I spent years creating leads for other people’s sales teams, and one thing bugged me every time. Two reps get leads of the same quality. One closes 18 percent. The other closes 8.
That gap is not luck, and it is not all talent. Most of the time, the best rep is doing something the others are not, and nobody has written it down.
Art or science? Yes.
Selling is both. But the more of the art you can capture, the more of it you can teach. Writing down what your best person does turns private skill into a process anyone on the team can run and everyone can measure.
“Process” is not a dirty word. Every sales team has one, written or not. Written processes just get better, because you can see them.
Who does what
- Executives fund the tools that let managers watch, measure and coach.
- Managers build the best-practice process from what actually wins.
- Reps follow it, so results mean something, then help improve it.
Look for patterns
Track where deals are won and lost. Find what the top rep does differently. Collect it in custom CRM fields, because you cannot decide on data you never captured. When it works, weaker reps start closing like stronger ones, managers hit their numbers, and the lead-generation budget stops being a leak.
The 2027 mentality
The best reps are now being copied by software. Call recordings and CRM notes can be read at scale, and the patterns that used to take a manager a quarter to spot show up in a week. I would use that in two ways: coach with the evidence instead of the anecdote, and let reps use AI for prep and follow-up so they spend more of the day on the part machines cannot do, which is being a person across the table.