# Selling styles: art or science (a love story)

- Link: https://jcody.com/blog/selling-styles-art-or-science-a-love-story/
- Published: 2026-07-21T09:00:00-04:00
- Author: Jeffrey Cody

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.