Strategies to Bridge the Performance Gap in Sales Teams

Hey all 👋 Looking for a sense check from the group. One of the challenges I keep running into is the performance gap between top AEs and the middle 70%. Not a new problem, of course. Every sales team has it. But I’m curious how others are actively tackling it at scale. The challenges I've seen with the obvious solutions:

Coaching doesn’t scale easily
Hiring more top performers is expensive and slow
A lot of enablement tools don’t seem to drive real behavioural change

Has anyone found strategies or systems that have actually helped raise the floor? Whether it’s tech, process, or something else, I’d love to hear what’s worked (or hasn’t).

6 comments

Nick W.
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I think the first thing you would need to do is identify the point of greatest friction for that middle 70% as compared to the top performers, wether it's converting first meetings, converting demos, or another sales stage. That way you have an idea of what the highest impact are to train might be and you can focus on that. Have you tried this already?
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Ben J.
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I think it's so variable across the team and hard to measure root cause as the teams I work with aren't the largest so the n for any data is low. Have you found any good tech that helps with this?
Nick W.
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I assume you're already collecting annecdotal feedback from managers on what their team members are good at if their a small team? Anecdotes could be just as revealing and valuable as the data itself. Otherwise, I assume you're using an outreach tool and/or CRM? If not, what do you use to track sales today?
Chris D.
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Coaching doesn’t scale. Run towards it, not away from it. Front Line Manager coaching the reps is the #1 way to bridge that gap between 70% and full quota.
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Matt E.
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Hi Ben J. - Totally feel this. Most teams I work with hit the same wall Top sellers make judgment calls, the middle just follow scripts. What’s helped:
Map behaviours to real buyer resistance (not just activity metrics)
Shift discovery from features to problem diagnosis
Use short coaching loops tied to actual deals, not theory
Raising the floor isn’t about more tools, it’s about better sellers making better decisions, more often.
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Holly W.
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Hi Ben, this is the perfect use case for autonomous coaching with agentic AI - this is one of the use cases re the Spotlight AI tech which I was sharing with you. Sales Managers as opportunity coaches will be a thing of the past,,,,

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