Spotlighting the Wrong Strength
Every sales org has its stars—the top 10-20% who carry numbers, lead the leaderboard, and speak at SKOs. They’re celebrated, imitated, and often protected. But the obsession with high performers hides a critical truth: your revenue engine runs on the middle 60%.
These are the reps who show up, carry quota, and manage volume. And they’re also the most neglected.
It’s not a talent issue. It’s a design issue.
Why We Overvalue Top Performers
Sales leaders naturally focus where the light is:
- Top reps get noticed for consistent results
- Their behavior becomes the unofficial playbook—even when it’s unstructured
- Leadership often tries to “clone” them without examining the conditions that made them thrive
But star performance is often non-replicable. What works for the top 10% often fails when applied to the middle 60%. Why?
Because stars succeed despite the system. The middle performs within it.
The Middle 60%: Undermanaged, Undercoached, Overlooked
The reps who form the bulk of your team are often:
- Given vague or generic enablement
- Left out of strategic feedback loops
- Measured by outcomes, not development
- Expected to “figure it out” on their own
And yet, they’re the ones who:
- Carry most of the pipeline volume
- Sit on the edge of opportunity and burnout
- Make or break forecast reliability
Behavioral Science: Why the Middle Stalls
A. Cognitive Overload
Without clear behavioral scaffolding, reps rely on instinct. That leads to inconsistent discovery, rushed proposals, and pitch drift.
B. Feedback Delay
Without near-term feedback, middle reps can’t build high-resolution intuition. Unlike top reps, they don’t self-correct fast.
C. Narrative Identity
If a rep doesn’t identify as a “high performer,” they may unconsciously plateau at the level they believe they belong.
Middle reps don’t fail because they lack talent. They stall because they lack systemic reinforcement.
Why Lifting the Middle Creates Compounding Gains
Unlike your top 10%, the middle has room to move. If you improve:
- Discovery motion by 10%
- Close rates by 5%
- Recovery from stalled deals by 15%
…across 60% of your org, the aggregate impact dwarfs any single rockstar.
Here’s the math:
Let’s say you manage a salesforce of 100 reps:
- Top 20 reps each bring in $1M+
- Middle 60 reps average $500K
- Bottom 20 reps bring in $350K
Now focus on just the middle:
- 60 reps × $500K = $30M in revenue
- A modest 10% performance lift (through better training, feedback, motion design)…
= $550K per rep
= $33M in upgraded performance
That’s an extra $3 million in annual revenue from the same people—without hiring, without promotions, and without burnout.
That’s how you close a quarter—or even a gap year—without betting the whole org on your stars.
What’s needed isn’t another incentive. It’s a better conditioning system.
Not training for information—but for performance.
A Model for Sales Performance Conditioning
Instead of focusing on outcome-based coaching, organizations must shift to motion-based training:
- High-rep practice: Simulated environments for reps to build cognitive endurance
- Behavioral feedback loops: Fast feedback to adjust approach and tone in real time
- Effort quality metrics: Focused measurement of input behavior, not just output
- Narrative recalibration: Helping reps reconstruct their performance identity
Training your salesforce like athletes doesn’t mean working harder—it means working more precisely.
Learn More: The Salesforce Fitness Lab
If you’re looking to understand how these ideas take shape in practice, explore the framework and design logic behind our behavioral approach to sales performance:
The lab isn’t a playbook—it’s a system for building motion, recovery, and behavioral lift across your entire salesforce.
Because the middle doesn’t need motivation. It needs momentum.
Discover more from Blue Monarch Group
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
