Same headset. Same CRM. Same products. Same goals.
Different salesperson.
It sounds obvious when I say it that way, yet I see inside sales leaders fall into the same trap all the time. We look at our rock star and think, That’s what great looks like. Then, without necessarily realizing it, we start trying to get everyone else to sell more like them.
If your top salesperson makes more calls, you tell everyone to make more calls. If they’re fantastic at building relationships, you want everyone to become a relationship builder. If they ask great questions, prospect relentlessly, or have a particular way of managing their pipeline, suddenly their approach starts becoming the blueprint.
Except your rock star isn’t an instruction manual.
What makes that salesperson successful is a combination of their skills, experience, personality, habits, motivation, and probably a few things you couldn’t duplicate if you tried. More importantly, the salesperson sitting next to them has their own combination of those things.
Your job isn’t to turn people into somebody else. Your job is to lead the individual salesperson in front of you.
That means when someone isn’t getting the result you want, the first question isn’t, “Why can’t you do what Chris does?” It’s figuring out what is standing between this salesperson and better performance.
In Mastering Inside Sales Leadership, I use Can’t, Won’t, or Don’t Know How as a way to begin making that diagnosis. The distinction matters because two salespeople can have exactly the same performance gap for completely different reasons.
Imagine two salespeople who aren’t making enough prospecting calls. One Doesn’t Know How to get past the gatekeeper and has started avoiding calls because rejection is piling up. The other knows exactly how to prospect and has demonstrated they can do it—they simply Won’t consistently put in the effort.
Same performance problem. Very different leadership problem.
Giving both of them another training session on prospecting isn’t individualized leadership. Neither is telling them, “Look at what our top salesperson is doing and do more of that.”
One needs skill development and confidence built through coaching and practice. The other needs a conversation about expectations, effort, and accountability.
Even the people who share the same job title shouldn’t automatically get the same coaching, motivation, challenges, or amount of your time.
That’s also why I don’t believe the goal of sales leadership is to create a team full of rock stars. Your rock star should be successful as themselves. So should everyone else.
If you’ve been following my Bell Curve Manifesto this month, this is where the idea gets personal. Moving performance to the right isn’t going to look the same for every salesperson and it shouldn’t.
The question isn’t, “How do I make this salesperson more like my best salesperson?”
It’s, “What does this salesperson need from me to become more successful?”
Same job. Different salesperson.
Lead the individual.