Dear SaaStr: How do I make my sales team more effective?
I get this question constantly. And there’s no shortage of frameworks, sales methodologies, tech stacks, and coaching programs promising to fix your underperforming team.
But after investing in hundreds of B2B companies and watching what actually works versus what sounds good in a board meeting, the answer is simpler and more uncomfortable than most founders want to hear:
Stop trying to fix the bottom. Double down on the top.
The Real Problem With Most Sales Improvement Programs
Most founders and VPs of Sales attack underperformance the wrong way. They look at the bottom 50% of the team and try to coach, retrain, or process-engineer their way to improvement. They buy new sales enablement tools. They hire a new sales trainer. They redesign the comp plan.
Sometimes it works a little. Mostly it doesn’t.
Here’s what actually works: Find your 1-2 reps who are already closing. Make them wildly, visibly, obscenely successful. Then get out of their way.
This is the oldest erutilized.
Visible Success is Contagious
Years ago I wrote that your #1 sales rep should be driving an M6 convertible by Month 12. People laughed at the specificity. The point stands.
Visible success is contagious. When two reps on your team are ringing the bell every day, driving nice cars, taking good trips, talking about the great deals they just closed—the rest of the team sees a path. They see that it’s possible. That your product can be sold. That the objections can be overcome.
Sales is a lot of No. More than almost any other job. AI doesn’t really change that. The phone still rings out. The champion still goes dark. The deal still gets pushed to next quarter. You need to believe—deeply, in your bones—that the close is coming. And nothing builds that belief like watching teammates actually do it, week after week.
Conversely, nothing destroys it faster than a team where nobody seems to be winning.
What “Doubling Down” Actually Means
This isn’t about playing favorites. It’s about identifying the specific behaviors, deal types, and motions that work—and then replicating them at scale.
Loren Padelford, CRO at Slice, put it better than almost anyone I’ve heard: the job of sales leadership is pure science, not magic. You’re in the foxhole with your top performers, looking at spreadsheets, watching input and output values, drawing trend lines, working out process steps. Revenue is just an output. The inputs are what people actually do—calls made, meetings held, demos delivered.
So when you have a rep doing 130% of quota while their peers are doing 60%, you don’t just celebrate them. You obsessively document what they’re doing differently. You sit on their calls. You look at their email sequences. You study their pipeline hygiene. You figure out what’s in their head when they’re handling the pricing objection that everyone else butchers.
Then you transfer that. Relentlessly.
The Performance Feedback Loop You’re Missing
Here’s something I’ve seen work at some of the fastest-growing B2B companies: merit-based pipeline allocation.
Most sales teams distribute leads round-robin or by territory. It’s “fair.” It’s also terrible.
The best reps get the same mediocre leads as everyone else. The worst reps get bailed out by hot inbound they don’t deserve. Everyone’s performance regresses toward the mean.
What the best orgs do instead is route leads to the rep most likely to close them—based on historical close rate by deal type, efficiency metrics, and call quality scoring. Your best enterprise AE gets your best enterprise leads. Your best SMB closer gets the SMB pipeline.
This creates a continuous performance pressure that traditional sales organizations lack. Perform well, get better leads. Underperform, get relegated. It sounds harsh. It is. And it drives performance across the entire team because everyone can see exactly what they need to do to move up.
The Honest Truth About the Struggling Reps
Yes, sales reps can be a bit lazy. Yes, they’ll blame marketing, competition, product gaps, or the economy for not closing. Yes, they’ll talk endlessly about “pipeline” as a substitute for revenue.
But here’s the thing—sales is genuinely hard. Every day is objections, rejection, and silence where you expected a reply. Some people have what it takes and some don’t. You can coach process. You can coach product knowledge. You can coach objection handling. You cannot easily coach someone into believing they’re going to win when they’ve been losing for three months straight.
That’s why your single highest-leverage move is getting 1-2 people on your team to believe. Completely. Viscerally. Because they’re living it.
Once you have that, it spreads. Top performers attract other top performers. Your recruiting pitch changes. “Come join this team—two of our reps just hit $800K in OTE last year” closes candidates faster than any equity calculator.
What This Means Practically
Stop spending 80% of your sales leadership time trying to improve your C players. Invest that time in your A players. Ask them what’s blocking them from closing even more. Clear those blockers. Give them better leads, better tools, better support. Let them run.
Then, as Loren says—in tough times especially—spend time with your top 1-2 reps who are still doing 80-100% of what they always did, even when the market’s tough. Figure out what they’re seeing that others aren’t. Help the rest of the team rapidly evolve toward what those reps are doing.
The reps at the top are already blazing the path. Your job is to widen it.
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(yell at sales image from here)
