Scaling Your Team’s Success With AI
As a frontline sales manager, your success hinges on one key question: Are your reps delivering the results they need to?
Clari Labs recently examined 10 million opportunities to discover what sets top sellers apart from their peers, and just how big the sales performance gap really is. The key findings reveal a wake-up call for frontline managers:
- The top 10% of reps contribute 65% of all revenue.
- The top 2% alone drive 37% of revenue.
- The bottom 50% account for just 7.6% of total revenue.
If half of your team is responsible for less than 8% of revenue, it’s time to take a hard look at how they’re working — because effort alone doesn’t drive results. The real challenge? Coaching with precision based on data-driven insights that you trust.
Becoming a top sales rep isn’t about working harder—it’s about working smarter with a repeatable playbook and data-driven strategies. It’s also about having a manager who uses data-driven insights in real time to inform these strategies to coach effectively.
It’s easy to assume that reps who hustle—who make calls, send emails, and pack their calendars—are on the right track. But activity doesn’t equal effectiveness. An overemphasis on quantity over quality can lead your team straight into a cycle of inefficiency and burnout.
This is where you, as a manager, make all the difference.
Coaching Has Evolved—Have You?
Traditional coaching often relies on subjective assessments or anecdotal deal reviews. But this model falls apart when teams scale or when data silos make it hard to get a clear picture of rep performance.
Today’s modern sales environment demands a new kind of coaching—coaching with precision. This means leveraging real-time insights, data-driven strategies, and a consistent, repeatable approach to improve execution across the team.
It’s not enough to ask, “How’s the pipeline looking?” or “What’s your gut feel on this deal?”
Precision coaching looks more like:
- Which reps are engaging with key personas—and which aren’t?
- Which deals are forecasted to close but lack next steps or multi-threading?
- Which reps are consistently converting meetings into late-stage pipeline?
This level of insight doesn’t just help you identify problems—it gives you the context to fix them.
The Path to Elite Performance Is Repeatable
Top performers aren’t just “naturally gifted.” They’ve figured out a repeatable formula that drives results. It’s a mix of behavior, process, and execution that separates the top 20% from the rest.
The good news? This formula can be learned—and taught. But only if you have visibility into what your top reps are doing differently. When you understand the patterns that lead to success, you can build scalable playbooks that elevate the entire team.
For example, if your top performers consistently build multi-threaded relationships early in the deal cycle and drive urgency by aligning to executive-level priorities, that’s a play worth replicating. But without the data to spot that pattern, it remains locked inside one rep’s anecdotal experience.
The Connective Tissue
All the revenue data in the world won’t help without the right context to take action. This means using data to surface the “why” behind your team’s performance—not just what’s happening, but what it means.
With the right platform, you can instantly see:
- Which reps are engaging economic buyers, and which are stuck in the weeds?
- Where deals are slipping—and what risks were missed during execution.
- How activity, pipeline progression, and persona engagement translate into real revenue impact.
This context allows you to coach from a place of clarity, not guesswork. You can stop asking reps to “do more” and start helping them do better.
Instead of reviewing every deal, you can focus on the moments that matter—the inflection points that make or break outcomes. You can catch early signs of risk before deals derail. And you can pinpoint exactly where a rep needs support, whether it's building pipeline, advancing deals, or closing faster.
Precision Coaching = Scalable Impact
When you coach with precision, you create a ripple effect across the team:
- Reps become more focused and confident.
- Forecasts become more accurate.
- Pipeline becomes healthier.
- Ramp time shrinks.
- Quota attainment rises.
You also build a culture of continuous improvement—where reps aren’t afraid of feedback because they trust it’s rooted in reality. And where you, as a manager, are seen not just as a leader, but as a strategic asset who helps them win.
Rethinking the Rep-Manager Dynamic with Clari
Let’s go back to that original question: Are your reps delivering the results they need to?
If the answer is “no,” the fix isn’t more pressure or more activity. The fix is precision.
Effort without strategy is a dead end. And instinct without insight is just noise. Your role is to cut through the noise, bring structure to the chaos, and lead your team toward consistent, scalable success.
One of the most powerful—and often overlooked—impacts of Clari is how it transforms the relationship between sales reps and their managers.
Traditionally, managers spend valuable time asking reps to repeat information that's already buried in emails, CRM systems, or scattered across other tools. That time is better spent moving deals forward. With Clari, managers walk into one-on-ones and forecast calls armed with a complete picture—signals, communications, deal history, and next steps—all in one place.
This shift means managers are no longer interrogators; they're strategic partners. Instead of chasing down data, they focus on coaching reps with clarity and precision. Every conversation becomes action-oriented, rooted in real-time data, not gut feel. The result? Higher win rates, faster deal cycles, and more empowered reps.
It’s a win-win: less time wasted, more impactful coaching, and better outcomes across the board.
Read the playbook to find out more.
