Expertise can be hard to spot. If you casually talked to a top salesperson about how they made magic happen, they might have said something like — “I just had a feeling this would work.” They probably aren’t being coy, either; their expertise may be so deeply engrained that it’s become more or less unconscious, and they don’t know how to articulate the cues they were paying attention to that made a great outcome possible.
All too often, we say: “That’s just Mary. She’s the best,” and let it go at that. And as others on the team struggle to navigate the situations that she makes look easy, we accept that her magic is an outlier and can’t be applied to anyone else’s performance.
But much of the time, what looks like magic is based on a combination of hard work and highly refined pattern recognition that allows the best performers to operate on instinct. Helping them articulate and define the patterns they’re paying attention to can help others orient themselves rapidly to what’s going on and take the right actions to help move a deal forwards.
As Jim Rohn and Zig Ziglar famously said, "Success leaves clues." But in sales, these clues are buried deep, making them all too easy to overlook, and difficult to extract and share with your wider team.
So what’s a sales leader to do when the skills that make your best people successful are invisible – even to them?
What Top Performers See That Others Miss
Star salespeople have developed unique ways of processing what they hear and see from their buyer. Their expertise isn’t just in what they say, but what they notice that others don't: the subtle cues that help them pattern-match accurately and move a situation forwards.
This is where sharing “best practices” can fall short — specific tactics and techniques aren’t that powerful unless the seller is able to build a mental model of what’s going on in the buyer’s journey and take action based on it.
Breaking this cycle and spreading success across your entire sales organization starts with changing how you study and celebrate wins.
Create structured opportunities for your team to reconstruct specific successes:
1. Focus on inflection points in recent wins
Have your top performers walk through moments when deals shifted from uncertain to likely, zooming in on those critical turning points.
Ask questions like:
- "What was the first signal that told you that this deal would progress?"
- "When did you feel hesitation from the buyer, and what did you notice?"
- "When did you start to feel relief or clarity from the buyer?"
2. Build contextual narratives, not just tactics
Transform these observations into structured stories that capture the situation, cues, actions, and results. The context is crucial—the same tactic might work in one scenario but fail in another slightly different one. Eliciting the top performer’s theory of what was happening on the buyer’s side enables other reps to look for the same cues in their deals.
3. Highlight the behaviors that moved the narrative forwards
When reps have a strong mental model for the buyer’s journey, their resourcefulness and creativity comes into play. You’ll find that top performers have come up with great techniques for building confidence, addressing objections, and getting on the same page with their buyers. Other reps can start using some of those techniques immediately to make buyers feel understood and move their deals forward.
4. Map patterns that individuals can’t see
As the sales leader, you can identify connections across multiple success stories that individual reps might miss. Look for:
- Similar customer characteristics across different success stories
- Common objection sequences that follow predictable patterns
- Timing elements that impact deal progression
- Language patterns that signal specific buyer concerns
One organization discovered that their most successful deals shared a common thread: proactively sharing information that really excited their champion but hadn’t previously been included in their standard sales process. This insight led to a simple process change that improved win rates across the entire team.
Leveraging Wins to Succeed as a Leader
As a sales leader, the real power comes from sharing these win stories across your team and organization. When done systematically, this process delivers benefits far beyond individual skill development:
For Your Sales Team:
- Faster onboarding: New hires avoid predictable mistakes by leveraging the pattern recognition skills of experienced colleagues.
- More consistent results: Performance becomes less variable across the team and more predictable quarter to quarter.
- Higher win rates: The entire team gets better at navigating critical moments that previously caused deals to stall.
For Your Top Performers:
- Increased recognition: Star performers feel valued when their unique expertise is acknowledged and sought after.
- Career development: Articulating their intuitive skills helps them lean into what works, become better coaches, and develop into future sales leaders.
- Renewed engagement: The process of reflecting on their success provides motivation to push past the challenges and go get that next win.
For You as a Sales Leader:
- Strategic insights: Patterns across successes can reveal market shifts, competitive positioning opportunities, or product-market fit insights that impact strategy.
- Process optimization: Identifying where standardization helps versus where judgment is required allows for more effective process design.
- Resource allocation: Understanding which expertise gaps most impact results helps prioritize coaching and development investments.
- Credibility with leadership: Data-driven insights from success patterns provide compelling evidence when advocating for organizational changes.
Most importantly, this approach transforms how your organization views expertise—from a mysterious talent possessed by a few stars to a learnable set of skills that can be systematically developed across your entire team.
Turn Individual Insights into Team-Wide Capabilities
Success leaves clues for those who know how to look for them.
The next time you see a deal effortlessly move forward for your top performer while similar deals stall for others, remember – there are valuable insights hidden in that success. The question is: does your organization have the tools to uncover them?
Start studying your team’s wins as deliberately as you analyze losses. Create structured opportunities for your team to articulate not just what they did but what they noticed that made those actions obvious.
By doing so, you'll transform individual brilliance into a powerful source of team-wide capability – and build a sales organization that doesn't just rely on hiring stars but actually creates them.
