When Your Top Seller Produces Four Times the Median
Your top seller produces four times the median.
Everyone in the building calls that talent. It usually isn't. A four-to-one spread inside one team, selling one product, into one market, isn't a talent distribution. It's the absence of a repeatable play. Your best rep has figured something out, nobody has written it down, and nobody else can execute it.
You can measure this in an afternoon.
Pull closed-won by rep for the trailing twelve months. Find the median. Compare your top performer against it.
Under 2× is normal variance. 3–4× means one person is carrying institutional knowledge that should belong to the company. Above 4×, you have a single point of failure with a phone number.
The instinct at that point is to go hire more people like that rep. It doesn't work, because what makes them good isn't a trait you can screen for. It's a sequence of questions, a way of framing the problem, a set of proof points they assembled themselves over years of getting it wrong.
So sit down with them and pull it out. What do they ask on the first call that nobody else asks? What do they say when the engineer pushes back on price? Have them forward you everything they sent a customer in the two days after a demo that closed, and everything they sent after one that didn't. Then make that the play. Everyone runs it, and the spread compresses toward the top instead of the middle.
The uncomfortable follow-up if you don't: what happens to your forecast when that person retires, gets recruited, or takes a quarter off?
Fastest diagnostic I know for whether a company has a motion or a person.
Originally posted on LinkedIn, 20 August 2026. Read the discussion on LinkedIn
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