Why Lifting the Middle 60% of Your Sales Team Outperforms Pushing the Top 20%

A sales rep standing on some building blocks

Why Lifting the Middle 60% of Your Sales Team Outperforms Pushing the Top 20%

Most business owners and sales leaders I meet instinctively want to double down on their top performers. After all, these “stars” bring in the biggest deals and set the pace for the team. So, the logic goes: if we can just get our top 20% to work harder, sell more, or stretch even further—surely the revenue will follow.

It’s a natural instinct. But it’s the wrong strategy.

The truth is this: if you want sustainable, scalable revenue growth, you’ll get far more impact by coaching and uplifting the middle 60% of your sales team than by trying to squeeze more out of the already high-performing elite.

Here’s why.

The Sales Performance Bell Curve

Every sales team, regardless of size or industry, can roughly be divided into three groups:

• Top 20% performers: They smash their targets, close the big deals, and often appear to “make it look easy.”

• Middle 60% performers: They’re solid, they bring in results, but they rarely overachieve.

• Bottom 20% performers: They consistently struggle and often end up leaving the business.

Now, here’s the key:
The middle 60% generates the bulk of your revenue, simply by their numbers. If you can lift this group by even a modest 10–15%, the impact on your business is usually far greater than trying to push the top 20% to stretch a little further.

Why Pushing the Top 20% Doesn’t Work

1. They’re Already Operating Near Capacity

Your top sellers are already playing at the upper edge of their ability, motivation, and often work-life balance. Asking them to give “just a little more” often results in burnout, disengagement, or—worse—losing them to a competitor who promises greener pastures.

2. Diminishing Returns

If your top performers already deliver 120% of quota, trying to push them to 130% yields only incremental gains. In contrast, lifting a mid-performer from 80% to 95% of quota produces a much bigger impact across the revenue line.

3. They Don’t Need Heavy Coaching

Top performers are usually self-motivated, self-correcting, and highly independent. They thrive on autonomy, not micromanagement. Investing disproportionate time in coaching them often doesn’t yield the ROI you’d hope for.

Why the Middle 60% is the Sweet Spot

1. Untapped Potential

The middle group is capable. They’re competent. But they’re inconsistent. A small lift in skills, process discipline, or confidence can produce a noticeable jump in performance.

2. Scale Multiplier

Because they’re the largest group in your sales force, even modest improvements ripple across the business.

If 12 out of 20 salespeople improve by 10%, the effect dwarfs squeezing another 5% out of your top four performers.

3. They’re More Receptive

Unlike the top 20%, who often prefer autonomy, and the bottom 20%, who may lack the capability to improve, the middle 60% are the most coachable. They want to succeed, they’re open to feedback, and they’re motivated to break through the glass ceiling.

The Buyer-Focused Advantage

Here’s where my Buyer-Focused Sales Funnel™ comes in. Most sales training is still seller-centric. I.e. it teaches techniques that worked 10 or 20 years ago. But modern B2B buyers are savvy. They don’t want to be “sold to.” They want to deal with partners who understand them, add value, and make their buying journey easier.

When you coach your middle performers through a buyer-focused lens, you give them:

• Clarity: Who their ideal customers really are, and what problems they’re solving.

• Confidence: How to open conversations that create lean-forward moments, not eye-rolls.

• Structure: A sales process aligned with how buyers want to buy, not how sellers want to sell.

• Consistency: Repeatable approaches that remove variability and guesswork.

The result? Middle performers start to sell like top performers, without needing superhuman effort.

Numbers Don’t Lie: The ROI of Coaching the Middle

Let’s put some numbers on it.

Imagine a 20-person sales team on a $1m quota each:

• 4 top performers (20%) delivering 120% of quota: $1.2m x 4 = $4.8m

• 12 mid performers (60%) delivering 80% of quota: $800k x 12 = $9.6m

• 4 low performers (20%) delivering 40% of quota: $400k x 4 = $1.6m

Total = $16m, or 80% of total quota.

Now, instead of pushing the top 4 performers to 125% (a small, hard-fought gain), you lift the 12 mid performers by just 10 points, from 80% to 90%.

Here’s the new math:

• Top 4 = 4.8m (unchanged)

• Middle 12 = $10.8m (up from $9.6m)

• Bottom 4 = 160% (unchanged)

Total = $17.2m, or 86% of total quota.

That’s a 9.3% total team revenue increase, simply by sales coaching the middle!
And that’s without hiring anyone new, changing comp plans, or burning out your top talent.

The Human Benefit: Culture & Morale

There’s another benefit that’s often overlooked. When you invest in the middle 60%, you send a strong cultural message:

• We believe in your potential.

• We’re here to help you succeed.

• You don’t have to be a superstar to deserve support.

This creates loyalty, improves retention, and builds a culture of shared growth. People feel valued, motivated, and engaged. That sense of belonging often translates directly into discretionary effort—the “extra mile” behaviours that boost performance further.

The Steps to Lifting Your Middle 60%

So, how do you do it? Here are some buyer-focused tactics I recommend:

1. Diagnose, Don’t Guess
   Use an evidence-based sales health check to pinpoint where reps get stuck: prospecting, qualifying, advancing, or closing.

2. Make Training Relevant
   Forget generic sales training. Make it real by using your customer scenarios, your pipeline, your deals.

3. Focus on Conversations, Not Scripts
   Coach reps to create meaningful conversations that buyers lean into. This builds trust faster than any “sales hack.”

4. Leverage Peer Learning
   Encourage mid-performers to shadow top performers. Structured knowledge sharing accelerates skill transfer.

5. Track Buyer Engagement, Not Just Seller Activity
   Shift from measuring dials and emails to measuring buyer responsiveness. Did the buyer lean in? Did they ask for more? Because that’s progress.

6. Celebrate Incremental Wins
   Recognise progress, not just closed deals. If someone secures more meetings with decision-makers this month, call it out.

Case Study Snapshot

One of my clients, a mid-sized B2B services firm, faced exactly this challenge. Their top performers were delivering, but the rest of the team lagged. We applied the Buyer-Focused Sales Funnel™ to the middle group, coaching them on better buyer conversations, qualification, and proposal alignment.

Within six months:

• Average deal size grew by 15%

• Mid-performers closed 30% more deals

• Revenue grew by 22% year-on-year

Meanwhile, the top performers kept doing what they do best, without pressure to push harder.

The Opportunity is Sitting Right There, Inside Your Team!

Imagine…

• What percentage of your team sits in the middle 60%?

• What would a 10% improvement in their performance mean for your revenue line?

• How long can you afford to leave that potential untapped?

The opportunity is sitting right there, inside your team.