Allbirds… is now an AI company.
BEST FROM LAST WEEK
Yes, the shoe company.
They just sold its shoe brand for $39M and rebranded as “NewBird AI” — a GPU-as-a-service compute company.
The announcement sent shares up 600% overnight.
The eco-friendly sneaker darling that peaked at a $4B valuation in 2021 is now chasing the AI wave with zero experience in the space.
The internet has thoughts.
📚 – Observations working at ZoomInfo for 7 days
BEST FROM LAST WEEK
📝 – 5 Lessons from a Sales Leader of 18 Years
💸 – Study Your Sales Leaders
Why Top Performers Are Extremely Hard to Replicate
One of the most common things I hear from sales leaders:
“We need to replicate what our top performers are doing.”
The logic makes sense. Find out what your best reps do, build a playbook around it, and coach everyone else to follow it. Turn C players into B players. B players into A players. Rinse and repeat.
But here’s the problem: elite performance is almost never just a playbook problem.
The Skill + Will Framework
When you break down why a top performer is a top performer, it usually comes down to two things:
Skill – the tactical stuff. How they run discovery. How they multi-thread. How they handle objections. How they read a deal and know when to push vs. when to pull back.
Will – the internal stuff. Drive, competitiveness, work ethic, hunger. The reason they’re sending follow-ups at 7am and still thinking about a stuck deal on a Friday afternoon.
What Actually Drives Elite Sellers
Here’s something worth thinking about: most elite sellers don’t spend a lot of time thinking about quota.
That sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true. They’re not trying to hit 100%.
They’ve already mentally moved past that. Their targets are bigger.
What actually motivates them tends to be a mix of:
- Financial upside – not just OTE, but life-changing income. They’re thinking about the big commission months, the equity, the long game.
- Status and recognition – President’s Club isn’t just a trip. It’s recognition. It matters to them that people know they’re the best.
- Competition – a lot of top reps have a quiet (or not so quiet) scoreboard in their head. They know where they rank, and they care.
- Autonomy – elite performers often want the freedom that comes with being a top producer. Less micromanagement, more trust.
That cocktail of motivators creates a different level of daily effort. More calls. Better prep. More creative follow-up. More willingness to push through the hard parts of a deal.
The Honest Reality About the Rest of Your Team
Here’s something a lot of sales leaders don’t want to say out loud:
Not everyone on your team wants to be a top performer.
Some reps are genuinely content at 80-85% attainment. It gives them a good income, reasonable hours, and the ability to prioritize other parts of their life. That’s a totally valid choice.
But it does mean that no amount of coaching, enablement, or playbook refinement is going to turn them into your next top rep. The ceiling isn’t process. It’s their level of motivation.
The mistake is treating this like a fixable problem. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s just a fit issue.
What You Can Actually Do With This
So if top performance can’t be fully replicated, what’s the move?
A few things that actually work:
1. Hire for will, train for skill. Playbooks can be taught. Drive is much harder to install after the fact. When you’re building your team, weight motivation and competitiveness heavily in your evaluation. Ask candidates what they’re trying to earn. Listen to how they talk about winning.
2. Create the right motivational environment. If your top performers care about status and recognition, build that into your culture. Leaderboards, Slack callouts, President’s Club visibility. Make winning visible. Some reps don’t need this. Others need it like oxygen.
3. Stop trying to make everyone an A player. A realistic goal is helping B players become stronger B players. Tighten up their process. Shore up their weak spots. That’s a win. Trying to turn a rep who’s happy at 80% into someone grinding for 150% usually ends in frustration for both sides.
4. Protect your top performers’ time and energy. The worst thing you can do is saddle your elite reps with admin, internal meetings, and process overhead that slows them down. Give them the conditions to keep doing what they do best.
Rant over,
Brian
Market rebounded hard last week for SaaS.
Good to see the relief rally.
Will it last?
