Hey {{first_name}} ,
It's the second week of July. You're either deep in H2 planning or you're avoiding it. Either way, the question on the table is the same one CROs and VPs of Sales have been asking themselves every July for forty years: what's the one thing we change in the second half that gets us to the number?
Most years, the answer reaches for hiring. Add reps, fix coverage, push activity. This year the better answer is somewhere else - inside the reps you already have, in the part of their work that nobody's been coaching well because the tools that promised to make coaching easy have mostly made it more confusing.
This issue is about that part of the work. Coaching precision - the discipline of looking across a rep's last five calls, refusing the temptation to coach the easy thing, and picking the one constraint that, if removed, would move the most deals forward. It's the third lever in our framework. It's the lever most teams are doing worst at right now. And it's the H2 priority that, in my read of the market, separates the teams that hit their number from the ones that explain why they didn't.
Sreedhar Peddineni,
CEO, GTM Buddy
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THE ACTIVATION
Most call scoring isn't coaching. Here's what is.
Let me start by being honest about what's broken in the current model, because every working sales leader reading this has already noticed it and the newsletter is not going to earn trust by pretending otherwise.
The first thing that's broken is what most call scoring measures. The dominant scorecards in market today - the ones built into the major conversational intelligence platforms, the ones the consulting firms ship, the ones enablement leaders are asked to roll out enterprise-wide - score for completeness instead of impact. Did the rep mention the value prop? Did they ask about budget? Did they confirm next steps? Those are compliance checks. They tell you whether the rep ran a playbook, not whether the rep moved the deal forward. A rep can score perfectly on a completeness rubric and still lose every deal, and the scorecard will not tell you why.
The second thing that's broken is what most managers do with the scores. They look at the scorecard, find the lowest-scoring item, and coach the rep on it. Sometimes that's right. More often it's wrong, because the lowest-scoring item is rarely the one that's actually killing deals - it's just the easiest one to spot. The hard work of coaching is figuring out which constraint actually matters for this specific rep at this specific stage of their development on this specific kind of deal. That work doesn't happen at scorecard speed. It requires looking across multiple calls, holding several hypotheses, and refusing to settle for the obvious answer.
The third thing that's broken is what gets coached when nothing specific gets identified. Reps know the default. “Be more consultative.” “Ask better discovery questions.” “Slow down and listen.” These are not coaching. They are placeholders that managers reach for when the structured work of single-focus coaching hasn't happened. Reps hear them as noise because they are noise - generic advice masquerading as feedback. The rep who hears “be more consultative” three quarters in a row stops engaging with coaching entirely, and the manager loses the only leverage they had over performance.
“Coaching that tries to fix five things fixes none. Coaching that fixes the one thing is the move that actually compounds.”
The discipline that works is single-focus coaching: for each rep, the manager identifies the one specific constraint that, if removed, would move the most deals forward in the next ninety days. Not the five things the rep could improve. Not the lowest-scoring item on a generic rubric. The one constraint that matters for this rep, in this segment, at this point in their development. That constraint becomes the coaching focus until the behavior changes. Then - only then - the next constraint comes up.
This is harder than the alternative. It requires the manager to look across multiple calls, not just react to the most recent one. It requires holding the hypothesis loosely while reviewing more evidence. It requires the courage to coach the constraint that matters even when it's not the most visible problem. And it requires accepting that behavior change is slow - the research is clear that a new sales behavior takes sixty to ninety days to become automatic, which is longer than most coaching engagements are sustained. Most managers give up at week three, conclude the coaching isn't working, and revert to the generic advice that doesn't work either.
The teams that get this right in H2 are not going to be the teams with the most sophisticated call scoring technology. They're going to be the teams whose managers have the discipline to do the look-across, pick the one thing, and stay with it for ninety days. The framework below is the structured version of that discipline. It's designed to be runnable by a working sales manager in roughly two hours per rep per quarter - not a daily activity, not a weekly review, but the periodic deep-look that decides which constraint actually matters.
One Move for This Week: Pick your three lowest-performing reps. Run the Five-Call Look-Across framework below on each of them this month. Don't try to coach all three reps on the constraint you identify in the same week - stagger the coaching engagements by two to three weeks so you can give each one focused attention. The single most leveraged H2 move most sales managers can make is to commit to single-focus coaching on the reps who need it most, and then stay with it for ninety days.
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THE FRAMEWORK
The Five-Call Look-Across
From the Revenue Activation Playbook · The discipline of single-focus coaching
What it is:
A structured discipline for identifying the one coaching focus that will most move the deal forward for a specific rep. Not an AI prompt. Not a tool. A two-hour exercise a sales manager runs themselves, on five recent calls from one rep, with a structured filter that forces the discipline of picking the one constraint instead of listing five.
Why it works:
The Five-Call Look-Across is honest about the fact that single-focus coaching is hard. Most attempts to coach single-focus fail because the manager reviews one call, identifies a problem, and starts coaching it - only to discover the problem they identified isn't the constraint that actually mattered. Looking across five calls before deciding what to coach catches that failure pattern. The pattern that shows up in five calls is more reliable than the pattern in one. The one that shows up in only one call is probably a moment, not a constraint.
Time required:
Two hours per rep, run once per quarter for each rep on your team. Less than thirty minutes per rep on subsequent runs once you know what you're looking for.
What you'll need:
Five recent calls from the rep - ideally mixed across deal stages (one discovery, two mid-funnel, one late-stage, one closed-won or closed-lost from the last quarter). Avoid running it on five calls of the same stage - the pattern you'll find will be biased toward that stage.
Access to the call recordings and any AI-generated transcripts or summaries you have. The framework works on raw recordings if you have nothing else.
A notepad. The output of this exercise is one paragraph, not a scorecard.
Optional but useful: the rep's last quarterly performance data - deal velocity, win rate by stage, average deal size. Not for grading. For pattern context.
The discipline, step by step
STEP 1 · The First Pass (60 minutes)Listen to or read transcripts of all five calls in sequence. Take notes on whatever stands out, but do not yet form a hypothesis about what to coach. The discipline at this stage is observation only. If you find yourself reaching for an obvious diagnosis - “discovery is weak” - write it down as a candidate but do not commit to it.Specifically watch for: where the rep loses momentum in the conversation; where the buyer says something the rep doesn’t pick up on; where the rep defaults to talking about the product when the buyer is asking about their problem; where confidence visibly shifts; where the rep does something well that they don't replicate in other calls.Take notes. Do not synthesize yet.
STEP 2 · The Pattern Sweep (20 minutes)Now look across your notes. Three questions to ask:
1. What's the constraint that shows up in three or more calls? That's the candidate.
2. If you removed that constraint, which of the five calls would have gone meaningfully better? If the answer is fewer than three, the constraint isn't important enough to be the focus - keep looking.
3. Is this a skill gap or an attention gap? Skill gaps mean the rep doesn't know how to do the thing. Attention gaps mean the rep knows how but isn't doing it. The coaching for each is completely different.Most managers stop at step two with a constraint and start coaching. Don't. The step-three distinction is what separates effective coaching from frustrating coaching.
STEP 3 · The One-Sentence Brief (15 minutes)Write one sentence in this exact form:“In the next 90 days, I want [rep name] to [specific behavior change], because in the last five calls I observed [specific pattern], and removing this constraint would have changed the outcome in [number] of them.”If you can’t write that sentence cleanly, you haven’t identified the right thing. Go back to step two.
STEP 4 · The Coaching Plan (15 minutes)For the constraint you identified, name three things:
1. What you’re going to coach in the next 1:1 - specifically.
2. What you’re going to watch for in the next two calls to confirm the behavior is changing.
3. What you’re going to do if it isn’t changing after thirty days - because the honest answer is sometimes the coaching is right but the rep is the wrong fit, and that’s a different conversation than continued coaching.
STEP 5 · The 90-Day HoldThis is the part most managers skip and the part that matters most. Once you’ve identified the one thing, stay with it for 90 days. Do not add a second coaching focus on top. Do not abandon this one for the next visible problem. behavior change takes 60-90 days to become automatic, and adding a second focus during that window is what makes coaching fail across nearly every team that tries it.
Why this discipline works when the alternatives don't
Most call scoring is reactive: a manager reviews the last call, scores it, gives feedback, moves on. The Five-Call Look-Across is structural: it forces a pattern review before any coaching happens, which catches the most common error in coaching, which is mistaking a moment for a constraint. A rep who fumbled discovery on one call has a moment. A rep who fumbles discovery in four out of five calls has a constraint. The same observation in the same week leads to different coaching depending on which pattern you actually see.
The other thing the discipline does well: it refuses to fake AI-generated coaching. AI can help with the call-review work in step one - transcripts, summaries, even pattern detection across multiple calls is something modern models do well. But the judgment in step two and the one-sentence brief in step three has to be the manager's. The manager owns the coaching relationship. AI can surface patterns the manager would miss, but the call about which constraint matters for this specific rep at this specific stage is a judgment call that doesn't outsource to a model. The reps know the difference, and they trust managers who do the judgment work themselves.
If you run this with a few of your reps this quarter and the conversation it opens is meaningfully different from the coaching conversations you've had previously, reply to this email. The patterns across managers running this discipline are exactly what we most want to learn from in H2.
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THE ACTIVATOR
Teri McDowell-Long
VP Global GTM & Partner Enablement at GoTo
Founding Member, Sales Enablement Society · Saint Paul, MN
Fifth spotlight in the Wednesday Women × GTM Buddy Revenue Activators series
Teri McDowell-Long is, by some real measures, the person whose career most precisely traces the arc this newsletter exists to name. She has been a founding member of the Sales Enablement Society. She has run enablement at Mindtickle, CB Insights, StreamSets, and now GoTo. She has been doing the work of activation - building behavioral-change systems, embedding qualification rigor into how teams sell, co-creating AI-led enablement maturity frameworks - for the better part of two decades, often before the function had a stable name and almost always before the work had clean executive attribution.
The reason we are featuring Teri in the H2 priorities issue specifically is structural. The Revenue Activator identity is not a new identity that needs to be invented. It is a name finally catching up to work that practitioners like Teri have been doing for years, sometimes alone, often without the budget or the title or the seat at the revenue table that the work deserved. The newsletter’s job is partly to surface the practitioners who have been doing this work, by name, with their voices, so the title and the work travel together. Teri is one of the clearest examples of that pattern in the cohort.
Teri's POV on what enablement isn't
Enablement is NOT checklists. It's the operating discipline that turns intent into behavior and behavior into revenue.
That line of Teri's is structurally identical to the coaching argument I made in The Activation above. A checklist is what completeness scoring produces. A discipline is what single-focus coaching produces. The first measures whether the rep showed up; the second changes what the rep does. Teri has been making this argument in her writing and her practice for years, and the work she has done at companies as different in scale as CB Insights and GoTo has consistently shown that the discipline interpretation of enablement is what produces the revenue outcomes the function is asked for.
Her work at GoTo is particularly relevant to the H2 question, because she is currently building an enablement function inside an organization in transition - large enough that legacy enablement patterns are tempting to default to, modern enough that the agentic version of the function is genuinely possible to construct. The choices she is making right now - about what to coach, how to measure, where to invest - are the choices many of the readers of this newsletter will be making in the next eighteen months. Watching her work is its own education.
Follow Teri
LinkedIn
Wednesday Women feature post
THE SIGNAL
Three external links worth your time this week.
1. Why the C-Suite Is Funding an AI Transformation It Can’t Define
I wrote this piece for Forbes about a problem emerging across nearly every leadership team: AI transformation has a budget, but no shared definition of what it should accomplish. The better question isn’t, “What AI tools should we buy?” It’s, “What work should our people stop carrying and what capacity should that create?”
2. The research base on behavior change in sales
Behavior change research consistently shows that new sales behaviors take sixty to ninety days to become automatic, and that the dominant failure pattern in coaching is abandoning the focus before that window closes. The work most cited in this area is Lemov’s on deliberate practice and the broader behavior-design literature out of Stanford and BJ Fogg. If you are running the Five-Call Look-Across framework above, the behavior-change research is what justifies the 90-day hold to your reps and to yourself.
3. The Bessemer State of the Cloud benchmarks
The Bessemer State of the Cloud benchmarks on Revenue Per Employee are the cleanest external context for mid-year planning conversations. The widening gap between AI-native and AI-augmented operators is showing up in efficiency ratios, not growth rates, and the gap is now meaningfully larger than it was at the start of the year. That’s the data point worth bringing into your board conversation for H2.
Got something we should signal in issue 6? Reply with it.
We read everything.
THE SKILL
Why behavior change takes 90 days, explained for sales managers.
If you're going to commit to single-focus coaching, you need to know what the behavior-change literature actually says - because the 90-day hold is the part of the discipline that breaks most often, and the reason it breaks is that managers don't believe the timeline. Here's the minimum framework, defensible in front of a skeptical rep or a rushed VP of Sales.
The three phases of behavior change
Days 1-30: The Awareness Phase
The rep knows about the new behavior. They can describe it. They might even rehearse it in role-play. But in live calls under pressure, the old behavior shows up because the new behavior has not yet been encoded as a default. This is the phase where most managers conclude the coaching isn’t working. They are wrong. The coaching is working; the behavior just hasn’t consolidated yet. Stay with it.
Days 31-60: The Conscious Practice Phase
The rep starts producing the new behavior in live calls, but only when they remember to. They have to think about it. The behavior is effortful, not automatic, and the rep will frequently revert to the old pattern when the call gets stressful. This is the phase where reinforcement matters most: catch the rep producing the new behavior, name it, and validate it. Public acknowledgment in team contexts is unusually effective here.
Days 61-90: The Automatic Phase
The new behavior becomes the default. The rep produces it without thinking about it, including under pressure. At this point, the coaching focus can shift to the next constraint. Not before. Most coaching engagements end before this phase even begins, and the rep ends up with three half-coached behaviors instead of one fully coached one. That is the failure pattern to avoid.
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Why this matters for you
The Five-Call Look-Across only works if the manager commits to the 90-day hold. Identifying the one thing and then changing the focus three weeks in is worse than not running the look-across at all - it teaches the rep that coaching is whim-driven, and they stop engaging.
Reps know this timeline, even if they can’t articulate it. The reps who have been through good coaching once will hold the line on a 90-day focus because they’ve experienced what consolidation feels like. The reps who haven’t will be skeptical. Teaching them the behavior-change timeline is itself part of the coaching.
Manager training on this framework matters as much as rep training. A manager who doesn’t believe the 90-day timeline will abandon the focus too early, every time. The skill the team needs is shared between managers and reps.
The question to ask your team
“Which of your reps are you 60 to 90 days into a single coaching focus on, right now? Name the rep, name the focus, and tell me what you’re watching for to know the behavior has consolidated.” If your sales managers cannot answer that question for at least their three lowest-performing reps, you have an enablement gap that no new platform will fix. The discipline is the answer. The framework above is the operational form of it.
That's issue five.
Mid-year priorities issues are where publications either prove they’re useful or start to fade into the background of subscriber inboxes. We tried to make this one as operationally honest as we know how to make it - single-focus coaching is the H2 lever most teams are underusing, the discipline is hard, and the framework above is the version we use ourselves.
Reply and tell me what landed and what missed. Specifically: if you run the Five-Call Look-Across on one of your reps this month, tell me what constraint you identified and what surprised you about the look-across exercise. That data is the most useful signal we get.
Three things you can do right now:
Pick your three lowest-performing reps. Run the Five-Call Look-Across on the first one this week. Stagger the next two by two to three weeks each.
Take the Revenue Activation Assessment. It diagnoses where your team’s capacity is most constrained across the Five Levers -revenueactivator.ai/assessment
Follow Teri McDowell-Long on LinkedIn. Her POV on enablement-as-discipline-not-checklist is exactly the read this moment in the year requires.
See you in two weeks.
Sreedhar Peddineni
CEO and Co-Founder, GTM Buddy
LinkedIn