What top performers actually do
Working in sales is hard. Period.
I've been in this game for 14 years. I've trained over 350 salespeople. I've worked with early-stage startups, mid-market companies, and enterprise teams across every kind of go-to-market motion. And I have never met a top performer that doesn't do the same five things.
They deeply understand their customers' business models, pain points, and current challenges. Not from a data sheet. From actual research. When I was at Trustpilot, I would look at every prospect's checkout funnel, their social media presence, their online reputation, before I ever picked up the phone. By the time I called, I sounded like a peer, not a seller. That's how I closed nearly 600 deals in two years.
They follow industry news to stay on top of trends and catch signals. The best salespeople always read the job ads because the job descriptions are full of intel. If you target enterprise, the best ones always read the annual report. They're not waiting for a "buying signal" notification. They're doing the work.
They develop granular playbooks by segment and persona. Because a CFO in retail doesn't have the same KPIs as a CFO in healthcare. A VP Sales at a 50-person company doesn't have the same problems as one at a 500-person company. If you're not adjusting your approach for every vertical and every persona, you're not being customer-centric. You're just mass-messaging.
They go the extra mile whenever needed, no matter the time or day of the week. This is the one that's hard to teach. Some people have it. Some people don't. Top performers care about the outcome, not the clock.
They take pride in solving complex customer problems and delivering outcomes. This is the big one. The reps who last in sales are the ones who are genuinely fascinated by their customers' world. When I was selling review software to e-commerce companies, I wasn't faking interest. I had just gone bankrupt running an e-commerce startup. I wanted to know how they made it work. And that genuine curiosity is what made prospects trust me.
Salespeople need to be motivated by the outcome of their work, which is not only correlated with the amount of work they put in but a combination of time plus quality work they put in. The more quality work, the more outcomes. And with uncapped commission, you get unlimited upside.
For all the above, I'm a strong supporter of uncapped commissions. No brainer.
Why the "replace reps with AI" crowd is dead wrong
Is AI going to change the way top performers operate? Yes.
Is blasting 1 million GenAI emails from disposable kill-switch domains going to replace top performers? Absolutely not.
Can blasting 1 million emails from disposable domains damage salespeople's reputations? Hell yeah.
If your AI strategy is to generate more volume on channels that are already overcrowded, you're not augmenting your team. You're accelerating the destruction of the channels that still work. And you're training Google and Microsoft's spam filters to block your domain in the process.
This is the part that frustrates me. Every week I see someone bragging on LinkedIn about sending a million emails and getting 78 meetings. That's a 0.0078% conversion rate. And the other 999,922 people? They now associate your brand with spam. Your domain reputation is wrecked. Your reply rates will keep dropping. And the next campaign will need two million emails to get the same 78 meetings.
This is not a way of life for everyone. This is not scalable. This is not sales.
Sales is understanding someone's problem better than they understand it themselves. And then having a conversation where they realize you might have the solution. No amount of AI-generated email volume can replicate that.
The right question: how do you make top performers 3-5x more productive?
If you ask a top-performing rep how they spend their week, you'll find that a huge chunk of their time goes into prep work. Researching accounts. Reading about companies. Looking for signals. Finding the right contacts. Building account plans. Personalizing outreach. Preparing for meetings.
All of that work is what makes them great. It's also what limits them. Because there are only so many hours in a week, and deep research for every account takes time.
So the question isn't "how do we replace the rep?" The question is: how do we give top performers back those 6+ hours per week so they can spend more time actually selling?
That's where AI belongs. Not replacing the craft. Handling the prep work so the craft can scale.
Step 1: Turn top performer knowledge into centralized intelligence
Before you deploy a single agent, you need to solve the knowledge problem. Because here's what happens in most sales teams: the best rep has all the insights in their head. They know which verticals convert. They know which persona cares about what. They know the talk track that works for healthcare versus manufacturing. And none of it is written down anywhere the rest of the team can use.
The first step is to document that knowledge and turn it into centralized intelligence that your AI agents and your entire team can work from.
Your value proposition and product offering. Your ICP criteria and the reasoning behind them. Your buyer personas for each segment. And most importantly, your customer stories. Customer stories are the best training content because they're already contextualized. They're your customer telling you how your product helped, in their words. AI agents are exceptional at learning from that kind of content.
When you train agents on this, they remember 100% of it. As human beings, we can only remember up to 20% of what we learn. That's not a criticism of people. That's just how brains work. Agents don't have that limitation. You train them once, and every single interaction they have with your data uses that full knowledge base.
This is the foundation. Without it, your agents are just another generic AI tool producing generic output. With it, they become digital colleagues who understand your market as deeply as your top performers do.
Step 2: Deploy agentic workflows that handle the prep work
Once your agents are trained on your centralized intelligence, you can put them to work on the specific tasks that eat your reps' time. Not all of these need to be fully automated. Some should be assisted, where the agent does the heavy lifting and the rep reviews or refines the output.
All of these workflows do the same thing your top performers already do manually. The difference is scale and consistency. Your top rep does deep research on 10 accounts a week. With agents, you can do it for 500. And the quality doesn't degrade because the agents are trained on the same knowledge your best people carry in their heads.
The key insight here is the flow. It starts at the bottom with your centralized intelligence. That intelligence feeds every agent. The agents handle the workflows. The workflows produce quality pipeline. And quality pipeline turns into won deals. Cut any layer and the whole thing falls apart. Skip the intelligence layer and your agents produce generic garbage. Skip the agents and your reps are back to doing everything manually.
Because sales is hard. Period.
The craft doesn't get easier. It never has. The channels change, the tools change, the competition changes, but the fundamental job stays the same: understand your customer's problem better than they understand it themselves, and have a conversation where they realize you can help.
AI doesn't change that job. It changes how much time your best people spend on the prep work that makes them great at that job.
The correct way to enable your top reps with agentic workflows is to first document their knowledge into centralized intelligence, then deploy agents that do the research, qualification, and personalization at a scale no human team can match. Not to replace the reps. To make them 3 to 5 times more productive.
That's precisely why and how we're building Evergrowth.
This is the correct way to enable your top reps with agentic workflows: start with their knowledge, turn it into centralized intelligence, and let agents handle the work that takes time away from selling.