What's up, it's Zayd.

The pattern has been around since the dawn of time…and by that I mean group projects in school.

I’ll take a moment right now to apologize to anyone that had to carry our team while I “supervised.”

But seriously, there is always one person who outperforms the rest.

For the sake of this newsletter, one sales rep that “carries the proverbial team.”

Their pipeline is three times everyone else's.

They show up to every meeting locked in, and they close at a rate that makes the rest of the board look like it's broken.

They're your answer to every tough quarter, and that’s a problem.

When I was running my first appointment-setting agency, we had a version of this.

A handful of people who were genuinely exceptional at what they did.

I leaned on them. Clients loved them.

I kept stacking their plates because the work got done and the results followed.

Then life happened.

People moved on, and suddenly the thing that was supposed to be a business started behaving more like a person, and that person had just put in their notice.

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The hardest thing to admit about your star rep is that the better they are, the more fragile the business becomes around them.

Every exception you make, every process you skip because they'll just figure it out anyway, every deal you hand them because you trust them more than the system is a liability being built in slow motion.

I've talked to dozens of founders in the 0 to 1M ARR range who think their sales motion is working because they have good numbers and a rep they'd describe as “a secret weapon.”

When I ask them what happens if that person leaves next month, the room gets very quiet.

When a top rep leaves, they take the implicit knowledge with them.

They take their personality, the way they positioned, the objections they'd already worked through, the instincts they'd built that never got written down anywhere.

None of that lives in your CRM.

The incentive is obvious.

If someone is performing, you don't want to slow them down to systemize what they're doing.

You want them selling.

Every hour spent documenting a process is an hour not spent closing.

That logic makes complete sense in the short term, but it’s so brutal in the long term.

It’s like an addiction.

You don’t realize that you’ve built a dependency until it's already too late to unwind it gracefully.

By the time you notice that one person is holding 60% of your pipeline, pulling back requires a conversation nobody wants to have and a reorg nobody has time for.

So you keep going…and the dependency deepens.

Only guide to safe outreach on LinkedIn

The lesson that I learned the hard way is that you should be using your best rep differently. It sounds counterintuitive to take them off the front lines, but the best thing a top performer can do for a company is make themselves replicable. Figure out how to capture the method underneath the magic so that other people can run a version of it.

There are a lot of obvious ways to capture elements of their “secret sauce”:

The outbound motion can’t live in one person’s head. You have to be able to metaphorically back it up to the cloud.

When someone teaches the system how to sell the way they sell, and the system learns from every edit they make, you start to capture something that actually scales.

The instinct becomes the infrastructure.

If your top performer took a month off tomorrow, would your pipeline survive it?