Sales Lab · Principles
On practice
The performance gap between reps isn't talent. It's the volume of reps the lower performer never logs.
You don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your last week of practice.
Every sales-leader you've ever met can quote how many calls they made in their first year as an SDR. Eighty a day. A hundred and ten a day. The number is always specific, always more than the rep they're hiring expects. The number is the answer.
Talent gets a rep their first thirty deals. Practice gets them the next three thousand. The leaders who tell new hires "you need to make more calls" are correct, but the instruction is wrong because the actual variable is not call volume. It is reps with a buyer who is actually difficult.
Real buyers are too valuable to practice on. A new SDR who calls a real CFO is not practising; they are buying their education by burning a CFO of someone else's pipeline. The good shops know this and put new reps on the worst lists. The great shops know this and put them in front of an AI buyer that's harder than the worst list.
The point of Sales Lab is not that the AI is more convenient than a real buyer. The point is that the AI is harder. A real buyer is busy and being polite. An AI buyer is calibrated to break the rep at the exact moment the rep is fragile. That moment is where the practice that matters happens.
We measure one number above all others. Not calls completed. Not seat utilisation. The number is the percentage of a rep's weekly calls where the AI was harder than their last real call. That number determines whether the rep is practising or whether they're just logging hours.
If you take one thing from this page: stop measuring training in hours, start measuring it in calibrated repetitions. The hours are a proxy. Calibrated reps are the thing itself.