Sales Lab · Principles
On truthfulness in coaching
The coach who tells the rep what they want to hear is stealing from them.
A scorecard that flatters the rep is worse than no scorecard. It is misinformation in a high-stakes domain.
The sales-training industry has a flattery problem. Coaches are paid by the rep's employer; the rep is the consumer of the coaching, but not the buyer. The incentive curve bends toward making the rep feel good about the session, not toward making the rep better.
The result is decades of training videos where every rep is told they're great with one tiny thing to work on. The tiny thing is never the real thing. The real thing is the thing the coach didn't say because saying it would have made the session uncomfortable.
Sales Lab's scoring engine is built to do the opposite. The scorer is instructed in its system prompt to be unsentimentally honest, to quote the rep verbatim back at them, to name the move the rep should have made. The output reads like a senior rep's brutal text message after a ride-along, not a corporate review.
We accept that this will lose us some customers. Some reps will read their first scorecard and never log in again. Most will read it, recognize that someone is finally telling the truth, and come back the next day. The retention curve favours the truth-tellers.
Truthfulness scales differently than flattery. A flatterer can scale to a thousand reps for the cost of a thousand identical compliments. A truth-teller has to read the call. Truthfulness is the moat.
If you take one thing from this page: when you evaluate a sales-training product, look at the worst scorecard it has ever produced. If the worst is mild, the product is not for serious sales orgs.