The Exact System High-Performing Sales Teams Use to Hit Quota Consistently

Today, I'm giving you a complete blueprint you can steal for running high performance one-on-ones with your sales team, using scoreboards to drive accountability, and how to structure insanely effective sales call coaching sessions to actually drive results. If you lead a team and you want higher performance without feeling like you're babysitting adults, you're going to want to stick around for this. Hey, I'm Marcus Shen, sales trainer and coach of some of the fastest growing companies and reps in the world and just finished a coach call with a sales VP at a $35 million a year company this week and we laid out exactly how to systemize leadership to drive results not once in a while but every single week.

Let's dive right in. So, first off, number one, weekly one-on- ones. Your weekly one-on-one with each rep isn't just a check-in.

It's the single most important lever you have to drive performance, catch problems early, and coach behaviors before they turn to missed quarters. Without a good one-on-one system, you're flying blind. Reps will tell you what you want to hear.

Deals will slip and performance will plateau. But with a great one-on-one system, you create total clarity. They know exactly where they stand and exactly what to do next.

And that's the real purpose of a one-on-one, which is clarity, which leads to action, which ultimately drives results. Here's the exact structure I ran as a frontline leader of a multiple eight figure team that I then taught to all my leaders, my skill to multiple nine figures while hitting present club every single year. Now, you first start off the one-on-one with just a little bit of quick rapport just to see how everything is going.

And then after a couple minutes of that, then you want to dive into reviewing their action items from the prior week. Did they do what they said they would do? Then you walk through the revenue numbers.

Now, more specifically, have them verbalize where they stand. That's monthto date, quarter to date, annual progress, towards presence club, or whatever top number they're driving towards. Then you dive deeper into the pipeline metrics.

You're looking at the activity and outcome gaps. You'll also want to spot check, you know, income produced activities such as new meetings set, demos run, discovery calls held, etc. And then you want to sign the next action items.

And here's the key, make the action items so specific a second grader could understand it. No fuzzy homework or like sell more or make more calls. Make it very specific.

For instance, schedule three net new means this week with X accounts or call decisionmaker X at Acme to schedule a follow-up. Now, I also highly recommend you use a form that they fill out in advance and send to you by the end of the day Friday. like you see on the screen for the one I custom built for one of my clients.

It's really simple and should take no more than 5 minutes to actually fill out. The act of actually filling out drives self-awareness and accountability. Then after the oneonone, you can save and send it back to them with a new week's action items.

Now, on top of that, this form also gives you a really simple structure to help you as a leader guide the conversation. At the end of every 101, your rep should know exactly where they stand and exactly what to do next. Number two, weekly scoreboards.

One of the best things you can do to drive performance is to create a simple, clear, and engaging scoreboard that everyone sees consistently. This should be a stack rank of performance based on whatever is your most important KPI. For instance, let's say it's attainment percentage.

That means every week you're sending out a screenshot every Monday with who is ranked at the top. Now, this isn't to shame people, but it's designed to help drive visibility and accountability while creating a culture of competitiveness. And competition is really good.

It drives performance and innovation. Here's an example you see on the screen. It doesn't have to be fancy, just a simple screenshot in Slack or email to celebrate the top performer stack ranked month of day or quarter date that's sent every single week as a cadence.

Everyone sees where they stand. That's the good, the bad, or the ugly. And visibility drives behavior.

These simple scoreboards turn invisible problems into visible action. Number three, sales call shadowing. This is where the magic happens.

Now, sales call shadowing is not about playing gotcha. It's about coaching in the real world when it matters the most. This is critical for their development.

Now, here's how to set it up. Each rep knows when your plan is shared. So, plan your month in advance so they have calendar invites for a half a day together.

This allows them plan effectively to make it highly productive. Here's what I did to make sure it's really productive. So, first off, I sent off the invites by the 25th of the month for the upcoming month so they had it in their calendar and they had time to plan to make sure it's going to be really effective.

And second, I required an agenda for the half day. It would list out the details of every call that I'm joining. Who's a customer?

What's the objective? Where are we in the deal? Just the core details really important for you to understand.

And there's a minimum of three calls booked for that time. I'm going to say that again. There's a minimum of three calls booked for that time together.

If they were an SMB rep, that's three brand new prospects. These should be discovery calls. So driving new pipeline.

If it was mid-market or enterprise, it's still three calls, but one minimum that's brand new and two that are midcycle in the process. This intentional structure allowed me to see live how they do things. The agenda would also have backup plans listed out as well in case meetings ran short, got cancelled, or if they no showed.

For instance, this could be a list of 30 prospects that the AU would then do a cold call session live with me on to coach them. Five call records to dive into and coach on together, and topics to discuss to help improve performance. I know what you're thinking.

That sounds pretty intense, but here's the thing. I'm going to invest four hours of my time with them. So, it's my ultimate goal to help them advance their sales skills and progress deals forward.

This makes them better in the long run and shows you truly care about their development. And remember, your number one job as a sales leader is to help your team be successful because when they win, you win as well. Now, one thing to note that I coached my sales manager on was this.

When a rep was illprepared with no calls or just one call and nothing else, a lot of the managers would just bail leaving the AE to their own devices. They just cancel the half day and let them do whatever they want. This would then absolve the AE of need to do anything and train the AE that it was easy to get out of these sales call shadowing days.

Here's the harsh truth. If your AE can't prepare solid half day for you, that's their sales manager, director, or VP, the person who ultimately has the greatest impact on their career. What do you think they're doing when you're not with them?

Jack Remember, this is their time to shine and show you their skills and how much business acumen they have. Now, let's talk about what you do when you shadow these sales calls. If that happens and they only have one call or no calls, you as a leader don't let them off the hook.

Ask them what would you do now instead if you typically have a no-show. How are you going to maximize this morning or afternoon together? And this is really important to see how they decide because ultimately you'll see how they mentally process through the decision they have to make whether they become reactive just jumping into Slack or email or do they actually have a plan to make it highly productive.

So, this could become a coaching session on exactly what to do next in which you coach and have them do live with you specific things that will actually improve their results like something that I already just mentioned. So, now let's talk about what you do when you shadow the sales calls. First, let them lead.

Observe first. Take notes on what they're doing really well and where they can tighten up. Give immediate actionable feedback after the call.

Don't save it for a week later. But specifically start with have them share the thoughts on the call. What they did well and what they could have done better.

Then you start off with at minimum three things they did really well. These are the things you want to reinforce and recognize as you want to see them continue to do this. These are things that you're probably hoping the rest of the team is doing as well that you can also recognize them in your weekly sales meeting on to help drive and reinforce that behavior.

Then you want to give them three things at max to focus on and work on. Again, don't give them a list of like 20 different things because if you give them 20 things, they'll get overwhelmed. They won't do a single thing.

It's at max three things that'll move the needle the most. And I have to iterate again, your goal is not to shame them at any point. is to deepen your relationship with them, build them up on what they're doing really well, and then give very specific tactical coaching to help improve their game.

You're shadowing to sharpen their skills. It's not designed to be a punishment, but actually to truly help them. And then after the half day is over, wrap it up with a really short call recap email that lists out three core positives and three things to work on max.

This allows it to be very targeted while helping boost them up while giving clear guidance. And the email structure is very, very simple. The subject line could literally be, you know, recap of this today.

And then it could be, hey, thanks so much for spending time with me. Really love seeing you do X, Y, and Z. Just point out something specific that you did or maybe something you guys talked about personally.

Here are three things you absolutely nailed. I'm so proud of seeing you do. Number one, number two, number three.

Just list out those exact things. And then list out the opportunities next which say here are three things I like you to focus and work on which going to help you achieve whatever desired result they're driving towards. Number one, number two, number three.

It was great spending time together. I'm looking forward to our next half day together in a couple weeks. Have a great rest of the day.

Boom. I also recommend blind carpent copying yourself and saving that email now as you can then reference it on your next sales call shadowing day to see how they progress in the areas you coach them. Now, as a direct sales manager that had 10 reps, I did a half day with each rep every other week.

This allowed me to see live how they prepared, how they ran calls, how they handle tough prospects, how they handle awkward moments, and so on. Or if they were new, I take over parts of the call so they can see what good looks like, and this will help me set the bar and expectations of how things must be done. You can literally 10x the learning curve and increase your skills drastically if you do this consistently because you're literally coaching live in the trenches.

So, there you have it. If you want your team to hit bigger numbers without needing heroics every quarter, it starts here. Master your one-on ones, master sales call shadowing, and create a culture where reps crave feedback because they know it's how they win.

If you found this helpful, hit like, subscribe, and share this with another sales leader who's ready to level up their team.