Dr. Noah St John, a sales coach, says top performers who suddenly plateau aren't burned out. He uses a $4.5M rep case study to show one question that reveals whether it's a skill problem or something else.
You've been told that when your best salesperson goes flat, it must be burnout. But the truth is, it's not burnout. Since 1997, I've helped my clients add over $3 billion in sales, and I can tell you that in over 90% of cases, when a top performer goes flat, the diagnosis of burnout is dead wrong. In this video, I'm going to give you one single question you could ask in your next one-on-one that will tell you in 10 seconds whether you have a skill problem or something else entirely. And that something else is probably costing you more per quarter than your entire training budget for the year. So let me show you how it works. A VP of Sales called me. Her top rep, $4.5 million the prior year, went completely flat. 3 straight quarters of declining numbers. The pipeline was healthy, no lost accounts. The process hadn't changed. So the VP did what everyone does— sent her to retreat, brought in a motivational speaker, upgraded the CRM, but nothing moved. So I sat down with this rep and I asked her one simple question, the same question I'm going to give you in this video. And her answer told me everything that I needed to know to diagnose and fix the problem. And it took about 10 seconds.
