Why the Second Best Rep on Your Team Is Actually the Most Valuable

Good Morning. Here's some not-so-amazing news if you're in a traditional corporate role: 44% of companies are planning "peanut butter raises" in 2026. This means the same flat raise for everyone, spread evenly like peanut butter, regardless of how much you crushed it this year. The last time this happened was 2008. Yikes. But this is the joy of working in sales… your paycheck isn't decided by some VP in a conference room debating budget allocations. You want to make more? Go close another deal. You eat what you kill, and there's no peanut butter spread happening with your commission check. Now, let's get into today's Follow Up. (:

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Every sales team has one.

The rep who hits 150% of quota, wins President's Club, and gets all the attention at kickoff.

Leadership loves to talk about them, asks them to present at all hands, and builds the playbook around how they sell.

Meanwhile, the rep sitting at 110% quota gets a pat on the back and a "keep it up."

Nobody makes a big deal about them. They just quietly keep hitting their number.

That's a mistake. Because the second best rep on your team might be the most important person on it.

Here's why.

Top performers often succeed for reasons that can't be repeated.

Maybe they inherited a stacked territory. Maybe they have 15 years of relationships in the industry. Or maybe they're just naturally charismatic in a way that can't be taught.

The Alexander Group studied one company where every single President's Club winner came from a territory with tons of opportunity. Those territories had more room to grow and lower maintenance, giving those reps an advantage that had nothing to do with skill.

Then there's the cherry-picking problem. Top reps tend to focus on easy inbound leads that are most likely to close and avoid challenging deals that may take longer to close. This means a bigger commission check for themselves, but a ton of missed opportunities for the company.

Your #2 rep, on the other hand, probably doesn't have the luxury of cherry-picking. They hit their number through discipline, process, and effort. And that's exactly the kind of success you can actually replicate across a team.

Harvard Business School studied over 50,000 workers across 11 firms and found that avoiding a toxic top performer saves a company roughly $12,489 in costs. Meanwhile, hiring a star performer only adds about $5,303 in value.

The toxic star costs more than twice what the star contributes.

We see this on sales floors constantly. The #1 rep who consistently performs, but ruins the entire culture of the team. Leadership tolerates it because the number looks good. But the rest of the team secretly hates them

Your #2 rep is usually the opposite.

They collaborate because they're not threatened by other people's success, and they make the people around them better.

When it's time to promote someone into a leadership role, most companies pick the top seller. And it usually backfires.

A study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics looked at nearly 40,000 sales workers across 131 firms and found that the better someone was at selling, the worse they performed as a manager.

Specifically, when a top seller got promoted, the sales performance of each person on their new team declined by 7.5%.

The reason is pretty simple… The traits that make someone a great individual seller (competitive drive, ego, independence) are often the opposite of what make a great coach.

Top reps who become managers get frustrated when their team doesn't match their intensity. So they micromanage and struggle to develop people who don't think like them.

The #2 rep succeeded through process, consistency, and coachability. Aka, the exact traits that translate into good leadership.

They can teach what they know because they know how they learned it.

Today’s newsletter was written by Nic Conley