GTMcraft Plays · The Lift the Middle Play

AI is widening the gap between your carrier reps and everyone else, and coaching the top 1 percent will not move your win rate.

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The 90-second read

Your number rides on 2 or 3 carrier reps while the middle 60 drifts, and AI is quietly making it worse. The tools reward the taste and judgment your best reps already have, so they pull further ahead while the middle copies and plateaus. The lever is not more attention on the top 1 percent, and not another 1-on-1 you cannot scale. It is a structured coaching system aimed at the middle, where AI does the prep so your scarce hours go into the actual coaching. Team win rate moves when the B team clears the bar, not when the A team gets one point better.

• AI widens the rep gap, it does not close it, because it rewards taste.
• The whole delta between a good org and a great one lives in the middle.
• Coaching is the highest-ROI lever and the first thing cut from the calendar.
• Lift the middle in order: point of view, shared language, process, then AI.
• This is not documenting the motion; it is lifting the people who run it.

Read time: about 5 minutes. First step runnable Monday morning.

The #1 move this week

Pick one skill your carrier reps do instinctively that your middle does not, and run one bi-weekly session on it with the 3 middle reps whose win rate you most want to move.

Most leaders spend their best hours on the top 2 reps and the fires, and hope the middle figures it out. Then they add AI and expect the gap to close. It does the opposite, because your carriers feed AI context and throw away the generic 70 percent, while the middle pastes it and stops building instincts.

Start here: name the one skill, ask AI to turn it into a one-page what-good-looks-like plus two role-plays in your context, and book the first bi-weekly session for this week.

Ignore this week: do not roll out a 25-competency framework to the whole team. Start with one skill, three reps, and a cadence you can keep.