I watched a rep close the deal that put her over quota for the year. Big logo. Hard fight. She earned every inch of it, and the whole floor knew it.

Then I watched her next discovery call.

Twelve minutes. Three real questions. She'd already decided what the customer needed before they finished describing their problem, and she spent the rest of the call confirming the story in her own head. The deal was fine. The discovery was hollow.

That's when it clicked for me. The skill reps lose the moment they hit quota isn't effort. It's discovery discipline.

Here's the uncomfortable part. Discovery is the first skill to atrophy precisely because it's the one success lets you skip.

When you're hungry, you ask. You don't know which thread matters, so you pull all of them. But once you've closed enough deals, your brain builds a shortcut — "I've seen this before, it's a version of the last one." The shortcut feels like expertise. It's actually just pattern-matching wearing expertise's jacket.

And it works often enough to be dangerous. The rep keeps hitting numbers on momentum and reputation, while the muscle that built those numbers quietly goes soft. Nobody flags it, because the scoreboard still looks great. By the time it shows up — in slipped deals, in churned accounts, in "we picked the other vendor" — it's been atrophying for quarters.

This is the part enablement keeps getting wrong. We pour everything into the ramp and almost nothing into the rep who's already winning. We treat skill as something you build once and own forever.

Skill is not a possession. It's a practice. The moment you stop practicing, it starts leaving.

So what do you do? You build deliberate practice for the people who think they're past it.

That's the whole idea behind The Curtain Call Model — the best performers don't stop rehearsing once the show is a hit. They rehearse harder, because they know the gap between "good enough" and "great" is exactly the part that erodes when no one's watching. Your top reps need reps too. Not remedial training. Deliberate practice, aimed at the skill their success is quietly eating.

If you change one thing, make discovery a recurring rep — not a thing you teach once during onboarding and assume sticks. Strip the deal out. Run a clean discovery drill on a fictional account, score it on questions asked versus assumptions made, and do it with your best people, not just your newest. The same way the most durable onboarding isn't front-loaded into week one — a point I made in Your Best Onboarding Investment Isn't Week One — the most durable skill isn't built once and banked. It's kept alive on purpose.

Because the rep who just hit quota is the one most convinced she doesn't need it.

She's also the one with the most to lose when the shortcut finally fails.

Which skill on your team gets weaker right after a rep starts winning — and what are you doing to keep it sharp? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

Until next time my friends…

❤️, Enablement

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