Watch someone genuinely good at selling. They're not running a script, and they're not doing the flashy stuff either. They mostly sound like a person who happens to know a lot and is curious about your situation.
That's uncomfortable if you've just spent a quarter documenting a sales process. It shouldn't be.
The process isn't what makes them good. The process is what stops everyone else from being bad. Those are two different jobs and conflating them is why so many sales methodologies get quietly abandoned six weeks after the training.
What the top performers are actually doing is spending their attention differently. They're not thinking about the next step in the sequence, because the sequence is automatic for them. That frees up the entire cognitive budget for the thing that matters: what is this person in front of me actually worried about, and is it the thing they just said?
You can't train that directly. You can only clear the runway for it.
Which means the highest-leverage thing you can do for a good seller usually isn't coaching. It's removing the eleven small obligations that eat the attention they'd otherwise spend on the customer — the CRM fields nobody reads, the quote that takes forty minutes to build, the weekly report that reformats data the system already has.
We've watched this play out across very different businesses. A tech who's brilliant with customers and loses his evenings to estimates. A capture planner with thirty years of judgment, spending it on document formatting. The pattern is the same: the expensive skill is being crowded out by the cheap task.
Great sellers don't need a better process. They need their week back.