Five habits of great sales leaders.

TL;DR

• Great sales leaders teach specific technique — not motivation, not vibes. A leader who can't teach the actual mechanics of the job is a cheerleader, not a manager.
• Great sales leaders audit work product — the emails, the calls, the CRM hygiene, the pre-call plans. Inspect what you expect; dashboards alone don't surface technique errors.
• Great sales leaders celebrate and reinforce great work publicly and specifically. Vague praise ("you're doing a great job, tiger") is worthless. Specific, public praise sets the visible standard.
• Great sales leaders coach technique on the spot. If you see an error, you fix it — nicely, but you don't pretend it's fine because the rep is senior or the correction feels awkward.
• Great sales leaders are candid when performance isn't there. Pretending is the failure mode: the rep never changes, and the eventual offboarding blindsides them because no one ever told them the truth.
• Credit: this chapter distills slides 30-35 of Pete Kazanjy's Founder-Led Sales course. See "Source and credit" below.

The premise: management makes the curriculum stick

The onboarding curriculum answers a narrow question: does the new rep know how to run the job on day 91? It does not answer a second question that matters more over the life of the hire: does the rep keep running the job to that standard on day 200, day 400, day 900? The gap between those two questions is management, and Kazanjy's course is built around a specific claim about what closes it — not headcount planning, not compensation design, not org charts, but five daily behaviors a manager either does or doesn't do.

The reason this matters at the founder-led and early-scaling stage specifically: the first sales manager most companies produce is a top rep promoted into the role, not a manager hired for management skill. That person defaults to what got them promoted — closing deals themselves, working their own accounts, being liked. None of that is management. Kazanjy's five habits are a corrective, not a nice-to-have; they are the specific, observable difference between a promoted rep who becomes a real manager and one who becomes an expensive individual contributor with direct reports.

Each habit below has a mechanism — what the leader actually does — and a failure mode — what happens when the leader skips it, usually with a concrete illustration from the course.

Habit 1 — Teach specific technique

The first habit is teaching, and Kazanjy is precise about what teaching is not. It is not motivation. It is not a pep talk before a big call. It is not "you can do this" energy management. Teaching, in Kazanjy's framing, is transmitting the actual mechanics of how to do the job — the specific words to use on a discovery call, the specific structure of a multi-thread email, the specific sequence of questions that gets a prospect to reveal budget authority. Technique, not vibes.

The mechanism is direct: the manager has to know the technique well enough to break it into teachable steps, and then has to actually teach it — in one-on-ones, in call reviews, in role-play, in written playbooks the rep can reference between coaching sessions. This is real preparation work on the manager's part. It is not something that happens by osmosis from sitting near a good rep.

The failure mode is the leader who can rally a room but cannot explain how to run a discovery call. Kazanjy's framing is blunt about what that person is: a cheerleader, not a manager. Cheerleading has a place, but it is not a substitute for technique transfer, and a sales org led entirely by cheerleading plateaus at whatever technique level the reps arrived with.

Habit 2 — Audit work product

The second habit is auditing, and it is the habit most consistently skipped by managers who are busy. Kazanjy's instruction is specific: read the actual emails reps send. Listen to the actual calls. Review the actual CRM records for hygiene — is the stage right, is the next step logged, is the close date real. Inspect the pre-call plans reps write before a discovery call or a demo.

The mechanism behind why this has to be the manager's own eyes and ears, not a dashboard: a pipeline dashboard tells you a deal is stalled in "proposal sent" for three weeks. It does not tell you the proposal email was poorly written, or that the rep never actually confirmed the economic buyer before sending it, or that the call that led to the proposal skipped discovery entirely and jumped straight to pricing. Those are technique errors, and technique errors are invisible in aggregate numbers. They are only visible in the actual work product. Kazanjy's phrase for the principle is direct: inspect what you expect. If you expect a certain quality of discovery call and never listen to one, you are not managing that expectation — you are hoping for it.

The failure mode is the manager who runs entirely off the CRM dashboard and the weekly pipeline number. That manager catches problems only after they have already cost a quarter of degraded conversion, because the dashboard is a lagging indicator of technique that was already broken weeks earlier.

Habit 3 — Celebrate and reinforce, publicly and specifically

The third habit is celebration, and Kazanjy is specific about two dimensions most managers get only half right: it has to be public, and it has to be specific.

Public matters because the celebration is not just a reward for the individual rep — it is a signal to the entire team about what good looks like. When a rep does something excellent and the manager reinforces it only in a private one-on-one, the rest of the org never learns what the standard is. Public reinforcement — a direct message shared into a team channel, a mention in a team-wide email — does two jobs at once: it rewards the rep, and it broadcasts "this is what we expect" to everyone else.

Specific matters because vague praise carries no information. Kazanjy's illustrative contrast is exact: "great job on your call numbers this week" or "that landing page is beautiful" are specific enough to be useful — the rep and everyone watching knows exactly what behavior earned the praise and can repeat it. "You're doing a great job, tiger" is not management, it's noise. It feels like recognition without transmitting anything a rep or an observer could learn from.

The mechanism Kazanjy recommends is a specific sequence, not a single broadcast: message the rep directly first — a Slack DM or a text — and then share it publicly. The private-then-public order matters; it means the rep hears it from the manager before they see it announced, which reads as genuine recognition rather than a performative team-wide gesture. A small spot bonus reinforces the same signal materially — Kazanjy's example is something modest, on the order of $50 for the team to go get drinks, not a formal bonus program.

The failure mode is silence, or worse, praise so generic it could apply to anyone on any day. Both produce the same outcome: reps have no reliable signal of what the manager actually values, so they default to whatever behavior feels safest rather than whatever behavior the manager wants more of.

Habit 4 — Coach technique errors, immediately

The fourth habit is coaching, and it is the habit most likely to be skipped out of social discomfort rather than time pressure. Kazanjy's instruction: if you see an error in technique, you have to fix it. Nicely — the correction should not be harsh — but it has to happen. You cannot let a technique error stand because correcting it feels awkward or because the rep is senior enough that the correction feels condescending.

The illustrative story from the course is a customer success manager who was not calendar-blocking their day and, as a result, was chronically distracted by phone and Slack notifications during work that required focus. The manager's internal objection was "I'm not going to tell a 30-year-old how to use their calendar" — treating the correction as beneath the relationship, or as a presumption about someone who should already know better. Kazanjy's point is that this reasoning is exactly backwards: the manager who avoids that correction because it feels awkward to give is the one failing at management, not the rep who needs the correction. Age, seniority, and how the correction might land socially are irrelevant to whether the technique error is real and costing the team performance.

The mechanism is straightforward once the discomfort is set aside: name the specific behavior, name the specific fix, follow up that it happened. The failure mode is avoidance — the manager sees the error, rationalizes not raising it, and the error becomes a permanent, uncorrected part of how that rep works, silently capping their performance indefinitely.

Habit 5 — Be candid when the performance isn't there

The fifth habit is candor, and it is the habit whose absence does the most compounding damage. Kazanjy's instruction: when a rep's performance is not where it needs to be, say so. Do not pretend otherwise to avoid an uncomfortable conversation.

The mechanism of the failure, when candor is skipped, runs in a predictable sequence. The manager avoids the direct conversation about underperformance, softening every review, deferring the hard conversation quarter after quarter. The rep, receiving no honest signal, has no reason to change anything — from their vantage point, performance reviews have been fine, so whatever they are doing must be working. The gap between actual performance and the rep's perception of it widens every quarter the manager stays quiet. Eventually the company reaches the point where the rep has to be managed out, and the rep is genuinely shocked — not because the underperformance wasn't real, but because nobody ever told them the truth along the way.

Kazanjy's framing of the trade-off is the core of the habit: candor delivered early is a kindness, even though it feels harder in the moment. False reassurance is cruelty deferred — it feels kinder today and costs the rep far more later, at the exact moment they have the least ability to do anything about it.

Common operator failures

• Cheerleading instead of teaching. The manager can energize a room but cannot break the job down into technique a new rep can execute; the team plateaus at the technique level reps arrived with.
• Managing off the dashboard only. The manager never reads an email or listens to a call; technique errors surface only after they have already shown up as a bad quarter of conversion.
• Vague, private-only praise. "Great job, tiger" delivered in a one-on-one nobody else sees; the team never learns what good actually looks like.
• Letting seniority excuse a correction. "I'm not going to tell a 30-year-old how to use their calendar" — the technique error goes uncorrected indefinitely because raising it feels presumptuous.
• Softening every review. Underperformance never gets said out loud; the rep is blindsided at the offboarding conversation because no earlier conversation was honest.

Related chapters

• The onboarding curriculum — the 30-60-90 that gets a new rep to standard; this chapter is what keeps them there.
• The manager's operating rhythm — the weekly, monthly, and quarterly cadence these five habits run inside.
• The first AE transition — the hire this management discipline has to be in place for before it ramps.

Source and credit

This chapter is a field-notes distillation of slides 30-35 of Pete Kazanjy's Founder-Led Sales course, part of his Founding Salescurriculum (foundingsales.com). The five habits — teach, audit, celebrate, coach, be candid — along with the specific illustrations (the "tiger" line, the calendar-blocking CSM) are Kazanjy's constructs and his teaching, not Allston Labs' invention. We are crediting him explicitly and elaborating the mechanism and failure modes in our own operator voice for the founders and early sales leaders we work with; the underlying framework and course are his.