How to Identify Your Top Performer and Replicate What They Do

Every brokerage of a reasonable size has one person who consistently retains more clients, closes more renewals, and generates fewer complaints than everyone else. Principals know exactly who this person is. What they usually cannot do is explain, in concrete terms, what that person is doing on their calls that produces the result.

The default explanation is personality: the top performer is "a natural," "good with people," or "just gets it." That explanation is comfortable because it requires nothing further. It also happens to be the reason most attempts to replicate top performance fail. Personality is not a training input. If the real drivers are qualities that cannot be taught or transferred, then the rest of the team stays exactly where they are.

The alternative is to treat top performance as a set of observable behaviours rather than a trait. Word choice, question sequencing, how objections get handled, and where in a call a broker moves from information-gathering to recommendation are all things that show up in the conversation itself. For firms without a way to systematically review those conversations, this pattern stays invisible even though it is happening on every call the top performer takes. The cost of that invisibility compounds over time: every month it goes undocumented is another month new starters learn by trial and error rather than from a proven approach already sitting inside the team's own call history.

There is also a retention risk hiding inside this gap. When a top performer moves on, whatever they were doing well tends to leave with them, because none of it was ever written down in a form the rest of the team could use. A brokerage that has documented the pattern keeps the value even after the person who created it has moved to a different role or a different firm.

The gap comes down to visibility rather than intent. A principal can sit in on a handful of calls, but that sample is small and self-selecting: a manager tends to listen in on calls that are already going well, or calls flagged for a specific reason, rather than a representative slice of a top performer's week. Even a well-intentioned review schedule rarely covers enough calls, across enough call types, to separate a genuine pattern from a handful of good moments.

Without that visibility, most brokerages end up building training programmes around a guess. A new starter is told to "watch how [top performer] handles renewals" without anyone being able to say precisely what to watch for. Coaching notes describe outcomes rather than technique: "great client rapport," "handles objections well," "clients trust them." These are true observations, but they are not instructions. They describe what happened, not how it happened, which means they cannot be taught to anyone else.

Reviewing enough calls to notice a consistent pattern takes time most managers do not have between rostering, complaints handling and their own client work. Without a practical way to listen at scale, the review process defaults to whatever calls happen to be top of mind, which is exactly the small, self-selecting sample described earlier in this section.

This matters more in insurance broking than in most sales environments, because a broker's calls sit at the intersection of client outcome and advice quality. Personal advice on general insurance is governed by the Corporations Act.

The Act sets out a modified best interest duty for general insurance products. A pattern worth replicating is one that holds up against that standard, and that can only be confirmed by looking at what was actually said.

In a renewal call, for example, this might look like confirming the client's current level of cover before mentioning price at all, naming the specific trade-off between premium and excess rather than presenting it as a simple yes or no, and returning to whatever the client said mattered most at the start of the call when a concern comes up later. None of this requires exceptional talent. It requires knowing, in specific terms, what the pattern actually is, and having a reliable way to check that the pattern is showing up consistently rather than only on the calls a manager happens to have heard.

In practice, this tends to show up in one-on-one coaching sessions rather than as a standalone report. A manager preparing for a coaching conversation can point to the specific call, the specific moment, and the specific alternative phrasing that would have moved the conversation further, rather than relying on a general sense of how the call went.

A brokerage's top performer is rarely a mystery in terms of results. What is usually missing is a clear, evidence-based account of what that person actually does differently in a conversation. Treating strong performance as a personality trait keeps it locked to one person. Treating it as a set of observable, repeatable behaviours makes it something the rest of the team can be coached towards.

Getting there depends on being able to listen to a representative set of calls rather than a handful of highlights, and on comparing like with like across the team. Callyx.ai makes that comparison practical at scale, turning one person's unexplained success into a standard the whole team can work from. The firms that make this shift stop treating their best broker as a lucky exception and start treating them as a source of evidence for how the rest of the team should be coached. None of this depends on the top performer being unusually gifted. It depends on the brokerage having a practical way to see what they are already doing, call by call, and turning that into something the rest of the team can practise.