Every telesales floor has one person like this. The manager and the star performer, closer than everyone else, laughing at things nobody else finds funny, covering for each other without ever saying so out loud. Most Directors read this as personality. It rarely is. Sales manager favouritism is usually structural, not emotional — and once you see the structure, you can’t unsee it.

Here’s the part most people miss. A sales manager’s bonus is rarely built on their own sales. It’s built on the team’s total number. In plenty of companies that bonus includes an override — a straight percentage of everything the team brings in. Many also add an accelerator that pays out more once the team clears its quota. Now ask yourself who’s actually driving that number past the line each month. On most floors it’s one person, carrying a share of the total that’s wildly out of proportion to the size of the room.

That’s not a coincidence, and it isn’t favouritism in the way people usually mean it. The manager isn’t protecting a friend. They’re protecting their own bonus. Whatever keeps that one person happy, comfortable, and still hitting their number matters most to the manager. It’s worth more to their pay packet than anything happening with the rest of the floor.

The Bonus Nobody Talks About

Override structures like this are common practice, not some rare exception. A manager earns a cut of total team sales. Accelerators kick in once the team passes 100% of quota. On paper, that looks like a sensible way to align a manager’s interests with the floor’s success. In practice, it does something else entirely once one person is responsible for the majority of the number.

Picture the maths. If your star carries half the floor’s total output, that person is effectively worth half the manager’s bonus, on their own. Every other agent on the floor is splitting the other half between them. The manager doesn’t need to consciously decide to favour anyone. The incentive does that work automatically, every single month, without a single conversation about it.

This is exactly why the star gets left alone when they skip the huddle. A struggling agent gets pulled into a one-to-one for the exact same thing. Behaviour was never really the issue here. The real issue was always whose number the manager couldn’t afford to put at risk.

It Isn’t Cynicism. It’s Just Incentive.

It isn’t cynicism because a manager under pressure to hit a team number will rationally protect whoever is most responsible for hitting it. None of this requires a manager to be cynical or self-serving in any conscious way. Most managers would tell you, honestly, that they treat everyone the same. They likely believe it too. But belief doesn’t change what the incentive is quietly doing underneath the surface, month after month, review after review.

A manager under pressure to hit a team number will always, eventually, protect the person most responsible for hitting it. That’s not favouritism as a character flaw. It’s a rational response to how they’re paid.

This is worth sitting with as a Director, because it means the fix was never going to come from asking managers to try harder at fairness. Fairness isn’t the problem. The structure underneath the fairness is the problem, and structures don’t respond to good intentions.

Why “The It Factor” Survives

The it factor’ survives because it closes the conversation down before anyone has to admit they’re protecting a bonus, not a talent. Ask most managers why one person outsells everyone else. You’ll get a shrug and a phrase along the lines of “they’ve just got it.” Nobody ever defines what “it” actually is. Nobody has to. The phrase does exactly the job it’s meant to do: it closes the conversation down before anyone has to look underneath it.

Think about what admitting the real answer would cost. If the manager said “they carry my bonus, so I leave them alone,” that’s an uncomfortable thing to say out loud, to the room and to themselves. “They’ve got it” costs nothing. It sounds like a compliment. It’s actually a way of avoiding the only question that matters: what, specifically, is this person doing differently, stage by stage, that the rest of the floor isn’t?

Nobody can answer that question honestly without stage-level information. Not because the answer is a mystery. It’s because nobody in the building has ever gone looking for it in a way that produces a real answer instead of a compliment.

Compare that to how any other skilled profession treats performance. A surgeon’s outcomes get reviewed procedure by procedure. A pilot’s flight gets assessed stage by stage, checklist by checklist. Nobody in either profession would accept “they’ve just got it” as an explanation for why one surgeon’s patients recover faster, or why one pilot’s landings are smoother. Yet in telesales, an industry built entirely on a repeatable, learnable sequence of stages, “the it factor” is treated as a perfectly acceptable final answer. It isn’t one. It’s simply the point where most managers stop looking.

What the Rest of the Room Could Actually Do

Here’s the claim most Directors won’t have heard before, and it’s worth sitting with: most of the room could very likely outsell your star, given the same tools. Not because they’re secretly more talented, but because the gap was never really about talent to begin with. It’s about who was shown how the call actually works, and who was left to work it out alone.

A performer who’s never had their calls broken down stage by stage — Information, Verification, Presentation, Close — is guessing at what works. That’s the same as everyone else on the floor. They’ve just been guessing successfully for long enough that nobody, including them, ever questioned it. That’s not a repeatable system. That’s a habit that happens to be working, for now, for one person, under conditions nobody has actually examined.

Meanwhile the rest of the room is told, implicitly, that they simply don’t have “it.” That’s a brutal thing to tell someone who’s dialling exactly as hard as the star, every single day. Nobody has ever shown them what to change.

What This Actually Costs You

This costs you a forecast resting on one person’s goodwill, a management structure organised around their comfort, and good agents who leave believing the game is rigged. Step back from the floor for a moment and look at what this arrangement really means for you as a Director or business owner. Your forecast is resting on one person’s continued goodwill. The management structure is quietly organised around keeping that one person comfortable, whether or not anyone would admit it in those terms. And the recruitment budget keeps getting spent chasing a repeat of whatever that one person happens to be doing.

There’s a harder cost too, one that rarely makes it into a board pack. Every capable agent who works hard, gets told they lack “it,” and never finds out what “it” actually was, is a retention risk you created yourself. Good people don’t usually leave because the work is hard. They leave because the game feels rigged, and because nobody ever gave them a fair, specific answer about what to change, or a real chance to prove otherwise. You lose them to a competitor who never even had to poach them properly. They walked.

Them and Us

Add the bonus structure to the vague excuse and you get a floor split into two camps. On one side, the manager and the star, bound together by a shared financial interest neither of them has to name. On the other, everyone else — working just as hard, blamed for lacking a “factor” nobody can define. They’re quietly aware that the rules aren’t the same for everyone in the room.

That divide rarely gets discussed openly. Naming it would force an uncomfortable admission from the manager: their loyalty has a price tag on it, and it isn’t the room’s development. Left alone, that divide does real damage. People notice unfairness long before anyone says the word out loud. The ones who notice first are usually the ones with the most to offer if anyone ever gave them the chance.

This divide also explains a pattern many Directors have seen without ever naming it correctly. The manager defends the star reflexively, before hearing any of the details, while showing no such patience for anyone else’s mistakes. It looks like inconsistency. It’s actually perfect consistency — consistent with protecting the one number the manager’s own pay depends on.

Change What the Manager Is Actually Protecting

None of this gets fixed by asking managers to be fairer. Good intentions don’t cancel out a bonus structure. What actually changes the picture is giving the manager something else worth protecting: a floor where every agent’s stage-level data is visible, not just the star’s.

Once a manager can see exactly where each person’s calls succeed and fail, developing the middle of the room stops being a distraction from their bonus. It becomes the fastest way to grow it. A floor where five people are each a little better beats a floor propped up by one person carrying the rest. The manager doesn’t need a lecture about fairness. They need a system that makes fairness the more profitable choice.

What Favouritism Looks Like After This

After this, favouritism can’t hide behind ‘they’ve got it’ anymore, because every agent’s stage data is visible and the scrutiny stops being personal. Think about what that actually changes in practice. Right now, a manager’s best move is to leave the star exactly as they are. Questioning anything risks a number the manager’s own pay depends on. Once stage-level data exists for everyone, that same manager’s best move flips entirely. Coaching the room’s weakest stage becomes the quickest, lowest-risk way to lift the total number, because it’s the gap most likely to be costing real, identifiable sales right now. The incentive hasn’t gone away. It’s simply pointing at a better target.

This also changes what favouritism even looks like going forward. A manager can still have a favourite. That’s human, and nobody’s pretending otherwise. But when every agent’s stage data is visible, a favourite can’t quietly avoid scrutiny anymore, because the scrutiny isn’t personal. It’s just what the system shows, for everyone, including the manager’s own team totals. Favouritism stops being able to hide behind “they’ve got it,” because “it” now has a name, a stage, and a number attached to it.

None of this means the current star stops being valuable. It means their value finally gets measured the same way everyone else’s does — by what actually happens, stage by stage, on the call. If they really are your best, the data will say so plainly, and nobody will need a vague phrase to defend it. If someone else on the floor turns out to be carrying hidden potential nobody ever noticed, the data will say that too, just as plainly, and just as fairly.

The Real Fix Starts With Facts, Not Fairness Speeches

That’s the whole purpose behind treating every stage of every call as visible information rather than a personality contest. It replaces “they’ve got it” with an actual answer, for every single person on the floor. That includes the one currently propping up your manager’s bonus without anyone quite admitting it.

You don’t fix favouritism by asking people to be fairer. You fix it by removing the reason favouritism made financial sense in the first place. Once the manager’s incentive points at developing the whole floor instead of protecting one number, the “them and us” divide loses the thing that was holding it together. The room stops watching one person get away with things nobody else could, and starts watching a system that treats every agent’s number the same way — including the one currently carrying more than their fair share.

If you want to see exactly how much of your floor’s number is really sitting on one person’s shoulders, that’s precisely what the IVPC Assessment is built to show you. It also shows you exactly what it would take to spread that number further.