Score

The move

On a yes, lock it: restate the agreement in their words, set exact next steps, pre-empt the second-guessing, ask about the referral. On a no, leave well — the free value stands, and a real return is planted. A no only scores if something was banked: a date, a name, or a leave-behind that was kept. Either way, ten seconds: one thing that worked, one thing that adjusts. Handed straight back to Presence.

In the body

The handshake on both endings. The exit is public — the street watches how you walk away from a no.

What this stage moves for the operator

Score is two things at once: the stage that protects revenue already won, and the only stage that compounds. It is where cancellation rate and referral rate are decided, and where a rep with ten years of experience diverges from a rep with one year repeated ten times.

The research behind it

Sources marked specific publication were checked against the publication itself — empirical studies, reviews, and meta-analyses alike. Where a claim rests on an established body of research rather than one identifiable publication, it says so — we would rather label the difference than dress a literature up as a single citation.

1. People judge an experience by its most intense moment and by how it ended, largely independent of how long it lasted.

   Specific publication Kahneman, Fredrickson, Schreiber and Redelmeier, "When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End," Psychological Science, 1993

   The exit disproportionately shapes the review, the referral, and whether the street is open next season — including the exits from conversations that did not sell.

2. Repetition improves skill most reliably when immediate, specific feedback is attached to it. How much of expert performance deliberate practice explains is genuinely contested — a critical meta-analysis put it at roughly 14% of performance variance overall, and about 18% in sport.

   Specific publication Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer, "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance," Psychological Review, 1993; and the critical meta-analysis, Macnamara, Hambrick & Oswald, Psychological Science, 2014

   Ten seconds of self-review is that attachment. Without it, fifty conversations a day produce fifty repetitions and no learning.

How Score fails, and what to coach

The visible symptom is rarely the thing to fix. Each row names what a manager sees, what is actually causing it, and which dimension the coaching conversation belongs to.