Stages, pass gates and certification

Stages and steps

A plan is made of stages; each stage contains steps. A step is one roleplay: a bot, a scenario, and a scorecard.

Stages carry the difficulty arc. Steps within a stage are variations on the same difficulty — three different mid-market CFOs rather than three escalating ones.

Stages and steps on the Analytics screen shows the plan as reps experience it, and where they're stalling.

Pass gates

A pass gate is the score a rep must reach on a stage before the next unlocks. This is what turns a library into a journey.

Setting the bar:

• Use the same scorecard across the plan. If each stage scores differently, progression means nothing.
• Set it from data, not from hope. Run the stage yourself and with two strong reps first, then set the bar slightly below the strong reps' scores.
• Expect stage 1 to be higher than you think and stage 5 lower. A hostile buyer legitimately scores everyone down; a bar that ignores that just blocks the whole team at the last gate.
• Don't set 100. Scoring is strict by design, and a perfect-score gate reads as broken.

Retries

Reps retry a failed stage. That's the design — the score is a gate, not a verdict. What matters is what happens between attempts: a rep who reruns the same scenario five times without reading the evidence is grinding, not learning.

Managers should watch for a rep with many attempts and a flat score. That's a coaching signal, not a motivation problem — see scores and feedback.

Certification

A plan can end in a certification step: the final, hardest stage, which the rep must pass to be certified on that plan. Certification is the thing you can put in a ramp plan and report on — "certified on discovery" means something specific and evidenced, unlike "completed training".

Badges appear on the leaderboard as reps earn them.

What managers see

For each plan: who has started, how far they've progressed (0/5 style progress against stages), their badges, their average score, and their last activity. Reps who haven't started are listed separately, with a Nudge action.

Making it stick

The mechanics do some of the work; these habits do the rest.

• Put certification in the ramp plan. If it's optional, it's optional.
• Review one stage per week in the team meeting. Play a real moment from a real session.
• Nudge early. A rep who hasn't started in week one won't start in week four unprompted.
• Retire stages that stop discriminating. If everyone passes stage 2 first time, it's no longer teaching anything.