Issue #106

Why “90% Effective” Sales Teams Still Miss Target

I was called in to work with a sales team who couldn’t understand why they were missing revenue targets.

On paper, they looked solid. Every stage of their process was working at 90–95% efficiency.

Prospects were being qualified, meetings booked, discovery calls held, proposals sent, and deals negotiated. No one area looked broken.

Yet results at the end of the quarter were miserable. The CEO was asking why ten salespeople were only delivering the equivalent of eight.

CVs were being updated…

(Here's a quick guide to how sales can talk to the CEO in a language they'll listen to, click here.)

How Can “Good” Deliver “Bad”?

I sat down with the team and mapped their funnel as a sequence of process steps, the same way you’d map a production line.

Here’s what it looked like, I’ve simplified the numbers so it doesn’t get distracting:

• Qualified prospect to “contacted for meeting”: ~90%
• Contacts to actual meetings: ~90%
• Meetings to proper discovery: ~90%
• Discovery to value proposition: ~90%
• Value proposition to proposal: ~90%
• Proposal to negotiated terms: ~90%
• Negotiation to implementation: ~90%

Also, you’ll notice I left out the first real step of qualification because that is largely not under the control of the sales team.

Individually, those numbers looked healthy. But lets roll them up to get the result for the whole process:

Seven 90%'s are: 0.9⁷ ≈ 0.48

That is a 48% success rate by the time you get to the money step.

That means fewer than half of prospects made it through the entire process cleanly.

This was exactly the same problem I’d seen in supply chains over the years.

Every department looks healthy on its own metrics, but the compounding effect of tiny defects creates chaos at the customer end.

For this sales team, it explained everything. Hitting 90% at each stage sounded like success, but the “rolled throughput yield” (RTY) was killing them.

Showing Them the Math

I put it into plain English for the CEO, a man more used to lunch than process design.

“Imagine you’ve got 100 chips on your plate and you pass the plate along a line of seven people. Each person is 90% effective. That’s good, right? But that means you lose around ten chips per person.

By the time the plate comes back to you there will be half as many chips left on it.

One in two of your prospects falls through the cracks, even when your people are performing well.”

The room went quiet. Nobody had ever thought of sales this way. They measured call numbers, conversion ratios, and win rates in isolation.

Nobody had looked at the whole pipeline as one interconnected system.

Sometimes a new metaphor can change your whole world view, here's how to look at selling as a performance instead of a process, click here.

Fixing the Weakest Links

The fix wasn’t to push everyone harder or hire more reps (like that was going to happen!).

We focused on the interfaces, the hand-offs between stages. That’s where the biggest leaks were hiding (it is always the first place to look, but not the only one).

One problem was between discovery and value proposition, they were good at asking questions, but the insights never flowed cleanly into tailored proposals.

Another was the leap from proposal to negotiation, they sent documents and waited, rather than actively managing the conversation.

We created small quality groups for each hand-off, the experts in the process redesigned their own work. They built checklists, templates, and feedback loops.

Every time a deal slipped, a group analysed where it slipped and tightened the transition.

Here's how to get your team to act like a cohesive unit, click here.

The Results

Within a quarter, the numbers looked better. Instead of seven stages at 90%, they were running most stages at 99%.

Maybe that doesn’t sound dramatic, until you run the maths again:

Seven 99%'s are: 0.99⁷ ≈ 0.93

That's 93% success, less than one in ten prospects were getting lost.

And the team knew how to get that even better over time.

The VP Sales presented the CEO with a full plate of chips when he reported the results.

That’s a 45-point jump in yield. On a ten-person team, it felt like they’d hired four extra salespeople, without adding to headcount.

The Lesson

Salespeople and managers love to quote their stage metrics.

“My discovery conversion is 92%.”

“My proposal close rate is 88%.”

That’s fine, but neither your customer nor your CEO care about fragments of the journey.

They care about the number at the end, the rolled result.

If you’re under pressure, don’t beg for budget to add headcount. Start by mapping your RTY. You’ll find that nudging each stage up by just a few points creates an outsized impact.

A funnel that looks healthy on the surface can still bleed out 20% or more of potential revenue.

Fixing it isn’t glamorous work. It’s checking hand-offs, tightening transitions, and running the maths.

But it’s the difference between hitting 50% of target and smashing through 100%.

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If you want another way of thinking about your sales process, check out this short video:

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If you want to get your team trained up in the basics of enterprise sales click here.

My course is a full suite of punchy, 5 to 10 minute videos like this one.

You can integrate them into your team meetings to coach your team to excellence, step by step..

And you can always email me if you want to discuss coaching or consultancy for you or your team.