During the summer they dig up streets, repave roads, and repair bridges. That leads to epic traffic jams, long commutes and tremendous amounts of frustration. And you’re late! I’ve been doing my best impression of the digging, without the paving and repairing. Several of my recent articles have been based on Objective Management Group’s (OMG) data from the evaluations of 1.8-million sales professionals, and like the road work, we’re gonna continue to dig!

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In this article, we will look to determine whether there is a correlation between sales percentile, sales pipeline, and sales performance.

OMG includes a pipeline analysis as part of every sales force evaluation it conducts. We ask each salesperson 19 questions about four late-stage, proposal-ready/closable opportunities currently in their pipeline. In Table 1 below, the percentage of salespeople who actually had four late-stage opportunities on which they could report are sorted by sales percentile.

Almost half of the elite and strong groups, representing the top 15 percent or so percent of all salespeople, had four late-stage opportunities while only a third or so of the serviceable salespeople and just 21 percent of the weak salespeople (half the population) had four late-stage opportunities in the pipeline. It should come as no surprise at all that stronger salespeople have more quality opportunities in their pipelines.

Table 2 below shows correlation between sales percentile, sales process, and sales performance.

There is a strong correlation between sales percentile and sales process. Eighty-six percent of the elite salespeople (5 percent of the sales population) and 70 percent of strong salespeople (11 percent of the sales population) have the Sales Process Competency as a strength. It drops off quickly and significantly for serviceable salespeople (34 percent of the sales population) and dramatically for weak (50 percent of the sales population) salespeople. Is it any wonder that only 20 percent of weak salespeople have sales process as a strength?

The most interesting finding was in the area of performance.

While the percentages do correlate to sales percentile, the way companies report sales performance is insightful. In the table above, read the column on performance backwards. Companies report that 36 percent of elite salespeople aren’t performing. In other words, they believe that they “should do better!” The finding is even worse for strong salespeople where companies say that 43 percent should do better. Companies say that 53 percent of the serviceable salespeople are performing and 40 percent of the weak salespeople are performing. This is crazy and it’s all about expectations. Expectations of the best salespeople are incredibly high, while expectations of the poor salespeople are incredibly low.

Objective Management Group (OMG) conducts a pipeline analysis as part of its sales force evaluations. We ask salespeople to answer 19 questions on four late-stage, proposal-ready, closable opportunities each. In addition to looking at and rating the quality of the pipeline, we then go and re-stage their pipeline based on their answers. It’s pretty cool and the re-staging looks like what I describe in the following.

The premise is that if we ask for late-stage, proposal-ready, or closable, then 100 percent of the opportunities should be in either the qualified or closable stage. I looked into the percentage of opportunities that required re-staging sorted by sales percentile and once again, the findings are powerful and insightful.

Take a peek at Table 3 at the top of page 35 where you can see the percentage of opportunities that we replaced in each stage, organized by sales percentile.

The first thing you’ll notice is that without exception, the percentages correlate perfectly with sales percentile. This is powerful because OMG does not use pipeline data to calculate sales percentile. So the opportunity percentages by stage serve to validate our sales percentile scores in one more way!

Elite (5 percent) and strong (15 percent) salespeople represent around 20 percent of the population, while around 50 percent of all salespeople are weak and the other 30 percent or so are serviceable. Notice that elite salespeople had 150 percent more of their opportunities remain in a late stage (qualified or closable) than weak salespeople who only saw 16 percent of theirs remain late stage. That’s right. Eighty-four percent of their opportunities were restaged to either the suspect or prospect stages of the pipeline.

As with the other articles that dig deep into the data, this is less of a surprise and more of a confirmation of what most of us have suspected and believed. But like the data, it goes deeper. You’ve heard the expression, “Inspect what you expect” and it is so true with pipeline. Before you give elite salespeople a free pass, note that even they had 60 percent of their opportunities restaged!

My takeaway is that organizations must move from pipeline reviews and forecasts, to pipeline inspections and justifications. Only then will coaching be in the proper context and will forecasts become accurate and reliable.

As you can see in Table 4 below, the company says that their top two salespeople, generating approximately $20 million between them, are not performing, while they say that their worst salespeople, generating a little more than $6 million combined from three of them, are performing.
Crazy, right?

Quotas continue to go up for the salespeople who perform until they can no longer hit the numbers. Meanwhile, in a race to the bottom, quotas are adjusted downward for incompetent salespeople until they hit a mutual area of pathetic. Some of us intuitively knew that this insanity was occurring, and now we can show proof of this with the data.

We can do so much better than this. Why do so many executives protect their worst salespeople? We hear things like, “Their customers love them.” “They serve a purpose.” “They have legacy knowledge.” “They’re family.” “I recruited him here from another company we both worked for.” “They’re not really costing us anything.”

If these third-rate salespeople and their protective bosses worked in accounting they would have been fired or jailed for this kind of performance!

What will it take for companies to demand the same performance from all salespeople that they get from their best salespeople? Better recruiting and selection, better training, better coaching and better accountability. And what will it take for those things to happen? Don’t hold your breath.

MANA welcomes your comments on this article. Write to us at [email protected].