Why You Need to Measure Sales Readiness

The Executives Hub

6/18/2025

Safe to say that for most businesses, a sales fly wheel that operates with high efficiency and predictability is an asset. But the data about sales productivity suggest that there is a large percentage of every company’s sales force that is not performing at the expected level.

The data below supports this fact:

• Only 60% of sales reps meet quota

• 79% of sales executives say a leading driver of hitting new targets is improving the productivity of existing sales reps

(Source: Docurated's State of Sales Productivity Report)

If sales are so critical to the health of a business, how is it that almost half of the organization’s sales representatives underperform while provided the same products to sell, competitors to deal with and market challenges to overcome? It must be genetics, right? What company would not want to clone the top 20% of their sales force that generates 80% of the growth? Since cloning is not yet perfected for such a situation, there is another way to get to the same outcome. It involves gaining a deep and data driven understanding of the behavioral drivers of your exemplars within the sales force.

With this specific data in-hand (down to the 1/5 sigma), you can create a ‘DNA behavioral’ profile of your top performers that can be utilized to understand the drivers that are most sensitive to generating sales growth success.

You now can deploy this ‘filter’ to understand the ‘fit scores’ of you incumbent sales representatives and identify the factors that align with or are ‘gaps’ in-light of the filter. Imagine now being able to calculate a ‘fit score’ for all of your sales representatives on a 1 (low) to 10 (high) scale.

What could you do with this information?

The ‘fit score’ can be leveraged to: 

• Identify areas where coaching might help close gaps 

• Conduct regression analysis (if the sample size is large enough) to correlate the two critical variables: performance & fit score 

• Would it be helpful to know (for example) that anyone with a fit  score less than 7 is not likely to be amongst the exemplar population? 

• Screen candidates for sales roles 

• Create a sales readiness score for individuals and teams within the  organization 

The success of your top sales performers should not be a mystery or chalked up to  mysterious variables. If you want to accelerate your sales performance and believe in  the utilization of robust data to inform your decisions, it is time to move beyond the  cognitive biases we all possess. 

Here is a summary of the steps involved: 

1. Understand the behavioral drivers of the top sales performers 

2. Create a data driven behavioral profile derived from the top performers 3. Assess all sales reps and compare them against the profile 

4. Calculate a ‘fit score’ for each sales rep. vs the target profile 

5. Conduct analysis of the variables to determine the fit scores that predict  performance 

6. Apply the new ‘job role filter’ to candidates and incumbents to optimize  performance 

The last step is to be prepared for a higher sales growth run rate than when you relied  on your gut to make sales performance adjustments.