Sales Excellence
Rebuilding a sales team around the capability the strategy actually required.
A B2B software company was missing its number and hiring more sellers. The pattern was familiar — the new hires looked like the top performers, and the top performers were built for a market that no longer existed.
The situation
A sales organization scaling into a market shift. A hiring profile calibrated to yesterday's buyer. New reps ramping into targets they were never selected to hit.
The question we set out to answer
“What does 'good' actually look like for the sales this company needs to make next year — and how does that differ from the sellers we already have?”
How the work was done
- 01
Ran the Sales Profile across the current team to map the actual capability distribution.
- 02
Layered Penta Personality on the top performers to distinguish habits from underlying preferences.
- 03
Rewrote the hiring scorecard against the sale the strategy required — enterprise, multi-stakeholder, longer cycle.
- 04
Reallocated existing reps to the accounts where their profile fit, before hiring more.
What changed
Attainment recovered before the next hiring wave landed. Half the planned hires were canceled — the capability existed inside; it was in the wrong seats.
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Ramp time on new hires cut roughly in half.
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Two 'underperformers' turned into top-quartile once reassigned.
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Sales leader stopped asking recruiting for 'more of the same' and started asking for a specific profile.
The principle behind the case
“The sales team you have is often closer to the sales team you need than the org chart suggests — you just have to see it.”