Problem

Ned was an Account Executive at Backblaze, carrying a mid-market book in a competitive cloud storage category. His numbers put him squarely in the average band of his team, hitting quota some quarters, missing it in others, with no pattern he could point to. He wanted to break into the top 10%, both for the compensation and for what it would open up next in his career, but he didn't have a clear picture of what the top reps were actually doing differently. He assumed it was talent or hustle. It wasn't.

Solution

I worked with him through one full 12-week cycle, then two more months of him running the system largely on his own.

Skills: His discovery calls moved to demo too fast, built on assumed pain instead of quantified pain, and he rarely knew who the real champion was inside an account until late in the cycle, if at all. We rebuilt discovery around one question he had to answer before any deal advanced: what is the cost of doing nothing, in dollars, to this specific buyer. And we made him name the champion, one person, by name, before a deal was allowed into Demo. No named champion, no advance.

Pipeline management: His quota was $500K, average deal size $15K, historical win rate 20%. That backsolves to roughly 33 deals a year, which at a 20% win rate means about 167 qualified opportunities, and a required pipeline coverage of 5x remaining quota at any given time. He had never calculated this number or used it to decide anything. Once he had it, coverage became the single number that told him, week to week, whether his job that week was generating new pipeline or closing what he already had. No more working on instinct.

Consistent execution: Same day, same time, every week, a 30-minute review. Score the lead measures (accounts researched, discovery calls run with a named champion, multithreaded contacts added), check coverage against the 5x line, name the one thing that broke that week, fix it before the next review. Three Most Important Things set every week, non-negotiable regardless of what else came up.

By the end of the cycle, he wasn't a different person. He was running the same job through a system that caught a stalling deal in week two instead of losing it in week eleven. That gap, between what he already knew how to do and what he actually did every week, was the entire distance between average and top 10%.