Problem

A team of Account Executives at this Fortune 1000 firm was tasked with developing an approach to consistently hit quota, rather than going through feast-famine cycles typical of their industry.

One root cause of these feast-famine cycles was identified as inconsistent sales execution, reflected in below-par selling skills, poor pipeline management, and a lack of systems.

Solution

I worked with them closely for six months.

The first month was diagnosis. Pulling the numbers stage by stage instead of looking at the quarter as one lump number showed where deals were actually dying: qualification was too loose, discovery was rushed or skipped outright, and pipeline coverage was never checked until it was already too thin to hit the number. Below-par selling skills, poor pipeline management, and lack of systems weren't three separate problems. They were the same failure surfacing in three places.

We worked on it in three layers, stacked on top of each other rather than tackling one at a time.

Skills: We rebuilt discovery and pipeline economics as core competencies, not soft skills. Reps learned to read their own coverage ratio, the pipeline value they actually had relative to quota, and use it as the number that decides whether this week's priority is generating new pipeline or closing what's already there.

Workflows: We mapped every deal against a shared nine-stage production line instead of letting each rep run the process by instinct. That gave the whole team the same lens: is a given deal's problem volume or conversion, which stage is leaking, where does more prep time actually pay off. "We need to sell better" became a specific, stage-by-stage diagnosis every week.

System: We backsolved 12-week goals from the pipeline math and installed a weekly operating rhythm: score the lead measures, check coverage, diagnose the one thing that broke that week, fix it before the next one. Correction moved from the end of the quarter, when it was already too late, to week two, when it still mattered.

Six months in, the team had stopped managing the number and started managing the pipeline that produces it. The feast-famine cycle was reduced in magnitude by roughly 60%.