Leadership's working theory was a top-of-funnel problem: the team was not generating enough new business, so the fix had to be more prospecting, more leads, or more headcount. The data did not hold it up.
The situation
A growing B2B SaaS company providing an employee communication and engagement platform engaged Score More Sales to run a ScoreCard Analysis: a structured evaluation across three teams and 14 salespeople, covering sales leadership, individual selling capabilities, motivation, sales process, systems and technology. The goal was to answer, with data rather than opinion, whether the prospecting theory actually held up.
Not enough prospecting activity, leads, or headcount.
What the analysis found
It did not hold up. The evaluation found that hunting for new business was, in fact, the one part of the sales motion that was working reasonably well.
58% of the team were Hunters who will and do hunt, and another 21% were Potential Hunters who will hunt if required. Nearly four in five salespeople will find new opportunities for the pipeline, consistently.
14% waited for prospects to come to them and 7% would not hunt under any circumstances. But the shortfall was not a lead-generation problem.
The real bottleneck was reaching decision makers and closing.
The analysis extended beyond individual salespeople to the systems around them: no formal sales process consistently followed, sales technology not effectively leveraged, leadership strategies not aligned across teams, forecasting accuracy needing significant improvement, and hiring criteria that was not identifying salespeople suited to the role. The company had a sales force that could find opportunities, but neither the individual skills nor the organizational infrastructure to convert what they found into closed revenue.
Score More Sales quantified the opportunity by team, weighting each salesperson's raw upside against their current Will to Sell, coachability, Sales DNA, and ability to internalize training. The factors that determine how much of the theoretical opportunity is realistic to capture, and how long it will take. The result: 566 additional Sales Qualified Leads, a 49% increase over the team's current 1,152 annual SQLs.
One team's timeframe was projected at just 6 months for its most improvable rep, reflecting how much faster the opportunity can be captured for salespeople with strong Figure-It-Out-Factor and few resistance points, versus salespeople who will require sustained coaching over two to three years.
The common mistake
This is a common pattern. Leadership sees a revenue shortfall, assumes it is a volume or prospecting problem, and invests in more top-of-funnel activity. The data here told a different, more specific story. The team was finding opportunities just fine. The revenue was being lost in the middle and end of the sales process, in ways that more leads would not have fixed and might have made worse by burying already-overwhelmed reps in even more unworked pipeline.
Measure before you assume. The data is usually more specific, and more fixable, than the story leadership is telling itself.
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Tell us what is happening and Lori will tell you what the data would likely find. You will hear back from her directly, usually within one business day.
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