How Leaders Scale Sales Performance

Executive Point of View

Despite decades of investment in sales training, CRM systems, incentive plans, and digital tools, sales performance remains one of the least predictable functions in most organizations. Revenue volatility, uneven productivity, long sales cycles, and over-reliance on a small group of top performers continue to challenge leaders across industries.

Our point of view is unequivocal:

Sales performance is not primarily a people problem, a tool problem, or a motivation problem. It is a system design problem, and a leadership discipline in how that system is operated.

Organizations that consistently outperform their peers treat sales as an integrated performance system, deliberately designed and continuously managed. Those that underperform tend to address sales issues in isolation, deploying new tools, launching training programs, or revising incentives, without addressing the underlying structural misalignment.

Drawing on more than two decades of experience and hundreds of client engagements across industries and geographies, where we have consistently helped organizations materially improve sales performance, we believe that sustainable sales excellence rests on five mutually reinforcing pillars:

1. Strategy & Planning
2. Sales Process & Tools
3. Sales Leadership & Sales Force Effectiveness
4. Skillsets Required
5. Compensation & Incentives

This paper sets out our perspective on how leaders should think about each pillar and, critically, how they work together as an integrated system. While marketing and sales are deeply interdependent, this paper focuses deliberately on sales-led growth environments, where value is realized primarily through active selling rather than

point-of-sale buying. Marketing plays an essential enabling role, shaping demand, clarifying value propositions, and reducing friction in the buyer journey. Still, in complex, high-value, and relationship-driven contexts, performance is ultimately determined by the effectiveness of the sales system.

Scope & Applicability of the Framework

While this point of view is grounded primarily in B2B sales environments and high-value, complex B2C contexts, where buying processes often involve multiple stakeholders, longer sales cycles, and value propositions that require more profound articulation, the underlying principles are broadly applicable.

At its core, sales performance is shaped by the same foundational elements across all sales models: clarity of strategy, disciplined execution processes, effective leadership, capability development, and aligned incentives. Whether in enterprise B2B, B2B2B, channel-led, financial services, complex solution selling, or scaled B2C environments, these five pillars ultimately determine the consistency, quality, and sustainability of sales outcomes.

The degree of complexity may vary by context, but the system logic remains constant. Organisations that deliberately design and align these pillars outperform those that rely solely on volume, incentives, or individual heroics.

A Note on Methodology & Experience

This framework reflects over two decades of applied work across industries, geographies, and organisational growth stages. Rather than deriving from a single empirical study, it represents a synthesis of recurring patterns observed across a broad range of sales transformation and capability-building engagements. The intent is not prescriptive uniformity, but the articulation of a structured lens that supports diagnosis, design, and leadership decision-making in complex sales environments.

The Sales Performance Paradox

The observable reality

Most leadership teams see the same symptoms:

• Forecasts that lack reliability
• Sales pipelines that grow but do not convert
• High variance between top and average performers
• CRM systems are rich in data but poor in insight
• Training investments with limited commercial impact

The instinctive response is typically tactical: increasing sales activity targets, launching additional training programs, introducing new tools, refreshing incentives, or replacing sales talent, often without addressing the underlying system design issues.

The underlying issue

What is often missed is that sales outcomes are an emergent property of the system in which salespeople operate. When strategy is unclear, processes are inconsistent, leadership capability is uneven, skills are underdeveloped, and incentives are misaligned, even strong sales talent will underperform. High-performing organizations do not rely on heroics. They rely on design.

Quick Summary of this Segment

Idea to action

1. Turn the “system, not heroics” thesis into a CEO diagnostic.

• 5–10 yes/no questions: e.g. “Can we show a clear line from strategy → territories → account plans?”; “Do we track leading indicators weekly at sales-leader level?”
• Leverage content on sales from Leaderonomics.com to nudge self-assessments and sales capacity growth for your people (i.e send a video or article to them weekly to remind them of a point/process)

2. Make the paradox visceral with one internal review ritual.

• Quarterly “Sales System Review” (not just forecast meeting) where EXCO must answer: “What system change did we make this quarter in strategy, process, leadership, capability, or incentives?”
• Decisions: kill one low-yield activity, fix one structural issue, test one new design.

Pillar 1: Strategy & Planning - Defining Where & How to Win

Our insight

Sales execution cannot compensate for strategic ambiguity. When the underlying offer, target customer, or value proposition is unclear or untested, even the most capable sales teams will struggle to deliver consistent results. In many organizations, sales strategy remains either too high-level to be actionable or too fragmented to provide clear direction. Sales teams are asked to pursue growth across multiple segments, products, and geographies simultaneously, often before the organization has validated what truly resonates with customers. The result is diluted focus, weak differentiation, and wasted selling effort.

From hypothesis to validation

Leading organizations recognize that an effective sales strategy begins with disciplined validation. They invest early effort in clarifying the minimum viable product or solution (MVP) and rigorously testing it against a clearly defined Ideal Client Profile (ICP). This process goes beyond confirming interest; it seeks to validate willingness to pay, buying urgency, and decision dynamics.

Through this iterative testing, high-performing organizations sharpen the Unique Value Proposition (UVP), articulating not just what is offered, but why it matters, how it is differentiated, and where it creates measurable value. This clarity is essential to achieving Product–Market Fit (PMF), without which sales execution becomes an uphill battle.

What leading organizations do differently

Top-performing sales organizations make explicit, evidence-based choices about:

• Target markets and segments, where sales effort will be concentrated
• Ideal Client Profiles and buying personas; who salespeople are selling to and how decisions are made
• Validated value propositions: why customers choose them and are willing to pay

Critically, these choices are tested in the market and translated into practical sales guidance, rather than remaining abstract strategy statements.

Strategic discipline in action

Effective sales planning creates a clear line of sight from strategy to execution:

• Corporate strategy to sales strategy
• Sales strategy to territory and account plans
• Account plans to activity priorities and KPIs

Sales plans, therefore, define not only revenue targets, but what must be done differently to achieve them, where to focus, what to stop doing, and how sales effort should be reallocated. In high-performing organizations, this discipline provides clarity, focus, and confidence to the sales force, enabling consistent execution at scale.

Quick Summary of this Segment

From hypothesis to validation

1. Run structured MVP–ICP sprints.

• 4–6 week cycles where product, marketing, and sales test 2–3 hypotheses on: ICP, UVP, price, and problem urgency.
• Require: minimum number of validation conversations, documented “reasons for no”, and a go/kill/iterate decision at the end.

2. Operationalize the Ideal Client Profile.

• Build an ICP checklist (firmographics, buying triggers, negative indicators) and embed it in the CRM qualification fields.
• Require every new opportunity to log “ICP fit: High/Medium/Low + reason”.

Strategy → plans → behaviour

1. Introduce “Strategic Selling Themes” per year.

• Choose 2–3 themes (e.g. “penetrate X vertical”, “expand wallet share in top-50 accounts”) and translate them into: account selection rules, pipeline tags, and meeting agendas.
• Quarterly review: which theme drove actual revenue, which needs to be refined.

2. Redesign account and territory plans.

• Force every key account plan to answer: “What will we stop doing?” and “Where will we reallocate selling time?”
• Link each plan to 3–5 leading indicators (e.g. new buying centers engaged, strategic conversations per month).

Pillar 2: Sales Process & Tools - Creating Repeatability & Predictability

Our insight

You cannot scale what you cannot standardize. Many sales organizations claim to have a sales process, yet tolerate wide variation in how deals are pursued, qualified, and closed. Tools exist, but are often disconnected from how sales actually happen. As a result, management visibility is low, and forecasting accuracy suffers.

What distinguishes leading organizations

High-performing sales organizations design sales processes that:

• Reflect how customers actually buy, not just how sellers want to sell
• Define clear stages, exit criteria, and decision points
• Differentiate by deal type, complexity, and size
• Explicitly distinguish new business acquisition (“hunting”) from account expansion (“farming”)

Tools, particularly CRM platforms, are configured to reinforce these processes, not substitute for them.

Prospecting (“Hunting”) & Account Management (“Farming”)

High-performing sales organizations explicitly distinguish between prospecting-led sales processes (“hunting”) and account management–driven processes (“farming”), recognizing that these motions require fundamentally different skills, rhythms, and success metrics.

Prospecting focuses on opportunity creation, early-stage qualification, and navigating initial buying uncertainty, while account management emphasizes relationship depth, value expansion, cross-selling, and long-term retention.

Organizations that don’t have clear sales processes often experience friction, misaligned incentives, and suboptimal performance. Leading organizations instead design integrated sales processes, with clear accountabilities, differentiated stage definitions, and tailored tools for each motion. This clarity enables sales teams to focus on the right behaviors at the right time, improves pipeline quality, and ensures that growth from existing accounts is treated as a strategic priority rather than an afterthought.

From activity to decision support

In leading organizations, sales processes and tools enable:

• Early disqualification of low-quality opportunities
• Clear next actions at every stage
• Consistent language across sales, management, and leadership
• Data-driven coaching and pipeline management

Depth of Process & Tracking: Balancing Discipline with Effectiveness

A recurring leadership question is how much detail and rigor a sales process, and its associated tracking, should require. Our rule of thumb is clear: sales processes should be as detailed as possible, but no more than is useful. Granularity enables visibility, coaching, and control; however, excessive complexity can overwhelm salespeople, reduce adoption, and ultimately impair outcomes.

Leading organizations calibrate process depth based on three factors: the maturity of the business, the competence and experience of the sales force, and the level of management oversight required. Early-stage or rapidly evolving businesses may require lighter, more flexible processes to encourage speed and learning, while mature organizations with scaled sales teams benefit from greater structure and standardization. Similarly, less experienced sales teams require clearer guidance and more explicit tracking, whereas competent teams can operate effectively with greater autonomy.

The objective is not process for its own sake, but impact on sales outcomes. Well-designed sales processes respect the need for detail and discipline while remaining mindful of cognitive load, execution effort, and the behaviors they encourage. When calibrated correctly, process depth enhances effectiveness; when misaligned, it becomes friction.

High-performing sales leaders continuously adjust this balance as the organization and its people mature.

Process discipline is not bureaucracy; it is the foundation of predictability.

Quick Summary of this Segment

Design and standardise the process

1. Map one “how customers buy” journey per major deal type.

• Facilitate cross-functional workshops (sales, marketing, delivery, finance) to map real buying stages and decision points for new logo vs expansion deals.
• Translate into 5–7 CRM stages with explicit exit criteria.

2. Separate “hunting” and “farming” motions.

• Define distinct processes, KPIs, and cadences for hunters (opportunity creation, first meetings, early qualification) vs farmers (renewals, upsell, cross-sell).
• Decide explicitly: which roles own each motion, how handoffs work, and how credit is split.

From activity logging to decision support

1. Redesign CRM fields to answer leadership questions.

• Replace vanity fields with 10–15 high-signal fields: decision maker identified, compelling event, budget clarity, risk flags, next step with date.
• Require every stage advancement to have a documented “why we believe this will move”.

2. Calibrate process depth.

• For mature, complex B2B: keep granular stages and strict exit criteria; for early-stage or new offerings: use lighter stages and a shorter required field set.
• Review twice a year: remove unused fields, add only those that inform coaching or forecast decisions.

Pillar 3: Sales Leadership & Sales Force Effectiveness - The Primary Force Multiplier

Our insight

Sales performance is a direct reflection of sales leadership quality. Too often, sales managers are promoted based on individual success rather than leadership capability. They remain heavily involved in deals, leaving little time to coach, develop, and systematically improve their teams.

What best-in-class organizations do

High-performing organizations redefine the role of the sales leader:

• From a deal closer to a performance architect
• From reactive manager to proactive coach
• From individual contributor to capability multiplier

They establish disciplined operating rhythms, including:

• Regular pipeline and forecast reviews
• Structured 1-on-1 coaching sessions
• Team-level performance cadences
• Transparent dashboards that drive insight, not fear

Managing Leading Indicators: The Leadership Imperative

In sales performance management, it is essential to distinguish between lagging and leading indicators. Revenue, conversion rates, win ratios, and other KPIs are, by definition, lagging indicators; they reflect the outcomes of past activities and decisions. While indispensable for assessing performance, they are inherently backward-looking and therefore insufficient as the primary levers for improvement.

High-performing sales organizations understand that leading indicators drive sustainable performance, the quality and consistency of sales activities, the behaviors exhibited in customer interactions, and the underlying skills and capabilities of the sales force. As a result, effective sales leaders focus less on managing numbers alone and more on managing what produces those numbers, how opportunities are qualified, how conversations are conducted, how the sales process is applied, and how execution progresses at each stage of the buyer journey.

This distinction has profound implications for leadership. Sales leadership is the most scalable lever in any sales transformation because leaders do not manage results directly; they manage the activities that create results. The critical leadership question is therefore not whether targets are being met, but whether the right activities are executed in the correct sequence at the right moments in the sales process.

In practice, this means managing activity quality, not just activity volume. High-performing sales leaders ensure that salespeople understand the sales process, apply it with discipline, and execute each activity in a way that advances the buyer’s decision-making. Coaching, therefore, goes beyond pipeline metrics and dashboards to address how value is positioned, how objections are handled, and how decisions are influenced at each stage.

Effective sales leadership integrates performance coaching across four dimensions: mindset, technical selling skills, soft skills, and

knowledge. Leaders build confidence, resilience, and ownership, while simultaneously strengthening execution capabilities such as questioning, positioning, negotiation, and closing. Equally critical is deep contextual knowledge of products and solutions, clients and industries, and competitive dynamics, so that activities are not only executed consistently, but executed intelligently.

In this model, KPIs serve as validation, not control. Leadership attention is directed upstream, toward activities, behaviors, and skills, where intervention remains possible, and performance can be shaped in real time. In doing so, sales leaders become architects of performance rather than overseers of outcomes, reducing reliance on individual heroics and creating a disciplined, repeatable system for sustainable productivity.

Quick Summary of this Segment

Shift managers from super-closers to performance architects

1. Redefine the sales manager job description.

• Make coaching, pipeline quality, and capability development explicit KPIs alongside revenue.
• For example: “Minimum 3 hours/week per rep in structured coaching and deal reviews” as a non-negotiable.

2. Install leadership operating rhythms.

• Weekly: pipeline and forecast reviews focused on stage health, disqualification, and next actions (not just numbers).
• Fortnightly or monthly: structured 1:1s that review leading indicators, skills focus, and commitments.
• Quarterly: talent and performance review—who is stuck, who is ready for bigger accounts, who needs focused support.

Manage leading indicators, not just outcomes

1. Define 5–7 core leading indicators per role.

• Examples: high-quality discovery calls, multi-stakeholder meetings, proposals with quantified value, new buying centers engaged.
• Make them visible on shared dashboards and review them before revenue in every management meeting.

2. Coach specific behaviours, not attitudes.

• Use call recordings, role plays, and live deal reviews to coach how reps ask questions, frame value, handle objections, and agree next steps.
• Document “exemplars” from top performers and turn them into coaching guides.

Pillar 4: Skillsets Required - Building Enduring Sales Capability

Our insight

Training does not change performance. Capability systems do.

Modern sales roles require a complex blend of mindset, interpersonal skills, technical selling skills, and deep contextual knowledge. Yet many organizations still rely on episodic training interventions with limited reinforcement.

What leading organizations understand

High-performing sales organizations:

• Define role-specific competency models
• Regularly assess skills and knowledge gaps
• Integrate training with coaching and performance management
• Treat capability building as a continuous journey

They move away from generic “one-size-fits-all” training toward deliberate capability development aligned to role, context, and strategy.

From learning to impact

Capability development is effective only when:

• Skills are practiced in real sales situations
• Managers reinforce learning through coaching
• Progress is measured and linked to outcomes

Instructional Design: From Content to Context to Capability Transfer

A critical, and often overlooked, determinant of sales capability effectiveness is instructional design. Too many sales programs still equate training with assembling PowerPoint slides, workbooks, and facilitator-led presentations, often resulting in what sales professionals privately describe as “PowerPoint karaoke.” In an era where sales training content is widely commoditized and readily available through books, YouTube, podcasts, and search engines, content alone no longer creates advantage.

Leading organizations recognize that effective sales capability development requires a deliberate instructional design methodology, one that engages experienced sales professionals in context-rich, application-driven learning. This means anchoring learning in real-world sales situations, empathizing with the complexity of actual customer conversations, and focusing on how decisions are made in the field, not merely what frameworks look like on slides.

Importantly, sales workshops are among the few capability-building engagements where it is both possible and practical to measure return on investment. Unlike many leadership or culture interventions, which may take years to materialize, well-designed sales workshops deliver near-term commercial outcomes. When structured around real opportunities, observable behaviors, and defined execution changes, they enable measurement not only of learning and behavior change, but of business impact, consistent with Kirkpatrick Level 4 evaluation. Improvements in conversion rates, deal velocity, deal size, or pipeline quality can often be directly traced to changes in sales execution following the intervention.

Best-in-class sales training institutionalizes proven practices by making the implicit explicit. In particular, it helps move top performers from unconscious competence, where success is intuitive and difficult to articulate, to conscious competence, where effective behaviors, decision logic, and techniques can be systematically understood, replicated, and coached across the organization. Sales performance does not improve simply by “trying harder”; it improves when something specific, observable, and repeatable is improved.

As a result, high-performing sales organizations increasingly treat sales training as workshops rather than training events. These sessions are designed as working forums to refresh critical concepts, embed new tools and frameworks, and, most importantly, rehearse real sales opportunities. Role plays, simulations, deal clinics, and live opportunity reviews allow salespeople to practice execution in a safe but realistic environment, accelerating skill transfer and reinforcing disciplined application in the field.

When instructional design is approached in this way, sales training moves beyond knowledge dissemination and becomes a measurable performance lever. Sales capability, when built systematically and evaluated rigorously, becomes a durable and defensible competitive advantage.

Pillar 5: Compensation & Incentives - Aligning Motivation with Strategy

Our insight

Compensation design is not a tactical HR decision; it is a strategic choice that signals what the organization values and how it expects sales to behave. There is no universally “correct” compensation model. The appropriate structure depends on multiple factors, including industry dynamics, competitive norms, customer buying behavior, sales cycle length, and, critically, the organization’s ambition, maturity, and desired future state.

Across industries, sales compensation structures typically fall into three broad models. Each has advantages and trade-offs, and each can be effective when aligned to context.

Salary-Only (with Performance-Based Bonus)

In this model, salespeople receive a fixed salary, with variable bonuses tied to overall sales performance or broader business outcomes.

Advantages

• Encourages long-term relationship building and customer-centric behavior
• Reduces short-term deal-chasing and excessive discounting
• Well-suited to complex, regulated, or relationship-driven industries

Limitations

• Weaker direct linkage between effort and reward
• Risk of reduced urgency or performance differentiation
• Requires strong leadership and performance management discipline

This model is often effective in mature organizations, industries with long sales cycles, or environments where collaboration, compliance, and trust are critical.

Base Salary Plus Commission

This hybrid model combines income stability with performance-based upside, typically linked directly to sales outcomes.

Advantages

• Balances motivation with income predictability
• Aligns individual performance with business results
• Widely accepted across most B2B and high-value B2C contexts

Limitations

• Can become overly complex if poorly designed
• Risk of misaligned incentives if commissions do not reflect strategy
• Requires regular calibration to avoid unintended behaviors

This is the most common and versatile model, particularly suitable for growth-oriented organizations seeking both discipline and drive.

Commission-Only

In commission-only structures, compensation is entirely variable and directly linked to sales results.

Advantages

• Strong performance orientation and cost flexibility
• Clear pay-for-results message
• Attractive to highly entrepreneurial sales talent

Limitations

• High income volatility and potential attrition
• Can encourage short-termism and aggressive selling behaviors
• Less suitable for complex or consultative sales environments

This model is most effective in high-volume, transactional, or early-stage environments, where speed and rapid customer acquisition are paramount.

Designing Compensation as a System Lever

Regardless of structure, all compensation models require:

• A clearly defined minimum acceptable performance threshold
• Alignment with the sales process and desired behaviors
• Strong leadership and performance management discipline

Importantly, compensation design must evolve with the organization.

Early-stage companies, emerging business models, and immature

markets often require different trade-offs than established organizations in mature industries. What works at one stage of growth may actively constrain performance at another.

Our perspective

Compensation should reinforce the sales system, not compensate for weaknesses in strategy, process, leadership, or capability. When deliberately designed and regularly reviewed, incentives become a powerful amplifier of performance rather than a source of distortion.

Implications for Sales Leaders

Taken together, these insights point to a few leadership imperatives. Organizations that improve sales performance sustainably do not focus on isolated interventions; they reframe how performance is managed, design sales as an integrated system, and embed learning directly into execution.

Technology, CRM, & AI - Enablers, Not Substitutes

Technology has become an increasingly critical enabler of sales performance. CRM platforms, sales analytics, automation, and emerging AI tools offer significant potential to enhance visibility, efficiency, and decision-making.

However, our perspective is clear: technology does not fix broken sales systems.

Leading organizations deploy technology only after clarifying strategy, process, leadership, and capability requirements. AI and advanced analytics are then used to:

• Improve opportunity qualification
• Enhance forecasting accuracy
• Support coaching and performance insights
• Reduce administrative burden on sales teams

Technology accelerates what is already well designed; it rarely compensates for what is not.

The Human Dimension: Character Still Matters

Even in the most well-designed sales systems, individual character continues to matter. Across our experience, the most effective sales

professionals consistently demonstrate four defining attributes: a learning mindset, discipline, resilience, and adaptability. They are curious and reflective, committed to executing fundamentals consistently, able to recover from rejection and setbacks, and capable of adjusting their approach as customers, markets, and contexts evolve.

Not all of these attributes are fully trainable. While skills and knowledge can be developed systematically, elements of mindset and character are often shaped by prior experience, values, and personal disposition. High-performing organizations, therefore, recognize that sales excellence is built through a combination of thoughtful selection and deliberate development. Capability systems and coaching can strengthen discipline, adaptability, and learning behaviors, but they are most effective when applied to individuals with underlying resilience and a willingness to grow.

This reinforces a critical leadership insight: systems do not replace people; they enable the right people to perform at their best consistently.

Final Thoughts

Sustainable sales excellence is never an accident; it is the outcome of leaders who choose design over hope, discipline over heroics, and learning over blame. When strategy is clarified, processes are grounded in how customers actually buy, leadership attention shifts to leading indicators, capabilities are built deliberately, and incentives are aligned with what truly matters, sales performance becomes not only more predictable, but profoundly more human. In a world enamoured with quick fixes, new tools, and heroic individual performers, the real competitive advantage belongs to organisations that commit to building coherent systems and the character to run them well over time.

For further discussion

This paper reflects momenta’s perspective on designing and operating sales performance as an integrated system. For leaders interested in discussing how these principles apply to their specific context, industry, or growth ambition, we welcome a direct conversation.

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