When I grade sales reps, I grade outcomes against their quota and skill and effort against their peers. Grading is hard, because we are dealing with high-performing talent that doesn’t always take feedback well. Traditional leaderboards fail because they rank reps on a single metric, conflating raw effort with conversion. Separating performance into effort, impact and outcomes makes it immediately clear whether a rep needs more meetings or better closing skills.
Key takeaways
- Leaderboards misdiagnose your best and worst performers. Ranking reps strictly on quota attainment or raw activity hides the underlying skills that drive or block revenue.
- Coaching requires separating weekly effort from skill-based impact. A rep who excels at booking meetings but struggles with deal conversion needs a completely different coaching plan than a rep who does the opposite.
- Data integrity is the foundation of any defensible grade. If your sales pipeline data is incomplete or unmonitored, even the most advanced scoring model will produce incorrect results.
Why a leaderboard does not always work
Recently I kicked off our Deep Dive session on how to grade your reps fairly with a quote from Kevin “KD” Dorsey.
I have seen this first hand. Sitting across many sales organizations, when the times get tough it’s easy to just start focusing on pure activity-based metrics. But I believe that approach has a massive blind spot. More activity does not mean better outcomes. Let me share two examples of reps I’ve worked with previously.
Jenny closed 177% of her quota. On paper, she looks like an absolute superstar. Yet she had the lowest activity on her team, booking only 1.8 meetings per week and creating $480,000 in new pipeline. A standard activity leaderboard would suggest her manager should push her for more meetings. In my view, doing so would be a huge mistake. She had a 71% win rate and an average deal size of $118,000. Forcing her into a high-activity routine would likely disrupt a highly effective sales process.
Now there is Ryan. He achieved only 47% of his quota. However, he led his team in effort, booking 5.6 meetings per week and creating $1.98 million in pipeline. A standard leaderboard suggests he is failing. But Ryan is working harder than anyone else on the team. His issue was conversion: he has a 29% win rate and an average deal size of $28,182. Pushing him for more activity only sends more deals through a leaky pipeline.
These contrasting stories show exactly why focusing on either attainment alone or activity-based metrics does not work. One rep needs her calls recorded to build a team training playlist. The other needs intensive coaching on deal conversion.
How to build a fair grading system
In my experience, to grade reps fairly, I always separate performance into three core categories: effort, impact and outcomes. The test I use for sorting any metric into these buckets is rep control.
- Effort is what a rep can change this week. This includes meetings booked and pipeline created. Because effort is fully within a rep’s control, I grade it against their peers. I curve effort within specific tenure groups, so a new hire is never compared to a veteran.
- Impact is what a rep influences through skill. This includes win rates and average deal sizes. It takes time and skill to change these. I curve impact against the entire team, as I believe a buyer doesn’t care how long a rep has been at the company, so everyone is held to the same standard.
- Outcomes are measured after the fact. This is attainment against quota. Outcomes should always be graded against the quota due so far, never against other reps. If everyone hits their quota, everyone gets an A. No rep should lose a grade because a colleague had a great quarter.
To calculate the overall grade, I weight these categories: outcomes at 3x, impact at 2x, and effort at 1x. That means results outweigh raw activity three to one.
We built this for a CRO who had to make headcount calls during a hiring freeze, and the order mattered there too: we tracked rep activity accurately first, then built the ranking from what the most effective reps were already doing.
What happens if your CRM data is not in a state to do this?
Don’t let the state of your CRM data stop you. The dirty secret of RevOps is that everything really runs on a spreadsheet. You can start grading your reps immediately in a spreadsheet to establish your methodology offline while you work on improving your data.
Watch the recording of Rep Performance: the grade your reps can’t argue with from our Deep Dive session. There I show what we at Lean Layer have built for clients who have great data, and how you can use a spreadsheet today if you are not yet at that point in your data-readiness journey. Whether it is managed in a spreadsheet or integrated directly into your CRM, clean pipeline data means that when a rep receives a grade, they cannot argue with the numbers.
Reach out if you have a question!
Kim
Frequently asked questions
Why does curving outcomes fail?
Curving outcomes means reps are graded relative to each other rather than their quota. If the entire team misses their numbers, someone still comes out on top and gets an A. Conversely, a rep who meets their quota could receive a lower grade simply because their colleagues had an exceptional quarter. Grading outcomes strictly against quota keeps the bar fair.
Why should effort be curved by tenure?
A sales rep in their first few months does not have the same pipeline or account base as a multi-year veteran. Holding them to the same activity and pipeline expectations is unrealistic. Curving effort metrics within specific tenure groups ensures reps are compared only to peers at a similar stage of their journey.
What are the safeguards in a peer-to-peer scorecard?
To prevent statistical noise, the scorecard includes four rules. First, a volume floor ensures win rates are not graded on fewer than ten closed deals. Second, a grace period leaves reps in their first three months ungraded. Third, we widen tenure groups to avoid grading a rep in a group of one. Fourth, any deal exclusions must be visible and reversible by anyone in the room.
How do you calculate the overall grade?
We assign points to the letter grades: three points for an A, two for a B, and one for a C. Each category is the average of its metrics. We then weight the categories: outcomes are multiplied by three, impact by two, and effort by one. This 3-2-1 weighting ensures that hard results carry three times the weight of raw activity.