78% of sales reps missed quota last quarter. It’s a headline stat, but also a quiet alarm. Because when nearly four out of five reps fall short, it’s not just a personnel issue. It’s a system failure.
The real question isn’t “why didn’t they close?”
It’s “why didn’t we see it coming?”
When a rep misses, the damage goes far beyond the lost deal.
You lose time on the wrong accounts, chasing the wrong signals.
You lose trust internally and with buyers.
You lose clarity because most teams don’t have the feedback loops to diagnose what broke.
In a world where go-to-market motions are more complex than ever, misses aren’t just common, they’re compounding. They delay hiring decisions. They erode team confidence. They turn strategy into slideware.
And perhaps most painfully, they waste buyer attention. You don’t get infinite shots. Every disengaged stakeholder, every ghosted email, every call that didn’t land, it adds up.
It’s easy to blame reps. But most aren’t underperforming out of apathy, they’re operating in the dark.
Reps are guessing what buyers care about because messaging doesn’t stick past the kickoff call.
They prep using stale notes and siloed intel then walk into conversations blind.
They get told to “own the number” but are rarely shown which actions actually move deals.
Meanwhile, only 5% of a manager’s time is spent coaching. Most leaders are stuck reviewing pipeline snapshots instead of shaping rep decisions in real time.
And the tools designed to help? They measure activity, not execution. CRMs are full of fields no one updates. Dashboards show stage movement but not whether the right behaviors are happening at each one. Forecasts start feeling more like rituals than reality.
Most sales strategies don’t fail because they’re wrong. They fail because they’re not applied consistently.
You launch the new pitch. You update the deck. Maybe there’s even a product marketing session. But two weeks later, no one knows if that message is showing up in the field or whether it’s landing.
It’s the invisible gap between strategy and action.
In our work with GTM teams, we’ve seen the same pattern again and again:
Leaders are confident in the playbook. But what’s missing is a system to know if the playbook is being followed and whether it’s working.
Instead of asking “what are reps doing?”
They ask, “are they doing the right things and when it matters most?”
They don’t wait for quarter-end to identify gaps. They spot execution issues weekly, sometimes daily, while there’s still time to course-correct.
They don’t measure coaching by the number of sessions. They measure it by impact: did objection handling improve? Are we gaining stakeholder alignment faster? Are we closing high-fit deals with confidence?
And they don’t treat buyer behavior as a lagging indicator. They treat it as the map. In one GTM org we worked with, simply tracking which messages led to stakeholder re-engagement helped boost re-open rates by over 30% because follow-ups were driven by what mattered to the buyer, not just the rep’s to-do list.
When a deal slips, it’s not just a forecasting headache. It’s a stall in the system.
Reps lose confidence. Leaders lose visibility. Buyers lose patience.
And unless you have a way to see what broke, and fix it while the deal’s still alive, those misses become patterns. Pipelines swell with false hope. Quarters end in fire drills. Coaching becomes reactive. The next “strategy” launch starts to feel like déjà vu.
The teams that win aren't doing more. They’re doing what works and doing it with precision.
That’s the system we’re building at Hive Perform where strategy meets execution, every week, every deal, every rep.