The Scorecard Number Missing From Your Sales Hiring
You know your cash position to the dollar. You know gross margin to the decimal. You can quote your backlog, your WIP, your DSO — from memory, on a Tuesday.
Ask what percentage of your sales team are A-Players, and you’ll give me a guess.
An optimistic one.
That’s the hole in your sales hiring. Not the job boards. Not the interview questions. The measurement. You run the one function that feeds every other number in the business on instinct — and you’d fire a CFO who ran the books that way.
If that comparison doesn’t sting — if you’re at peace grading your financials with an audit and your people with a hunch — this isn’t for you. Keep guessing. Close the tab.
Still here? Then let’s put a number on the thing you’ve been eyeballing.
Stop Auditing the Money and Eyeballing the People
Here’s the belief, in your own inner voice: I know who my good people are.
You’ve watched them for years. You see the closes. You hear them work the phone on the drive between job sites. You don’t need a rubric to tell you who’s carrying the team.
Every owner believes this. And the guess is almost always high — because the grade is contaminated by loyalty, by tenure, by the big deal from 2022 that still gets told at the holiday party.
The tell is sitting in your own L10. Look at the Scorecard. Revenue. Margin. Pipeline. Quotes out. Numbers for everything the business produces — and not one line for what the business runs on: the strength of the person in each sales seat. You measure the output with precision and the input by feel.
That’s not a system. That’s a hunch with a payroll attached.
Run the two-notecard test this week. Write your grade for every sales seat on a card — thrilled, tolerable, or wrong. Have your sales manager do the same, separately. Compare. The overlap tells you whether the business has a talent standard or two private opinions. Most owners find out they’ve been running payroll on the second one.
Count What Gut-Feel Sales Hiring Costs You
Objective Management Group has assessed more than two million salespeople. Six percent are elite. Fourteen percent are good. Twenty percent are above average. The remaining sixty percent are mediocre to poor — and the distribution doesn’t change by industry. Construction, distribution, software: same curve.
So when your salespeople hiring runs on gut feel, you’re drawing blind from a deck where four cards in five are a miss. Industry-wide, that’s exactly how it plays out: about 20 percent of sales hires succeed.
Each miss costs $125,000. Salary, ramp, the deals they fumbled, the customers they touched and lost, the quarter you spent deciding. And the tolerated B-player you never replace charges you something like that number again every year he keeps the seat warm.
You wouldn’t accept a 20 percent hit rate on project bids. You built process around estimating, purchasing, and safety precisely because instinct doesn’t scale. Sales hiring is the last seat in the building where luck is still the plan.
Put the A-Player Percentage on Your Scorecard
The standard isn’t subjective, and it isn’t new. Jack Welch operationalized it at GE. Steve Jobs ran Apple on it. Verne Harnish’s Scaling Up community built a whole discipline around it. An A-Player is a salesperson in the top 10 percent of the profession for the compensation you pay — someone who consistently delivers, models your core values, and whom you would enthusiastically rehire today.
The Scaling Up community’s observation, across thousands of scaleups, is blunt: move a team past 50 percent A-Players and performance climbs; push past 80 percent and results start to compound. Their claim — and I’ve watched it hold in EOS companies — is that the percentage of A-Players on the team is the ultimate lead measure of performance.
Run that through the operating system you already own, because it fits like it was machined for it. EOS taught you that lead measures predict and trailing measures report. Revenue reports. The seats predict.
So install the number:
Four moves to make this quarter
- Score every sales seat. Three grades, no curve: A-Player, A-Potential (right values, GWC’s the seat, a coachable gap on a written plan), or wrong person / wrong seat. Grade against the standard above — not against your affection for the person.
- Put the percentage on the L10 Scorecard. One line: % A-Players on the sales team. The number will embarrass you the first week. Good. It’s now visible, owned, and IDS-able like everything else you run.
- Set a Rock to raise it. “60 percent to 75 percent by Q4” is a Rock. “Upgrade the team” is a wish with a deadline missing.
- Recruit like A-Players don’t read job postings — because they don’t. They’re employed, over quota, and not looking. Job boards deliver the available, not the exceptional. Targeted pursuit, the same five questions for every candidate, a scoring rubric, independent evaluators. If you still trust your read across a conference table, start with “you can’t read a candidate in thirty minutes” [internal link — URL needed].
Then hold the number with the same discipline you hold cash. Re-score quarterly. Same standard, no drama. This is the Right People pillar [internal link — URL needed] doing what pillars do: carrying weight silently.
Answer the Fear: “My Team Will Read This as a Verdict”
You’ll worry that grading the team lands as a no-confidence vote. That your best rep bristles. That someone bolts.
Backwards.
B-players fear measurement. A-Players are drawn to it — they’ve been carrying an unmeasured team for years, and they know it. A visible standard tells them somebody finally sees the difference. A-Players want to join a gym, not a spa. The rep who resents a clear standard just told you which grade he was expecting.
And the quieter doubt underneath — I don’t have time to sponsor a talent program — dissolves on contact. This is one Scorecard line, one quarterly scoring, and Rocks you already know how to run. You built the infrastructure years ago. You’re adding a number, not a department.
One warning: measurement without action is theater. If the same seat scores “wrong person” two quarters running and nothing happens, the team learns the standard is decoration. The number only works if “why sales coaching can’t rescue a bad sales hire” [internal link — URL needed] is a lesson you’ve already accepted.
Take the First Measurement
Picture the L10 eighteen months from now.
The Scorecard line reads 80 percent. Hiring stopped being roulette when the process replaced the hunch — done right, sales hiring success moves from 20 percent to 80. The forecast holds up when the bank asks. Sales runs on the same discipline as every other seat in the building — and it runs without you in the room.
Revenue is a trailing indicator of talent.
You’ve been managing the trailing number your whole career. Start managing the one that predicts it. Grade the seats. Post the percentage. Raise it like a Rock.
If you want your real A-Player percentage — not the optimistic guess — book a Sales Integrator Alignment Call. Forty-five minutes. We walk your sales seats against the standard, and you leave with the number, the gap, and the first move — whether we ever talk again or not. That number is the front door to the team that gets you out of the sales seat for good.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an A-Player in sales hiring?
An A-Player is a salesperson in the top 10 percent of the profession for the compensation you offer — someone who consistently delivers results, models your core values, and whom you would enthusiastically rehire today. The standard traces to Jack Welch and Steve Jobs and was operationalized for growth companies by the Scaling Up community. It is a measurable grade, not a compliment.
What percentage of salespeople are A-Players?
About 20 percent. Objective Management Group has assessed more than two million salespeople: 6 percent are elite, 14 percent good, 20 percent above average, and 60 percent mediocre to poor — the same curve in every industry. That’s why unstructured sales hiring misses four times out of five.
Why does salespeople hiring fail so often?
Because it runs on instinct instead of process. Industry-wide, about 20 percent of sales hires succeed — the interview rewards candidates who sell themselves well for thirty minutes, which is not the job. A structured selection system moves hiring success from 20 percent to 80 percent.
How much does a bad sales hire cost?
$125,000 for a standard sales seat — salary, ramp time, fumbled deals, damaged customer relationships, and the quarters lost deciding. For a higher-value enterprise seat, the figure runs to $250,000. A tolerated mediocre rep costs a comparable amount every year they stay.
How do I raise the percentage of A-Players on my sales team?
Score every sales seat against the A-Player standard, put the percentage on your L10 Scorecard as a lead measure, set a Rock to raise it, and replace job-board recruiting with targeted pursuit of salespeople who aren’t looking. Measured quarterly, the number climbs the way any owned Scorecard number does.
