The goal wasn't met. The meeting ends with a quick decision: expand the team. No one can answer how many opportunities were lost due to an inadequate offer, timeline, price, or lack of a decision. Even so, the company is already preparing the new job openings.
This is a hypothetical scene, not the description of an investigated hiring process. It calls into question a response that may be legitimate but shouldn't precede a diagnosis. Hiring expands sales capacity. It doesn't guarantee that existing capacity was being well utilized.
The thesis of this report is that an operation without an understanding of its losses runs the risk of multiplying an ineffective process. The question is not whether salespeople are necessary, but what problem the hiring is intended to solve. Lack of coverage, excessive workload, and process deficiencies require different decisions.
A Benchmark Is Not a Verdict on the Team
In the H1 update of its 2024 B2B Sales Benchmarks, Ebsta reports that 75% of representatives in its database did not meet their quota in the second quarter of 2024. The report analyzes 4.7 million opportunities from 566 companies, $57.3 billion in analyzed revenue, and over 1.2 million hours of conversations. The primary source also records sales cycles that are 20% longer compared to 2023.
The database is commercial and observational, not a representative survey of Brazilian salespeople. The percentage doesn't prove that most professionals are incompetent, nor does it identify how much of the result stems from goals, the market, the product, or management. Using it to blame a team would be an interpretation that the study's design does not support.
The data calls attention to another possibility: goals and capacity need to be investigated together. If the decision-making time changes, the predicted productivity per period can change. The same number of professionals can perform more work and close fewer deals in a month without their effort and competence having dropped in the same proportion.
An Indicator That Informs or an Indicator That Threatens
A KPI is a metric chosen to track an objective. The number of calls shows activity; conversion shows the relationship between a set of opportunities and an outcome; margin shows an economic dimension. None of these indicators replaces the others.
When the goal rewards isolated activity, the team might increase contacts without deepening understanding. When it rewards closing deals without regard for economic conditions, they might offer excessive discounts. We are not assigning a rate to these behaviors here. They are possible effects of incentives that need to be observed within the operation itself.
My interpretation is that a good indicator allows for a discussion about a decision. If the meeting only asks why the number is in the red, the data tends to turn into a judgment. The team learns to explain the result afterward instead of producing information that helps them act beforehand.
The Reason for the Loss Must Survive the Meeting
Price can mean a lack of budget, an unfavorable comparison, or poorly understood value. 'No decision' can mean low priority or an unmapped internal process. A generic CRM field records the closing of the opportunity but may not preserve the investigable cause.
The investigation requires distinguishing between what the buyer says and the salesperson's interpretation. It also demands that management examine patterns over a period, avoiding the transformation of a single episode into a rule. The article on price objections presents this difference between a quick explanation and a hypothesis that needs to be verified.
Listening to negotiations requires a clear purpose and respect for the conditions of recording. Understanding the loss does not authorize an invasion of the client's privacy or the use of a conversation for the public humiliation of the professional. Sales learning and personal exposure are not equivalent.
Coverage and Bottlenecks Are Not the Same Deficiency
In retail, in a hypothetical example, a team might serve enough buyers but depend on a slow response regarding inventory. Hiring another salesperson does not automatically change availability. The relationship with stockouts and lost sales makes the operation's role in the outcome visible.
In agribusiness, a reseller might lose deals because technical assistance capacity or financing analysis is slow. It might also have regions without coverage, where hiring would make sense. These examples do not describe real companies; they show why the same drop in revenue can lead to opposing diagnoses.
The decision about people needs to consider effective demand, workload, cycle, and delivery capacity. There are operations where the team is insufficient and overloaded. Avoiding hiring based on a generic belief in efficiency would be as poorly founded as hiring reflexively.
Management Also Enters the Funnel
Approval of terms, clarity of the proposal, and access to information can depend on leadership decisions. If these points are left out of the analysis, every loss appears as a failure of the last professional who spoke with the buyer. The entire process remains protected from diagnosis.
A responsible analysis tracks comparable opportunities and verifies at which stage the difficulty arises. The comparison should not mix very different clients, channels, and offers as if the salesperson were the only variable. Metrics need coherent denominators and an explanation of the period being observed.
No cited study guarantees that reviewing KPIs will increase sales. The author's proposition is more specific: before adding capacity, the company must demonstrate which constraint it is trying to reduce. The hiring can then be accompanied by a verifiable hypothesis, instead of representing a vague hope.
If the new salespeople started tomorrow, which obstacle would cease to exist—and which would continue to await a management decision?
Sources and Methodology
Ebsta — 2024 B2B Sales Benchmarks: H1 Update. First half of 2024 update: 4.7 million opportunities from 566 companies, $57.3 billion in analyzed revenue, and over 1.2 million hours of conversations. Observational commercial database, not a probabilistic sample of Brazilian companies; associations do not prove causality.
Opening photograph: illustrative image from the Unsplash photo stock; it does not depict a company or case investigated in this article.