Kenny Owens

If your reps can only close when the prospect is already ready to buy, they are not sellers. They are cashiers. "The leads are garbage." If you run a sales team, you have heard this sentence more times than you can count. Pipeline review. Quarter missed. Same room. Same conversation. Marketing presents the numbers. Reps push back. "The leads are not ready." "They are not qualified." "They didn't request an offer on a first meeting." "They booked a call but they are not serious." Marketing defends itself. Reps dig in. Nothing changes. I have watched this argument play out across more teams than I can count, and it almost always hides the same thing. Marketing did its job. It generated interest. But interest is not the same as intent. A lead that downloaded a whitepaper is interested. A lead that attended a webinar is interested. A lead that replied to outreach and took a meeting may also be just interested. None of those are ready to buy. And that gap between "interested" and "ready to buy" has a name. It is called selling. That is the rep's job. Not marketing's. Discovery. Qualification. Relationship building. Stakeholder mapping. Multiple conversations. Understanding the real problem. Building enough trust that the buyer feels safe making a decision. That is the work. And when reps skip it because the lead did not arrive gift wrapped, the lead dies and gets blamed on the source. Here is what makes this hard to talk about. Most reps were not trained for this. They came up in a world where inbound was strong, leads arrived warm, and the job was mostly about handling demand that already existed. Nobody taught them how to take initial interest and develop it into a real opportunity over multiple touchpoints. So when the leads require actual work, they do not have the muscle for it. That is not their fault. But it is still their job. Because here is the thing I see every time. The same team. The same lead source. The same CRM. One or two reps work the leads properly. They do the discovery. They build the relationship. They have the patience to go through 3 or 4 conversations before asking for anything. They convert at 2 to 3 times the rate of everyone else. Same leads. Dramatically different results. The leads were never the problem. The gap between interest and intent was always the problem. And bridging that gap is not marketing's responsibility. It is the core of what a salesperson is supposed to do. If your reps can only close when the prospect is already ready to buy, they are not selling. They are processing orders. 💫 P.S. BIG NEWS!!! We just put our new prospecting agent in your hands! If you are tired of soul-draining sales admin work, this is built for you. ✨ Grab your access, with 250 free credits from me here: https://lnkd.in/evr-gRax

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Your company promises sellers $280K OTE in the offer letter. Then assigns them a quota that only 40 percent of the team will hit. In a territory half the size of the rep in the next seat. With a comp plan they don't receive until two or three months into the fiscal year. That's not just a sales problem. That's a culture problem. If you're a #CPO or #CHRO, you already review comp plans for legal compliance and pay equity. But the things that actually shape sales culture aren't in that review. Quota setting. Territory design. The gap between what your company promises a seller they can earn and what the system actually lets them earn. These decisions get made in sales and finance planning cycles, and they have more impact on culture than almost anything in your current remit. Getting involved doesn't mean taking over the process. It means asking a few questions. What percentage of reps hit quota last year? When do reps actually receive their comp plans? Can two sellers in the same role with the same OTE have wildly different territory potential? And the big one: how much does the company overassign quota beyond the actual revenue target? Because if you're promising sellers they can earn their OTE while quietly building a plan that requires 130 percent of target to be sold before the math works, that's not a planning assumption. That's a broken promise. And your culture absorbs every bit of it. Your sellers already know when this is broken. They're not telling you. They're telling Glassdoor . They're telling RepVue . They're telling every candidate in their network. The cost: 35 percent annual sales turnover. 1.5 to 2x base salary to replace each one. Your best people leave first because they have the most options and the least tolerance for a system that feels rigged. The good news is the data to answer these questions now lives on a single platform. Comp design, territory balance, quota distribution, and attainment equity in one place, giving people leaders real visibility into the system that's actually shaping sales culture. You have a seat at every table that shapes culture. This one could use your voice. Varicent

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