I've watched brilliant Sales Heads get fired. Not because they were bad at the job — because leadership judged them on outcomes instead of understanding the decision-making that produced those outcomes. The team hit every number on the plan. The board looked at the competitor's growth chart, saw a gap, and reached for the nearest lever: the person running sales.
Imagine that happening at your company, at your level. A number that looks fine in isolation — 100% of target — sits next to a competitor compounding at 2X a year. That gap doesn't stay quiet. It festers with the leadership team until someone acts on it.
In twenty years leading sales across six companies, I've watched the instinct play out the same way almost every time. There are three default moves, and all three are reached for before anyone has actually diagnosed the gap.
- Put more pressure on the sales team. Tighter targets, harder reviews, more scrutiny on the same process that produced this quarter's numbers.
- Buy more leads. More top-of-funnel volume, on the assumption that volume was ever the constraint.
- Replace sales leadership. "Fresh blood" — a new hire inherits the same broken system and, on average, takes 6–9 months to find that out the hard way.
Every one of these can produce disastrous results if it isn't preceded by actually analysing the gap. Random decisions made against a sales team don't just fail to close the gap with a competitor — they can shrink the revenue you already have, which is the opposite of what anyone intended.
More Leads ≠ 100% More Sales
None of this means competitor growth doesn't matter — it's genuinely imperative to close that gap. But closing it starts with three specific questions, not a reflex.
Three questions before you touch your sales team
1. What does your company actually celebrate?
Some organisations run on hero salespeople — a handful of people who can close anything, and everyone else operating well below them. Others run on system-led sales, where performance is closer to evenly distributed because the process does more of the work than any one person's talent. Which one are you, honestly?
2. Is there a real gap in your pipeline?
Check conversion ratios against industry standard — and not only the headline lead-to-customer number. Stage-by-stage conversion tells a very different story than the top-line figure usually does.
3. Can your current setup actually scale?
With the resources you have today — people, tooling, process — is 2X growth even structurally possible, or is the ceiling built into the system itself?
Just these three data points are usually enough to turn a reflexive decision into a smart one. But if your competitor is genuinely pulling ahead and you want a sharper diagnostic before you touch your sales team's structure, this is the framework I actually use.
The RADAR framework
Five checks, in order, before a single revenue decision gets made.
R · A · D · A · R
Rival Intelligence
How, specifically, are competitors doing better? Not "they're growing faster" — which part of their motion is actually outperforming yours.
Acquisition Intelligence
Where are deals actually being lost? Which stage, which segment, which reason — named specifically, not assumed.
Development Intelligence
Why aren't existing customers expanding? Growth that only comes from new logos is more fragile than growth that compounds from the base you already have.
Alliances Intelligence
Which partners are actually delivering — for you, and for the competitor you're being compared to? Channel performance is rarely examined until it's too late.
Revenue Decisions
Use everything above to locate the real problem area — which is very often not sales at all.
That final "R" is where most leadership teams jump to conclusions too early. The honest answer to where the problem sits could land in any of six places:
Product
Is what you're selling actually competitive right now?
Pricing
Is the number itself the objection, or is it a proxy for something else?
Sales
Genuinely a process or coaching gap — not assumed by default.
Marketing
Is the pipeline arriving pre-qualified, or is sales doing marketing's job?
Partnerships
Is the channel a growth lever or a rounding error?
Customer Success
Is retention quietly undoing everything new sales brings in?
Your sales team may not be failing
A team that hits 100% of target is, definitionally, doing what was asked of it. If the real gap is a competitor compounding at 2X, the fix is rarely "get better salespeople." It's almost always somewhere in the five checks above — and finding out which one takes a diagnostic, not an instinct.
Lead with systems thinking before you lead with a headcount decision.