State of Sales: What’s Driving Performance Challenges Today
Insights into the skill gaps, deal execution issues, and forecasting challenges teams are experiencing across the sales process.
Sales performance is under pressure across every industry. Win rates are declining, fewer reps are hitting quota, and forecasts are harder to trust. CROs and revenue leaders are expected to explain these results to executive teams and boards, yet the information available rarely shows what’s driving the decline or gives leadership a clear path to fixing it.
Every quarter revenue teams review the same results: missed numbers, uneven execution, and deals that seem strong but don’t convert. What they can’t see is what’s driving those results. They’re asked to diagnose performance without reliable insight into how sellers run conversations, how opportunities evolve, or what shapes a buyer’s decisions.
There is no issue with the existing effort or talent. Teams work hard, but the systems around them don’t show what’s happening inside real opportunities. Activity indicators suggest progress even when nothing meaningful has changed, and leaders make decisions without seeing the point at which deal strength begins to decline.
This report outlines the patterns affecting today’s sales performance, highlights what leaders need to understand about the environment their teams are operating in, and shows how to build a sales process grounded in analytics and evidence.
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What’s Inside
The report is organized around the major forces shaping sales performance today. It breaks down the decline in key metrics, the structural issues inside revenue teams, why common fixes haven’t worked, what top-performing organizations are doing differently, and the system-level changes needed to improve results.
A Look at the Decline in Sales Performance
Breaks down the indicators showing a broad drop in performance across industries. Covers the pressure revenue teams face, the shifts in buyer expectations, and the patterns appearing inside pipelines long before results show the impact.
Where Modern Revenue Teams Are Breaking Down
Examines the execution gaps inside everyday selling. Highlights the issues in discovery, qualification, problem diagnosis, and opportunity progression that lead to inconsistent performance and late-stage surprises.
Why Leadership Efforts Haven’t Changed the Trajectory
Explores why common fixes fail. Shows how well-intentioned investments in tools, activity, training, and headcount don’t address the underlying issues. Highlights the lack of visibility that prevents leaders from understanding why deals weaken.
How Top Teams Are Creating More Predictable Results
Identifies the behaviors and structures used by organizations that are outperforming the trend. Outlines the practices that give these teams clearer insight into buyer needs, stronger opportunities, and more reliable forecasting.
What Organizations Need to Build Consistent Execution
Lays out the foundational elements required for durable improvement. Focuses on the need for a unified approach that connects skills, opportunity management, and forecasting into a single operating model.
The System Behind the Performance Drop
Reframes the decline in sales as a structural issue. Shows how fragmented processes, disconnected tools, and misaligned priorities prevent teams from creating movement inside opportunities.
A Framework to Fix It
Introduces the model designed to address these breakdowns. Explains how a problem-centric approach helps sellers uncover the right information, managers evaluate deal quality, and leaders gain visibility into the factors that shape results.
Who Should Read This Brief
Organizations whose results no longer match the effort will get value from this brief. Leaders will gain a clear view of what’s affecting deal quality, team execution, and forecasting accuracy, along with a framework to address it.
It’s especially relevant for:
- CROs and revenue leaders responsible for performance and strategy
- Sales leaders who manage teams and run pipeline or deal reviews
- Enablement teams building training and reinforcement programs
- RevOps teams evaluating process design and system alignment
- Frontline managers coaching sellers through live opportunities
- Founders and CEOs involved in selling at early-stage or high-growth companies
FAQ
What prompted the creation of this brief?
This brief came from repeated conversations with revenue leaders who were doing all the right things on paper yet still couldn’t explain why performance felt unpredictable. Their teams were working hard, but results didn’t reflect the effort. The same patterns kept appearing across industries, which led us to document what we were seeing and outline the factors shaping today’s sales environment.
Why are key revenue metrics declining across so many industries?
The decline isn’t tied to a single cause. Leaders describe issues throughout the sales process that don’t show up in dashboards or activity metrics. The brief breaks down the pressures affecting win rates, opportunity strength, and forecast reliability, and gives context for why these shifts are happening at the same time across different markets.
Will the ideas apply to my team if we already run regular training?
Yes. Many teams with strong training programs still experience uneven execution and unpredictable results. The brief helps leaders identify where performance is breaking down and how to evaluate whether current training efforts are influencing daily conversations and real opportunities.
Does the brief offer steps for improvement?
It outlines the foundation needed to improve performance and the elements leaders should focus on first. The goal is to help teams understand the forces shaping their results and provide a structure they can use to evaluate their current system and plan next steps.
Why aren’t traditional fixes like more tools, more activity, or more headcount improving results?
These approaches are common, but they don’t address the issues most leaders describe. The brief explains why these efforts have limited impact today and what leaders should examine inside their process before making additional investments.
A Sales Growth Company works with revenue teams that want a more reliable way to improve sales performance. Our approach is built on the principles of Gap Selling and focuses on helping sellers uncover the problems, impacts, and causes that influence a buyer’s decision.
We design training and enablement programs that support problem-led conversations in outreach, discovery, demos, and deal development. Our work with leaders, managers, and sellers highlights the same issues outlined in this brief: inconsistent execution, limited visibility inside opportunities, and forecasts that rely on subjective inputs rather than what buyers have shared.
The ideas in this brief come from hundreds of conversations with organizations that invested heavily in tools, training, and headcount without seeing the improvement they expected. The patterns were consistent across industries and became the basis for the Problem Centric™ OS, the operating model our team uses to help organizations build more predictable performance.
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