You hired them. You manage them. You forecast them. And right now, at least three of them are costing you a quarter you haven't lost yet.
Good. That means you already know them. Name the pattern and you can coach it. Keep calling it "a tough quarter" and nothing changes.
She has confirmed next steps on every deal, every week, without being asked. When she says a deal closes this quarter, it closes this quarter — not next quarter, not soon. She isn't at the top because she works harder. She's at the top because she operates in reality, not hope. Every other archetype on this page is a deviation from Alice. She is the reason you know the deviation is a problem.
She stops prospecting the moment she starts closing. Not intentionally — she just can't do both at once. So her quarters alternate: a great one, a terrible one, a great one, a terrible one. The pattern is always visible in hindsight and the pipeline is always empty on the wrong day. She will call each miss an anomaly. It isn't. It's what happens when someone hunts hard, closes hard, and never does both at the same time.
He has one deal that represents 60% of his forecast — and he has had one deal like this for the last three quarters. Everything depends on it: his energy, his activity, his mood on Monday morning. When it closes, he's your best rep. When it slips, the quarter is over. He has nothing else because he stopped building anything else the moment the whale appeared. His pipeline looks full. It is one entry, written differently each week.
He doesn't lose deals. He lets them drift. His first meetings are strong, his demos land, and prospects like him — but he never sets a specific next step. No date. No time. No commitment. So nothing moves forward. His pipeline is full of opportunities last touched three weeks ago. He calls it nurturing. You call it forecasted. It is neither. It is a list of conversations that ended without a next step and never recovered.
He hit his number in September. He is finished until January. Not because he is lazy — because he genuinely cannot see the problem. He earned his commission. His Q4 pipeline is empty because he built nothing after crossing the line. His October miss is always a surprise to him and never a surprise to you — you saw it coming in August. You said nothing because he hit his number. That silence is the most expensive decision you made all year.
He hits 70–80% of quota every quarter, year after year. He is never in crisis, never a problem worth addressing — never bad enough to act on and never good enough to celebrate. His entire book is accounts he inherited or relationships built three managers ago. Zero net-new business in years. He is liked by everyone and growing nothing. The cost of Carl doesn't show up on any report. It shows up in the growth you never had.
He quotes at every conversation. Qualification is not part of his process — volume is. His pipeline is enormous and almost entirely fictional: every entry looks real until you ask one question about the prospect's actual problem. He is also consistently the most wrong in your forecast, by the largest margin. He blames the prospect every time a deal goes cold. He doesn't understand why his conversion rate is low. You can't trust a single number he gives you — and he is genuinely confused about why.
The moment a prospect pushes back on price, he discounts — not as a last resort, but as a first response. He doesn't know how to hold value under pressure, so he removes the pressure by removing the price. His close rate is good. His average deal size is 20% below everyone else's. He appears in the quarterly win report and the CFO's margin concerns in the same month, every month. And because he closes, nobody addresses it. He is your most expensive rep — and that cost never shows up in his salary.
He lowballs every forecast — not to protect himself, but to look like a hero when he beats it. His close rate looks great on paper. His conversion numbers are outstanding. And your finance team can't build a plan around a single number he gives them. He makes planning impossible by design. Sam isn't cautious. He's controlling the narrative. The damage isn't in any one quarter — it's in the years of decisions made on numbers everyone knew were wrong.
The Sales Fiction Index™ gives you the answer in one week. Not a report — a clear number and a prioritised plan you can act on before your next forecast call.
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