By Richard Eib, Jersey Hired
If you were given the opportunity to build a sales team from scratch, the obvious strategy would seem to be hiring as many high achievers as possible. Find the people who consistently exceed quota, who are relentlessly competitive, who want to earn more than everyone else and who aren't satisfied unless their name is sitting at the top of the sales leaderboard. Put enough of those people in one room and, theoretically at least, you should have an exceptional sales organization.
I'm not convinced it's quite that simple. In fact, 30 years of recruitment experience tells me it's not that simple.
There is no question that high achievers are valuable. Every sales organization needs people who push boundaries, chase the accounts others consider impossible and force the business to reconsider what good performance actually looks like. But after years of working around sales, recruitment and businesses of different sizes, I've come to believe that one of the biggest mistakes a company can make is assuming that the ideal sales team is simply a collection of its highest-performing individuals.
A great sales team needs high achievers. It just doesn't necessarily need everyone to be one.
The Difference Between Individual Performance and Team Performance
Sales is one of the easiest areas of a business in which to measure individual performance. Revenue is revenue, and there is usually a number attached to each salesperson. We have quotas, conversion rates, pipeline values, average deal sizes and rankings. At the end of the month, quarter or year, it is relatively easy to determine who sold the most.
The problem arises when we start treating that number as a complete measurement of someone's value to the organization.
Consider two salespeople. The first regularly achieves 150% of quota, earns substantial commissions and finishes near the top of the leaderboard. The second consistently delivers somewhere around 95% to 105%. They aren't spectacular, but they aren't unreliable either. Their pipeline is well managed, their customers are happy, they work well with colleagues and the company can reasonably predict what they're going to produce each month.
Which one is more valuable?
Most businesses would immediately choose the first salesperson, and in pure revenue terms they may be right. But the calculation becomes more complicated if that top performer demands the best territory, expects preferential treatment, refuses to share information with colleagues and leaves eighteen months later when a competitor offers a better compensation package. Meanwhile, the supposedly less impressive salesperson might remain with the company for ten years, producing dependable revenue year after year.
This isn't an argument against hiring exceptional salespeople. It's an argument for looking at performance over a much wider horizon.
What High Achievers Bring to a Sales Team
There are very good reasons companies fight to recruit top salespeople. High achievers can transform the economics of a sales organization. They often have the confidence to approach larger prospects, the persistence to keep pursuing difficult opportunities and the competitive instinct required to turn a "no" into a "not yet." The very best can open doors that others cannot and create significant amounts of revenue from opportunities that might otherwise have been missed.
They can also raise standards across the team. If everyone believes a territory is capable of generating $1 million and one salesperson suddenly produces $2 million, assumptions begin to change. Other salespeople start asking what they did differently, which accounts they targeted, how they structured their prospecting and what they said during the sales process. Managed properly, one exceptional salesperson can therefore improve far more than their own revenue number.
There is another benefit that is sometimes underestimated: energy. Strong salespeople tend to create momentum. They want the next deal, the next account and the next challenge. That attitude can be infectious, particularly in organizations where sales performance has become comfortable or stagnant.
Any company deliberately building a team without high achievers would therefore be making a mistake. The question isn't whether you need them. The question is how many you need and what else you need around them.
The Risks of a Team Full of Superstars
Imagine managing ten salespeople who all expect to be number one.
Initially, that sounds like a fantastic problem to have. In reality, it can become extraordinarily difficult. High achievers often understand their own market value and expect their employer to recognize it. They may want the strongest territories, the largest accounts, the best inbound leads and greater autonomy. Again, none of those expectations necessarily make someone a difficult employee. The confidence and ambition behind them may be precisely what makes that person an outstanding salesperson.
The problem is what happens when everyone on the team has the same expectations.
Territories still have to be divided. Leads still have to be allocated. Existing accounts still need owners. Somebody will inevitably believe another salesperson has received a better opportunity, and when compensation is directly connected to those opportunities, disagreements can quickly become personal.
Competition is healthy in sales, but there is a point at which competition stops improving performance and starts damaging collaboration. Salespeople begin protecting information rather than sharing it. They become reluctant to help colleagues because a colleague is also a competitor. Customer ownership becomes territorial and internal politics can begin consuming energy that should be directed toward winning business.
A company can end up with an impressive collection of individual performers without actually having much of a team.
The Value of the Consistent Performer
The salesperson who quietly achieves quota month after month rarely receives the same attention as the person delivering 150%, but these employees can be enormously valuable.
Consistency creates predictability, and predictable revenue matters. Businesses have payroll, budgets, investment decisions and growth plans that depend on understanding what revenue is likely to arrive. A sales organization in which results swing dramatically depending on whether two superstar employees have a good or bad quarter can be much harder to manage than one with a broader base of reliable performers.
Consistent salespeople can also provide something that is increasingly valuable in competitive employment markets: stability. Not everybody wants to become a vice president. Not everybody wants to manage a team. Not everybody wants their entire professional life to revolve around earning as much money as humanly possible.
Some people genuinely want to be good at their job, earn a good living, have strong relationships with their customers and go home at the end of the day.
Employers sometimes mistake that for a lack of ambition. I think that's a mistake.
Ambition is personal. One salesperson might want to earn $250,000 a year and become a sales director before they're 35. Another might want to consistently achieve quota, earn $100,000 and have dinner with their family every night. If both people are delivering what the organization requires from them, I'm not sure why one definition of success should automatically be considered more legitimate than the other.
In fact, the second employee may ultimately provide the company with considerably more long-term value.
Today's Average Performer Could Be Tomorrow's Superstar
Another danger of obsessing over high achievers is that companies can become reluctant to hire people who aren't already there.
This is particularly relevant when recruiting salespeople. Employers frequently want candidates who have already sold the same product, to the same customers, in the same market and at roughly the same deal size. They then want evidence that those candidates were consistently at the top of their previous sales organization.
Understandably, everybody wants the finished product.
But businesses also need to develop talent.
The salesperson currently producing 70% of quota may not be a failed hire. They may be six months away from understanding the product, developing their network and becoming one of the strongest people on the team. Someone coming from a different industry may initially lack product knowledge but possess exceptional communication skills, resilience and commercial instincts.
If companies only recruit proven stars, they can miss people with enormous potential.
There is also a financial consideration. Proven high achievers tend to know they're proven high achievers, and they expect to be paid accordingly. Developing your own top performers can create a much healthier talent pipeline than repeatedly attempting to recruit somebody else's.
Performance Isn't Always Visible on the Leaderboard
There are also people whose contribution to a sales organization isn't fully reflected in their individual sales number.
Almost every good sales team has them. They're the experienced salesperson who helps a new colleague prepare for an important meeting. They're the person who actually keeps the CRM up to date. They share useful market intelligence rather than keeping it to themselves, collaborate with marketing, introduce colleagues to contacts and help solve customer problems even when there isn't an immediate commission attached.
They may never finish first on the leaderboard.
Remove them, however, and everybody notices.
This is one of the reasons sales leaders should be careful about creating cultures in which revenue is the only contribution that receives recognition. Revenue obviously matters, the purpose of a sales organization is ultimately to generate business, but the environment in which that revenue is produced matters as well.
The best high achievers understand this. They don't simply sell more themselves; they make the people around them better.
There Are Risks to Accepting Different Levels of Achievement
Of course, there is an obvious counterargument to all of this. A philosophy of building a balanced team can easily become an excuse for tolerating mediocrity.
There is an important distinction between a consistent performer and an underperformer.
Someone reliably achieving close to quota, managing their pipeline, prospecting effectively and contributing positively to the organization may be extremely valuable. Someone repeatedly missing targets, failing to prospect, neglecting opportunities and showing little interest in improving is something entirely different.
Businesses still need standards, accountability and consequences for persistent poor performance.
There is also a risk that a team containing too many comfortable performers becomes exactly that: comfortable. Without people pushing expectations higher, organizations can gradually redefine average performance as good performance. That's why high achievers remain so important. They provide the tension that prevents complacency.
Compensation needs to reflect that difference too. Saying that different types of performers have value doesn't mean everyone should receive the same rewards. If someone generates substantially more revenue, they should generally benefit financially from doing so. A compensation plan that doesn't meaningfully reward exceptional performance risks encouraging the very people you want pushing boundaries to stop doing it, or to leave.
The goal isn't equality of performance. It's balance.
New Jersey Employers Should Look Beyond the Résumé Numbers
There is an important lesson here for New Jersey employers hiring sales professionals.
Sales recruitment tends to be heavily focused on numbers, and understandably so. Hiring managers want to know what percentage of quota a candidate achieved, where they ranked on their previous team, the size of their largest deal and how much revenue they generated.
Those questions are useful, but they don't tell the whole story.
Sales performance doesn't happen in a vacuum. Territory matters. Brand recognition matters. Pricing matters. Lead generation matters. Product quality matters. Management matters. The maturity of the sales organization matters.
A salesperson producing 140% of quota while working for a dominant market leader with thousands of inbound leads isn't automatically more talented than somebody achieving 95% while cold prospecting for an unknown company in a difficult market.
Context matters enormously.
That's why employers should look beyond the headline number and ask what kind of salesperson their organization actually needs. Does the existing team need another aggressive new-business hunter, or does it need someone who can develop existing accounts? Does it need another superstar, or someone dependable who can create stability? Does it need an experienced salesperson, or could a developing candidate with the right attributes become considerably more valuable over time?
Hiring the person with the most impressive numbers is easy to understand. Hiring the person who makes the overall sales organization stronger requires considerably more thought.
Build a High-Achieving Team, Not Just a Team of High Achievers
There is no universal formula for the perfect sales organization. A startup entering a new market may need a disproportionate number of aggressive, entrepreneurial salespeople who are comfortable with uncertainty and capable of creating opportunities from nothing. A mature company with a substantial existing customer base may place greater value on consistency, relationship management, account development and retention.
What matters is that the team is built deliberately.
A strong sales organization might contain the superstar chasing 200% of quota alongside the dependable salesperson who has achieved 100% for the last seven years. It might include an emerging salesperson currently sitting at 75% who will become next year's breakout performer and an experienced colleague whose personal numbers don't tell you how much they contribute to everybody else's success.
The danger is assuming that one of those people is inherently more valuable simply because their number is larger today.
Businesses don't succeed for a quarter. The goal is to build something capable of performing year after year, through changing markets, employee turnover, economic downturns and competitive pressure. That requires exceptional performers, but it also requires consistency, institutional knowledge, collaboration, development and stability.
So, yes, hire high achievers. Reward them. Challenge them. Give them opportunities to do extraordinary things.
Just don't assume you need an entire sales floor full of them.
Because ultimately, the objective shouldn't be to build a sales team made entirely of high achievers.
It should be to build a sales team that achieves highly.
And those are not necessarily the same thing.