My comment went past 25,500 views because it hit a nerve:
We’ve built sales orgs on numbers that collapse the moment the top 25% leave.
And everyone in the industry knows it.
Here’s the math most teams hide:
48 reps × £600K quota = £28.8M in coverage.
CRO’s real number? ~£21M.
The buffer is baked in.
And it’s killing your team.
Because when only 25% of reps carry the number:
→ Top performers burn out carrying everyone else
→ Mid-performers stagnate with no path to win
→ New reps are set up to fail in quota models built for veterans
→ Leadership celebrates “goal attainment” while bench strength quietly erodes
I’ve watched companies hit plan with 28% attainment…
and then miss the next two quarters because the reps who made the math work walked.
Concentration risk isn’t strategy.
And Ryan Walsh breakdown on quota capacity exposes the part most companies avoid:
If you can’t build a system where 40%+ of reps win, do you actually know what makes your top 25% successful?
Or are you just hiring more people into a lottery you don’t understand?
Most teams celebrate hitting the number while the system quietly collapses underneath them.
The companies that win do one thing differently:
They extract what their top 25% do, operationalise it, and make it repeatable for the other 75%.
That’s the difference between covering a number…and building a competitive advantage.