Latest / Sales Leadership with Fexingo: Quota Carriers, Sales Managers, and Revenue Teams / Why Your Best Sales Rep Just Ghosted the Pipeline
Transcript
- Lucas: You've got a rep on your team who closes at forty-five percent — above average across the board. Last year, she brought in two point three million in new business. This year, through the end of the first quarter, she's on pace for about six hundred thousand. Same territory. Same product. Same comp plan. What changed? Luna: Two point three to six hundred thousand — that's a seventy-four percent drop. That's not a slump. That's a structural problem. Lucas: Exactly. And it's happening inside a mid-market SaaS company I've been tracking — I can't name them, but the pattern is becoming common enough that sales ops people have a name for it now. They call these reps 'pipeline ghosts.' Luna: Pipeline ghosts. That's a great term. So they're present, they're closing, but they've stopped doing the invisible work — prospecting, qualifying, pushing deals through the early stages. Lucas: Right. They become invisible in the pipeline itself. All their activity clusters in the later stages. And the reason is almost always the same: the compensation plan accidentally taught them that early-stage activity doesn't pay. Luna: Let's unpack that. How does a comp plan accidentally teach that? Lucas: Most SaaS comp plans are heavily weighted toward closed-won revenue. You get a base salary — let's say sixty thousand — and then uncapped commission on anything above quota. But here's the thing: if your quota is one million and you're already at eight hundred thousand by mid-year, a rational rep looks at the remaining months and asks: 'What's the fastest path to crossing that line?' The answer is almost never to go find ten new small deals. The answer is to double down on the two large deals already in stage four that you know you can close. Luna: So they stop feeding the top of the funnel. And then next quarter, when those big deals are gone, they have nothing. Lucas: That's the ghost cycle. They hit quota one year by closing a couple of whales. The next year, the pipeline is empty because they never restocked. And because their comp plan rewards the finish line, not the race, they double down on the same strategy. It works for one more quarter, then it collapses. Luna: I saw a version of this at a company I worked with. A rep closed a single seven-hundred-thousand-dollar deal in December — put him over quota by twenty percent. Next year, he was gone by April. His pipeline was a desert. His manager blamed 'poor territory planning,' but really the comp plan had created the behavior. Lucas: That's exactly it. And here's the data point that woke me up to this: a sales ops leader at HubSpot — I interviewed her for a piece last year — told me that after they redesigned their rep comp to include what she calls 'activity gates,' rep-level pipeline health improved by about twenty-three percent within two quarters. Before that, they had the same ghost problem. Luna: Activity gates — walk me through what that actually looks like in practice. Lucas: It's a threshold-based bonus tied to specific early-stage actions. Not a per-activity micro-commission — nobody wants to pay reps for sending an email. But if a rep doesn't log at least six new qualified opportunities per month, they lose access to a portion of their variable comp. It's a gate, not a carrot. Luna: Interesting. So it's a penalty for not restocking, rather than a reward for doing the obvious. Lucas: Right. And the number varies by role and territory. The HubSpot ops person told me they used historical data to find the minimum number of new opportunities that, if not created, correlated with a rep missing quota two quarters out. That number was seven per month for enterprise reps, four for mid-market. They set the gate at those thresholds. Luna: A data-driven floor. I like that. But doesn't this risk gaming? Reps opening low-quality opportunities just to hit the gate number? Lucas: It can. But they paired it with a quality filter — the opportunity had to progress to a qualified meeting, which they defined as a meeting with a budget holder and a confirmed pain point. They also tracked close rate on gated opportunities versus non-gated. It held up. Luna: So the fix isn't to pay more. It's to change the structure of how the rep thinks about their time. Lucas: That's the deeper point. If these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, I'll just say — this whole show is listener-funded. No ads, no sponsors. A small group of people already chip in through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, and that's literally what keeps us going episode after episode. No pressure, just wanted to name it. Luna: Yeah, and honestly, that model lets us talk about stuff like this without spinning it toward any sponsor agenda. We get to follow the data wherever it goes. Lucas: Exactly. So back to activity gates — the HubSpot change wasn't without friction. Some of their top closers complained that it felt like 'busy work.' One rep who'd been a top performer for three years threatened to quit. But they held the line. Luna: And did he quit? Lucas: He didn't. Within two months, he'd built a pipeline that was three times deeper than any of his peers. He ended the year at one hundred and forty percent of quota — his best year ever. The activity gate forced him to do what he'd been neglecting. Luna: So the comp plan wasn't the only problem — it was also the lack of a structural forcing function. The gate provided that. Lucas: Right. And I think that's the lens sales leaders should use when they look at their own teams. If you have a rep who's consistently hitting quota but whose pipeline is thin — like, less than two times quota in weighted pipeline — that's a ghost. Don't wait for the collapse. Luna: What about the opposite? A rep who has a massive pipeline but low close rates. Is that another kind of ghost? Lucas: That's a different pattern — I'd call that a 'pipeline hoarder.' They fill the top of the funnel with low-quality leads, hit activity metrics, but never convert. The fix there is usually around qualification rigor, not compensation. But for ghosts, it's almost always comp design. Luna: So if a sales leader suspects they have ghosts, what's the first step? Lucas: Run a simple cohort analysis. Take your top twenty percent of reps by closed revenue last year. Look at their pipeline at the start of each quarter for the last eight quarters. If any of them had a quarter where their pipeline was less than one point five times their quota, flag them. Then look at their early-stage activity — demos booked, discovery calls logged. If that number dropped while their close rate held or improved, you've identified a ghost. Luna: That's actionable. And it doesn't require a new software tool. Lucas: Not at all. Just a CRM query and a spreadsheet. The hard part is the second step: redesigning the comp plan. And that's where most leaders get stuck. Luna: Because it's political. Changing comp mid-year feels risky. Lucas: Exactly. But you don't have to change the whole plan. You can add a gate as a modifier — say, ten percent of variable comp tied to a pipeline health metric. Implement it at the start of a new fiscal year, so it's clean. Communicate it as a way to protect the rep's own future earnings. Because that's actually true. Luna: I want to come back to the term 'pipeline ghost' for a second. It's evocative, but it also implies something almost sinister. Most of these reps aren't malicious — they're responding rationally to the incentives you gave them. Lucas: That's the key insight. No rep wakes up thinking, 'I'm going to destroy my pipeline.' They think, 'I'm going to hit my number.' And the comp plan tells them the most efficient way to do that. If the plan rewards closing above all else, they'll optimize for closing. The ghost isn't the problem — the system is. Luna: So the antidote is to make pipeline health part of the definition of success — not just a nice to have. Lucas: Exactly. And the data from HubSpot and others suggests that when you do, you don't just prevent ghosts. You actually improve overall team performance. Because now the top performers are also the ones who keep the machine fed. Luna: I wonder how many sales leaders are going to run that cohort analysis after this episode. Lucas: I hope some do. Even if they just look at one rep's data and have one conversation, that's a start. The ghost cycle is avoidable — you just have to see it before it's too late.