47% of My Team Made President's Club. Here's the Only Thing We Did Differently.

In 2024, 91% of sales organizations missed their quota targets. Only one in four individual sales reps hit their number (QuotaPath, 2024; SPOTIO, 2024). The standard leadership response is predictable: hire more people, raise the quota, run more training, coach harder.

None of it is working.

I want to tell you about a different result — and more importantly, why I think it happened. On one team I led at a global SaaS company, 14 of 30 sellers made President's Club in a single year. Nearly 47%. Industry average for President's Club attainment globally runs between 10% and 15%. We had more President's Club performers than any other theatre in the company.

We didn't add headcount. We didn't change the quota. We didn't run a new training program.

We ran one exercise. And I've been thinking about why it worked ever since.

The Real Problem Isn't Talent

Before we get to the exercise, it's worth naming the structural problem that most sales leaders ignore. Research from Salesforce's State of Sales (2024) and HubSpot's Sales Trends Report (2024) consistently finds that sales reps spend between 28% and 35% of their time actually selling. The rest — between 65% and 72% of the working day — goes to administrative tasks, CRM updates, internal meetings, and reporting.

That means the performance problem starts before a rep ever picks up the phone. You're not losing to poor execution on calls. You're losing to a structural tax that consumes most of your team's day before the selling even begins.

A Gartner survey of over 200 senior sales executives found that 77% of sellers report struggling to complete their assigned tasks efficiently. The same research found that sellers overwhelmed by competing demands are 45% less likely to hit quota. This isn't a people problem. It's an infrastructure problem.

A Word on Coaching — And Two Different Questions

Most conversations about sales team improvement eventually arrive at coaching. And coaching matters. But there's a distinction worth making clearly, because conflating two different questions leads to bad decisions.

Question one: where do I get the best return on my individual coaching time?

The math here is simple. Think of a hockey team. Your top performer scores 100 goals a season. Your middle performer scores 50. Your bottom performer scores 10. Now assume your coaching can generate a 10% improvement in whoever you invest in.

Best individual ROI on your coaching time: invest in your top performer. Every time. This is actually consistent with elite sports philosophy — the best coaches spend disproportionate time with the players who have the highest ceiling. If you have one hour and one rep to invest it in, that's the honest answer.

Question two: where does the biggest aggregate team gain come from?

This is a completely different question. Now you're not asking where your coaching hour goes furthest. You're asking: if a mechanism existed that lifted the whole team simultaneously, where would the math land?

The middle tier generates the largest aggregate lift — not because each individual gets a better return, but because of volume. There are more of them. On a bell curve, there always will be.

Both statements are true. They just answer different questions. The first is about the ROI of your individual time. The second is about the aggregate impact of a structural change. The problem is that most sales leaders only have tools for the first question. One-on-one coaching is inherently individual. It can't do what a structure can do.

That distinction matters, because what we built was a structure.

The Exercise: Plan to Make Plan

At the start of each fiscal year, every seller on the team — all 30 of them — built and presented their own territory plan. Not a template filled in by their manager and handed back. Their plan. Built from their own data, covering their own territory, with their own deal bands, vertical priorities, activity commitments, and the metrics they'd use to check themselves each month.

Then they presented it. To me. To their direct leader. Out loud, in front of their peers.

The plans were revisited quarterly — not by managers auditing performance, but by sellers checking their own work against their own commitments. Every quarter, the question wasn't "why didn't you hit your number?" It was "you told us this is what you'd do. How's it going?"

That's it. No new technology. No additional headcount. No revised compensation structure. A planning exercise and a stage.

Why It Works: The Science of Ownership

I didn't fully understand why this exercise worked as well as it did until I started reading the research behind it. It turns out behavioral economists and organizational psychologists have been studying this exact mechanism for over a decade.

In 2012, researchers Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely at Harvard Business School published what became known as the IKEA Effect. In a series of experiments — assembling furniture, folding origami, building Lego sets — they found something consistent and striking: people place significantly higher value on things they build themselves than on identical things built by someone else. Participants who assembled basic IKEA furniture were willing to pay 63% more for their own creation than for the same pre-assembled item. Builders valued their amateur origami nearly as highly as expert-made versions.

The mechanism isn't craftsmanship. It's psychological ownership. When you build something, it becomes yours in a way that transcends the object itself. You've invested effort. You've made decisions. The thing reflects your judgment. And because it's yours, you're committed to it.

This is exactly what happens when a seller builds their own territory plan. They're not executing someone else's strategy. They're executing their own. The preparation for the presentation isn't the precursor to the work. It is the work. The planning exercise itself is the transformation.

Research from Dr. Gail Matthews at Dominican University reinforces the commitment layer. Her study found that people who write down their goals are 33% to 42% more likely to achieve them than those who simply think about them. And when goal-setting is combined with public accountability — sharing commitments with others and reporting progress — the probability of achieving those goals climbs dramatically. The three-part combination your sellers experience when they build a plan, write it down, and present it publicly is not accidental. Each layer compounds the one before it.

The organizational psychology research is consistent. Employees with a high sense of psychological ownership are more likely to be proactive in solving problems, go beyond minimum requirements, and seek innovative ways to succeed (Journal of Management, 2025). They don't need to be pushed. They've already claimed the outcome as theirs to protect.

The Result Nobody Expected

I expected better performance. The numbers delivered. 14 of 30 sellers — nearly 47% — made President's Club. Industry-wide, that's roughly three to four times the normal attainment rate. More President's Club qualifiers than any other theatre in the company that year.

What I didn't expect was the team culture that emerged as a byproduct.

At end-of-quarter celebrations — whether in the office or at the local pub — something unusual happened. Sellers were visibly more joyful about their colleagues' success than their own. Not performatively. Genuinely. The people who'd made Club were celebrating the ones who'd come close. The ones who'd missed were already talking about what they'd do differently next quarter, not pointing at market conditions or territory inequity.

Nobody planned for this. There was no culture initiative. No team-building offsite. No values workshop. It emerged from a planning exercise.

Research on team cohesion offers an explanation. Studies consistently find that interpersonal accountability — holding yourself and your peers to shared, visible commitments — builds what psychologists call task cohesion: unity around a collective performance goal. When every person on the team goes through the same rigorous process, understands the weight of it, and watches each other present, they stop being a group of individuals with adjacent quotas. They become a team with shared stakes.

That cohesion isn't manufactured by asking people to trust each other. It's earned by putting your plan in front of the room and being accountable for it.

What This Means for You

If you're leading a sales team and your performance is flat — or declining — the instinct is to coach more, hire better, and train harder. Those aren't wrong instincts. But they answer the individual question, not the structural one.

The structural question is this: does every seller on your team currently own their own success? Not in theory. In practice. Do they have a written plan they built from their own data? Have they committed to it publicly? Are they checking themselves against it each quarter?

If the answer is no, you don't have a talent problem. You have an ownership problem. And the fix isn't hiring or training or quota adjustment.

The fix is a stage. Give your sellers the data, the format, and the room. Ask them to stand up and tell you how they're going to win.

Then watch what happens when it's their plan to protect.

About Andrew DevlinAndrew Devlin is a fractional VP of Sales operating under ScaleTech CRO, with 25+ years of technology sales leadership at companies including Cisco, Cloudflare, Splunk, TELUS, and Contentsquare. He has contributed to over $2 billion in revenue and developed more than 100 sales professionals to President's Club. He holds the Sales Xceleration Certified Advisor and President's Circle designations and teaches B2B Sales at Okanagan College. He works with $10M–$100M B2B technology companies transitioning from founder-led sales to scalable, structured revenue growth.

Ready to build the sales infrastructure your team needs to perform?

Sources

QuotaPath (2024). Sales Compensation Trends Report. QuotaPath.com
SPOTIO (2024). Sales Statistics Report. SPOTIO.com
Salesforce (2024). State of Sales, 6th Edition. Salesforce.com
HubSpot (2024). Sales Trends Report. HubSpot.com
Gartner (2023). Survey: 77% of Sellers Struggle to Complete Assigned Tasks Efficiently. Gartner.com
Norton, M.I., Mochon, D., & Ariely, D. (2012). The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(3), 453–460.
Matthews, G. (2007). The Impact of Commitment, Accountability, and Written Goals on Goal Achievement. Dominican University of California.
MDPI (2025). The Psychological Ownership and Task Performance Relationship: The Mediating Role of Intrapreneurial Behavior. Administrative Sciences, 15(4).
CSO Insights / MHI Research Institute. Sales Performance Optimization Studies. Annual research series.
Carron, A.V., Colman, M.M., Wheeler, J., & Stevens, D. (2002). Cohesion and Performance in Sport: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology.