Why Most $10M-$100M Companies Don't Have a Sales Foundation — And What It's Costing Them
The Uncomfortable Truth About Your Sales Operation
Here's a statistic that should stop every CEO in their tracks: only 1% of small and mid-size businesses have a solid sales foundation. Not 10%. Not 25%. One percent.
That finding comes from Sales Xceleration's 2024 State of Sales report, which surveyed hundreds of companies across industries. The same study found that nearly 54% of SMBs lack most of the essential components required for sales success.
If you're running a company between $10M and $100M in revenue, there's a very good chance you fall into that 99%. And it's probably costing you more than you realize.
What Does "Sales Foundation" Actually Mean?
When I talk about sales foundation, I'm not talking about having salespeople. You have those. I'm talking about the infrastructure that makes sales performance predictable, scalable, and sustainable.
A solid sales foundation includes:
A defined sales process that your team actually follows
CRM discipline with clean data and consistent usage
Pipeline management with clear stages and qualification criteria
Forecasting systems that produce numbers you can trust
Performance metrics tied to corporate objectives
Coaching frameworks that develop your people systematically
Most mid-market companies have bits and pieces. Maybe a CRM that's half-used. Perhaps a sales process that exists in someone's head but isn't documented. A forecast that's more wishful thinking than data-driven projection.
That's not a foundation. That's a collection of spare parts.
The Data Is Stark
The research paints a troubling picture of how mid-market companies actually operate their sales functions.
CRM adoption is shockingly low. According to Sales Xceleration's research, 53% of SMBs don't use a CRM system at all. Compare that to large enterprises, where 91% of companies with 11 or more employees use CRM systems (CRM Magazine). The gap isn't about technology access — it's about operational discipline.
Even when companies have tools, they don't use them well. Multiple studies show that a majority of companies fail to fully utilize their CRM — with some research indicating that over 40% of CRM features remain unused. The rest treat it as an expensive contact database rather than a revenue management system.
Goals aren't aligned. Perhaps most alarming: 94% of SMBs fail to align individual sales goals with corporate objectives. Your salespeople may be hitting their numbers while your company misses its targets. That's not a people problem — it's a systems problem.
Staffing and development are an afterthought. The same research found that 96% of SMBs face challenges in areas such as staffing, training, and role definition. Companies hire salespeople but don't develop them. They promote top performers into management roles without preparing them for leadership.
Forecasting is unreliable. Fewer than 20% of B2B sales organizations consistently forecast within 5% of actual results (Gartner). According to Forrester, only 28% of sales leaders say they are confident in their pipeline accuracy. When you can't predict revenue, you can't plan anything else.
Quota attainment is declining. QuotaPath's 2024 Compensation Trends Report found that 91% of companies failed to achieve 80% or more of their quota targets. RepVue data shows that only 39% of mid-market reps hit quota in early 2024 — a steady decline from previous years. Salesforce's 2024 State of Sales report is even more stark: 67% of sales reps don't expect to meet quota this year, and 84% missed it last year.
Process discipline is missing. According to research from The Sales Collective, 86% of companies do not have a documented, repeatable sales process. Without a defined process, every deal becomes an improvisation rather than an execution. In an HBR study of 800 sales professionals, only 37% were found to be consistently effective across different selling situations — a number that drops further in companies without structured processes.
Reps aren't selling. With all the administrative burden, pipeline management chaos, and lack of systems, salespeople aren't doing what you hired them to do. Salesforce research shows sales reps spend only 28-30% of their week actually selling. The remaining 70% is consumed by data entry, internal meetings, and searching for information they should have at their fingertips.
What This Actually Costs You
The absence of sales infrastructure doesn't show up as a line item on your P&L. It manifests in subtler, more insidious ways.
Unpredictable revenue. Without pipeline discipline and forecasting rigor, you're always guessing. Good quarters feel lucky. Bad quarters feel like surprises. You can't plan capacity, inventory, or hiring with confidence because you don't know what's coming. CSO Insights research shows that nearly 60% of forecasted deals in B2B sales slip to the next quarter — a symptom of weak process and optimistic projections.
Dependency on heroes. When systems don't exist, individual performers become irreplaceable. Your top rep holds knowledge that walks out the door if they leave. Your founder still closes the biggest deals because no one else knows how. That's not a sales team — it's a collection of individuals.
Wasted talent. Good salespeople underperform in bad systems. They spend time on administrative work that should be automated. They pursue deals that should have been disqualified. They reinvent the wheel on every opportunity because there's no playbook. According to HubSpot's 2024 Sales Trends Report, sales reps spend only about two hours per day on active selling — the rest is consumed by admin, data entry, and searching for information.
Inability to scale. This is the killer. You want to grow from $20M to $50M, but you can't just triple your headcount and expect revenue to follow. Without infrastructure, more people means more chaos, not more sales.
The companies that successfully scale their sales operations share one thing in common: they built the systems before they needed them.
Why Mid-Market Companies Get Stuck
If sales infrastructure is so critical, why do most mid-market companies operate without it?
What got you here won't get you there. The founder-led sales approach that worked at $5M becomes a bottleneck at $20M. The informal processes that felt agile when you had three salespeople feel chaotic when you have twelve. Growth exposes infrastructure gaps that were always there.
Sales leadership is expensive and risky. A full-time VP of Sales costs $200-300K+ and takes 6 months to ramp. Many CEOs have been burned by bad hires — leaders who talked a good game but couldn't execute. So they delay the hire, and the infrastructure never gets built.
Urgency crowds out importance. When you're fighting fires daily, building systems feels like a luxury. There's always a deal to close, a customer to save, a quarter to make. The strategic work keeps getting pushed to "next quarter" — and next quarter never comes.
You don't know what you don't know. If you've never seen world-class sales infrastructure, you don't know what's missing. You assume your challenges are unique, or that your industry is different, or that your team just needs to work harder.
What Good Looks Like
I've spent 25 years building sales operations at companies like Cisco, Splunk, and Cloudflare — organizations that treat sales infrastructure as a competitive advantage. Here's what separates them from the 99%.
Process over personality. Top-performing sales organizations don't depend on superhuman effort from individuals. They have documented processes for prospecting, qualification, discovery, proposal, and closing. New hires ramp faster because they're learning a system, not figuring it out on their own. According to Forrester, companies with structured opportunity management processes achieve 43% higher win rates than their competitors.
Data-driven decisions. They know their conversion rates at every pipeline stage. They know average deal size, sales cycle length, and win rate by segment. They don't argue about forecasts — they look at the data. McKinsey research confirms that companies with expanded, data-driven commercial operations significantly outperform those that maintain simplified sales functions.
Systematic development. They don't just hire good people and hope. They have coaching rhythms, skill assessments, and development plans. They build leaders internally because they've invested in their people. Research shows that 84% of sales reps achieve their quotas when their employer incorporates a best-in-class sales enablement strategy (G2). Yet according to Harvard Business Review, in a given year, over a third of firms do not train salespeople at all.
Accountability without drama. When expectations are clear and metrics are transparent, accountability becomes straightforward. People know what success looks like and whether they're achieving it. Difficult conversations become easier because they're grounded in facts.
The Path Forward
If you recognize your company in these statistics, you're not alone. But recognition without action is just awareness.
Building sales infrastructure doesn't require years of effort or massive investment. It requires clarity about what matters, discipline in execution, and often, experienced guidance to avoid common mistakes.
Start by asking honest questions:
Do we have a documented sales process that everyone follows?
Can we forecast next quarter's revenue within 10%?
Do our individual sales goals actually ladder up to corporate objectives?
Are we developing our people, or just managing their numbers?
Could a new hire ramp to productivity without shadowing our best rep for months?
If you answered "no" to more than one of those questions, you have infrastructure work to do.
The good news: this is solvable. Companies fix these problems every day. The ones that move fastest are the ones that recognize the cost of inaction — and decide that unpredictable, unscalable sales is no longer acceptable.
Andrew Devlin is a Fractional VP of Sales who helps CEOs of $10M-$100M companies build predictable revenue through sales infrastructure and leadership. He has generated over $2 billion in revenue across his career and developed more than 100 sales professionals to President's Club recognition.
Ready to assess your sales foundation?
Sources
Sales Xceleration, 2024 State of Sales Report
Salesforce, State of Sales, 6th Edition (2024)
QuotaPath, 2024 Compensation Trends Report
RepVue, Quota Attainment Data (2024)
Gartner, Sales Forecasting Research
Forrester, Pipeline Accuracy and Opportunity Management Research
CSO Insights, B2B Sales Performance Research
The Sales Collective, Sales Team Quotas Statistics (2025)
McKinsey & Company, Future of B2B Sales Research
G2, Sales Enablement Statistics (2025)
Harvard Business Review, "Do You Really Know Who Your Best Salespeople Are?"
Harvard Business Review, "Effective Sales Training: What Are the Foundational Elements?"
HubSpot, 2024 Sales Trends Report