Your best people aren't broken. The numbers are just being clumpy.

Hi Reader

He was standing about five feet away from me, hands on hips, gazing out the window.

Using the silence to fill the air with tension. An amateur move, but I'd seen it before, so I let him have his moment.

Eventually he broke it.

"So what are we going to fucking do?"

"Nothing," I said.

"We're going to do nothing."

That didn’t go down well.

What followed was the full inventory…..revisit the strategy…review what the guys are saying on calls…readjust targets ....reforecast ....and, is the CRM even up to scratch?

And then the one that was always going to arrive last: "Are these people even good enough?"

I sat there and let the fire burn out.

Because I knew what was happening. He'd been hearing me for weeks and not listening. And what we were about to do - if I let him - was fix a ghost. Treat a symptom for a disease that wasn't there. He thought it was a serious illness. It was a mild one. And he was about to prescribe chemotherapy for a head cold.

Shawn ran a UK health tech company. Four salespeople, decent pipeline & reasonable close rate. Jake, his best rep, had crushed it for three consecutive months. Then two months in a row, he came in under target.

Not catastrophically under, but enough to make Shawn pace.

What Shawn saw was this: a rep losing form, possibly losing faith, possibly sandbagging for next quarter. A pattern that needed intervention. A problem that needed fixing by Monday.

What was actually happening: nothing. Nothing at all.

Jake was still making the same calls. Running the same demos. Closing at his normal rate. The only thing that had changed was where the deals happened to land on the calendar - and that was never in Jake's control to begin with.

Three months of strong numbers followed by two softer months. On paper it looks like a trend. In reality it is just what randomness looks like in a sales environment.

And Shawn, like almost every founder I have sat across from in this situation, had never been told that.

There is a mathematical reality called the “Poisson Distribution”. For our purposes, We’ll just call it the “Law of Clumpiness”.

It says that even your absolute best rep, doing everything exactly right, calling the same prospects, running the same demos, closing at their normal rate, still has roughly a 40% chance of having a flat-out poor month. Purely by random chance.

Sales do not trickle in like a perfectly even stream no matter how much you want them to. They clump. Three deals land in one week, then silence for three weeks, then two more close on the same Tuesday. That is not a performance problem. That is how random processes actually work in the real world.

The good months and the bad months are part of the exact same process. The hot streak Shawn loved in Q1? Same coin flip just landed the other way in Q2.

In practice here’s what this means. For a rep averaging five deals a month, there is approximately a 40% chance of coming in at four or fewer in any given month purely by statistical chance. There is a non-trivial chance of a zero month; not because anything is broken but because that is what the distribution looks like when you play it out over time.

The question is not whether that month will come, because it absolutely will. The question is what you do when it arrives.

Shawn did eventually calm down & sit down. The fire burned out. And then we had the conversation we should have had at the start.

I told him: look at the quarter, not the month. And if the quarter is solid, look at the rolling three months before you change a single thing. One bad month is not a pattern. Two bad months following three good ones is almost certainly not a pattern. It’s just ‘the clump’ going quiet.

If we freak out every time the clump goes quiet i.e. questioning every rep, revisiting every process, pulling apart every call, we’re not managing performance. We are managing luck. And not only will that make the Shawns of this world lose their mind, it will burn through every good rep they have. Good reps know when they are being managed rationally and when they are being managed emotionally. And when the latter plays out, they leave.

None of Shawn's team were broken. None of them were lazy. None of them were sandbagging.

The numbers were just being lumpy.

Same as always.

The Commercial Thread

The three-month rule: do not change a system, a process, a target, or a person based on one bad month. Look at rolling three-month averages before drawing any conclusion about performance.

One bad month is data.

Two consecutive bad months following a strong run is still probably data.

Three months of consistent underperformance against a fair target is the point at which the conversation changes.

The cost of getting this wrong is not just operational. Every time a founder intervenes on statistical noise they teach their sales team something: that performance here is judged by luck, not skill. And a team that believes that stops trying to control what they can control…because they have learned it makes no difference anyway.

Fix the ghost and you lose the person.

So ease back on the throttle & give it another cycle. The clump always comes back.

When did you last make a significant change to your sales process, your targets, or your team after a single bad month?

What did that change actually fix? and what did it cost you to find out?

And here’s one for coffee time today: does your sales team believe their performance is being measured or their luck?

Key take-away: The numbers were lumpy before you started managing them. They will be lumpy after. The only variable you control is what you do when the clump goes quiet.

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