A top rep converting 1 in 5 leads turns 100 leads into 20 deals. The same 100 leads split evenly between a 1-in-5 rep, a 1-in-9 rep and a 1-in-15 rep produce about 13. At $4,000 gross a deal that difference is roughly $29,000 a month, or $355,000 a year, and most stores never see it because nobody puts the two numbers side by side.
Every store knows who its best closer is. Almost none of them route leads like it. The round robin is fair, it is easy to defend at a sales meeting, and it quietly costs more than almost anything else on the floor.
The arithmetic nobody runs
Take a store with 100 leads a month of all types, three salespeople, and $4,000 in combined gross on an average deal. Say the three convert at the rates you would actually see on a real board.
| Rep | Converts | Closing rate |
|---|---|---|
| Top | 1 in 5 | 20% |
| Middle | 1 in 9 | 11% |
| Struggling | 1 in 15 | 7% |
If your top rep worked all 100 leads on their own, that is 20 deals. Nobody is suggesting they should, and we will come back to why. Hold it as a ceiling.
Now split the leads evenly, 33 each, which is what most stores actually do:
| Rep | Leads | Deals |
|---|---|---|
| Top | 33 | 6.7 |
| Middle | 33 | 3.7 |
| Struggling | 33 | 2.2 |
| Total | 100 | 12.6 |
That is not a lost opportunity in the abstract. It is the cost of accepting the performance you already have.
So give every lead to the best rep?
No, and this is where the easy version of this argument falls apart.
One person cannot work 100 leads properly. Closing rates fall as volume rises, because the follow-up that produces a 1-in-5 rate is exactly what gets dropped when the pile gets too big. Starve the other two and they leave, and now you are hiring, which costs around $10,000 a head before you count the deals nobody wrote while the seat was empty.
The 20 is a ceiling, not a plan. What it tells you is how much room there is between what your floor produces and what it could.
Where the upside actually is
Here is the part that surprises people. Run the same model again, but instead of moving leads, move a rep up one tier.
| What you change | Extra deals a month | A year, at $4,000 |
|---|---|---|
| Struggling rep reaches 1 in 9 | 1.5 | $72,000 |
| Middle rep reaches 1 in 5 | 3.0 | $144,000 |
| Both move up one tier | 4.5 | $216,000 |
The biggest single gain is the middle of your board, not the bottom and not the top. The struggling rep is the one who gets talked about, and the top rep is the one who gets the attention. The middle rep, who is doing fine, gets neither, and is sitting on the largest unclaimed number in the store.
A top rep at 1 in 5 has maybe a point or two of improvement left. A middle rep has nine points. The same hour of coaching is worth several times more at the middle of the board, and almost nobody spends it there.
Three questions worth asking this week
- Do you know your per-rep closing ratio? Not store average. Per rep, by lead source, over 90 days. If you cannot produce that in ten minutes, that is the first job.
- Who is getting your time? Most managers split it between the person in trouble and the person already winning. Check whether anyone has coached your middle in a month.
- Does lead routing reflect any of this? Pure round robin says every rep is equally likely to convert, which you already know is not true.
What to do with it
Weighting leads toward performance is worth doing, carefully, and with enough volume left for everyone else to develop and earn. But it is the smaller half of the answer. Routing moves deals between the people you already have. Coaching changes what the floor is capable of, and it compounds.
The catch is that coaching is the one job on a sales floor with no deadline on it. Leads, inventory, desking and month end all have one. Developing the middle of your board does not, so it waits, and the $355,000 stays on the table another year.