The rep who hit quota every other month for a year
Feeds Module 20 — Performance Management · ships with The Execution Score
What we saw. A rep with real wins, consistently lumpy. Good month, bad month, good, bad. Activity KPIs looked fine. Opportunity generation looked on track. Quota hit half the time.
Why nobody intervened. You see quota hit every other month, so the rep reads as inconsistent rather than failing. You let them float.
What was actually true. The calls were poor and no value was being driven. Roughly half the pipeline was phantom — opportunities created by buyers trying to get the rep off the phone, or price-shopping a quote to use against their incumbent. So the rep needed two months of generation to fund one month of genuinely converting pipeline.
At 50% phantom pipeline the rep needs exactly two months of building to fund one month of quota — which produces a period-2 oscillation. Build, harvest, build, harvest. Modelled across twelve months:
72% annual attainment reads as a coachable near-miss, not a failure. So the rep survives a full year.
On a $95,000 monthly quota that is a $313,500 shortfall — and roughly $200,000 more in the gap between this rep and an average replacement holding a steady 90%.
The lesson
A rep who hits every other month does not have a consistency problem. They have a pipeline that is half fiction, and the alternation is the arithmetic of that fiction.
What replaced it
Weekly call scoring, and a diagnostic matrix where activity met, opportunity generation on track, call score low is the phantom-pipeline row — the exact cell this rep occupied for a year while looking merely inconsistent.
Figures are the worked model, at an assumed $95,000 monthly quota. The mechanism is what transfers — alternating months are a measurable signature, not a personality trait. Ask what fraction of the pipeline is real, and the period of the oscillation tells you.