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Why Your Best Sales Rep Just Ghosted the Pipeline
Season 1
Episode 7
Published 1 month ago
Description
Lucas and Luna dig into a pattern that sales leaders are quietly talking about in mid-2026: the rise of the 'pipeline ghost' — a top-performing rep who stops prospecting, stops qualifying, and starts cherry-picking only the easiest deals. They trace the problem back to a single compensation design flaw at a real mid-market SaaS company, where a rep who closed $2.3 million in year one collapsed to $600,000 in year two. They unpack the behavioral economics of quota attainment, the hidden cost of over-indexing on closing comp, and a specific fix using 'activity gates' — a term coined by a sales ops leader at HubSpot. If your own team is seeing deal velocity slow even while close rates hold, this episode offers a concrete diagnostic.