Should a sales organization be built around a small tier of elite performers or a broad team with widespread quota attainment?

Becca Lindquist · May 2, 2026

The best sales culture is one where roughly 60% of reps are over 100% of quota and 80% are over 80%.

At those attainment levels people are successful, having fun and telling their friends to come work there, which lets you recruit the best talent — and culture matters a lot in sales.

Scope: offered as a rule of thumb; notes others use different thresholds, e.g. 50% over 100%

33:49 20VC: Inside Clay's Sales Playbook Scaling to $100M ARR | How to Set Sales Comp Plans | How to Read Sales Talent Linkedin Profiles | What Profiles to Hire & Fire | How to Increase Performance and Speed in Sales Teams with Becca Lindquist

Becca Lindquist · May 2, 2026

Zero-sum sales structures make reps selfish and fearful, whereas quota targets set so most of the team attains (60% over 100%, 80% over 80%) create a culture where reps help each other while still competing to beat one another

When broad attainment is achievable, people celebrate others' success rather than protecting themselves; she and Todd at Heap pushed each other to bigger deals while trading ideas

36:17 20VC: Inside Clay's Sales Playbook Scaling to $100M ARR | How to Set Sales Comp Plans | How to Read Sales Talent Linkedin Profiles | What Profiles to Hire & Fire | How to Increase Performance and Speed in Sales Teams with Becca Lindquist

Ishan Mukherjee · Apr 4, 2025

Sales teams will be dramatically smaller in the future — potentially 10-20% of current org sizes

Sales follows a power law where the top 10% of reps bring in 90% of the revenue

0:02 Top decile carries revenue so teams shrink

Ishan Mukherjee · Apr 4, 2025

AI will make the already-best sellers and leaders better and make sales an even more acute power law, so everyone else must adopt AI or risk irrelevance

Sales is an information arbitrage game and the top performers will keep compounding their edge, mirroring what Cursor and Cognition are doing on the building side

16:19 Ai intensifies the power law

Ishan Mukherjee · Apr 4, 2025

The comp philosophy where most reps hit 80-90% of quota only works if the whole company is growing into a large TAM; otherwise you need the power law model, which is getting more extreme

There are two distinct philosophies — keep the vibes good with broad attainment, or accept a bimodal distribution where the top 10% carry it

21:34 Broad attainment only works with a huge tam

Harry Stebbings · Apr 4, 2025

Concentrating capability in a top tier of sellers creates a damaging two-tiered culture when the killers and the merely average sit inside the same team

Disparity across companies is fine; disparity within one team is corrosive

22:58 Within team disparity is corrosive

Ishan Mukherjee · Apr 4, 2025

As the performance distribution becomes more bimodal, leaders must retrain the whole workforce for the changed job — and where that fails it becomes an existential decision about those people

The job and the way the work is done have fundamentally changed, so people either evolve into the modern economy or don't survive in it

23:09 Retrain the workforce or exit them