The Deadbolt Test: What Looks Fine on Your Sales Team From Three Feet Away

It Looks Fine From Three Feet Away

Maybe you have a door like this.

You try to throw the deadbolt and nothing happens. You have to lift the door, lean into it, or give it a hip-check because the bolt doesn’t line up with the strike plate. Too high. Too low. The door closes past the opening. The door doesn’t close far enough.

From three feet away it looks fine. Nobody walking down the hall knows you have to wrestle the thing just to lock it. Get up close and it’s a disaster. A shit show. Somebody made a mess of one or both of the hardware cavities. The one I was wrestling with looked like the hole had been cut two sizes too large and then “fixed” with toothpaste, bubble gum, and cardboard.

It looked locked.

It wasn’t.

Most sales organizations are that door.

Not because the hardware is missing. Because from the hallway — the dashboard, the team, last quarter’s revenue number — it looks like the bolt slid home. Get up close and you have to force it.

Here are ten versions of that door.

1. The 80/20 Rule Became Company Policy

When most of the revenue sits with a handful of people, or a handful of accounts, leadership treats it like a law of nature. It isn’t. It’s a warning light you decided to live with. It normalizes missed quotas, mediocrity, and a sales force that can’t replace the revenue it already has. You wouldn’t accept that distribution from your CFO. You shouldn’t accept it from sales.

2. The Book of Business Is Wearing a Mask

The residual and repeat revenue from large existing customers is doing the selling. The salespeople who inherited those accounts get credit for a skill they may not have. From three feet away, the number looks healthy. Up close, half the team couldn’t recreate that book if the customers left. The revenue is the mask. What’s underneath is this year’s capability gap.

3. Your Sales Process Looks Like a Sock Drawer

It seems fine until you open it. Stages are missing. Key milestones are AWOL. The sequence was ranked by popularity, habit, and whatever made it into the CRM, not by what actually gets a deal to third base and home. Motion gets mistaken for progress. Hope gets staged as pipeline.

4. New Hires Are Sent Down the Long and Winding Road

Onboarding is a playlist, a laptop, and a wish. They face a long ramp, most miss quota, and the turnover looks “unplanned” only because nobody planned the ramp. If it takes a year to find out someone can’t sell, you weren’t using a predictive sales candidate assessment and your development process was never installed.

5. You Bought Tools. You Did Not Build a Stack.

What you have is a pile. A black hole where the right tools should be, a few tools that were never right for this team, and licenses nobody has used the way they were supposed to be used. A real stack supports the process. While a pile of pancakes still passes for breakfast, that doesn’t mean it’s a good way to start your day.

6. Compensation Checks a Box

The plan exists. Legal liked it, Finance can administer it, so it got approved. That is not the same thing as a plan designed to change behavior and pay for effective selling. Most comp plans are static, copied forward a year, and then blamed when they fail to motivate the team. A plan that doesn’t influence the daily work is just payroll with different words.

7. Your Sales Manager Is Season-One Ted Lasso

Ted could give a speech that made you want to run through a wall. What he could not do, especially in season one, was coach the sport he was hired to coach. A lot of sales managers are stuck in that first season: analogies, stories, pep talks, and almost no tactical coaching that builds skill for the next call. Motivation without tactics is a locker-room poster. It does not move a salesperson good to great.

8. The Pipeline Has a Low-Fuel Light and Nobody Pulls Over

In the car, the low-fuel light gets you to take the next exit. In sales, the same warning appears on your CRM dashboard every day and the team keeps driving down the highway. The fast route. Not the right route. Empty pipelines do not fill themselves at the self-serve pump. They fill when somebody prospects, and most teams treat prospecting like optional cardio.

9. Your Forecasts Come From Retro Meteorologists

Before satellites and models, weather forecasting was sophisticated guesswork. It was also consistently wrong. Look up the Blizzard of ’78, when New England got hammered with three feet of “partly cloudy.” That’s what most monthly and quarterly sales forecasts still are: a confident map of a storm that was never qualified. CEOs don’t hate forecasts. They hate being told it’s going to sprinkle and then needing a shovel for their explanation to the board.

10. Getting Deals Closed Is Like Waiting Up for the High-Schooler

“Be home by 11.” Then it’s 1:30 and you’re still in the kitchen waiting. Promised close dates slip by months and quarters for the same reason teenagers miss curfew: nobody verified the plan, the ride, or whether they were actually going where they said. In sales that’s both a qualifying problem, with a surface-level sales management pipeline review. If you didn’t get thorough answers on decision process, budget, timeline, competition, and commitment, you didn’t have a close date. You had a bedtime.

How did your door do?

• 7 or more — You can blow the door open. Don’t decorate the hallway.
• 4–6 — A kick is all it takes. The bolt is theater.
• 1–3 — You’re a crowbar away from disaster. The door still looks fine from the street.
• 0 — Police-ram proof. I haven’t met many of those. If that’s you, keep pressure-testing the hinges.

Perfect sales teams don’t exist. Great ones stop pretending the door is locked.

There are a lot of ways to attack the problems on this list. The first one is not a new CRM field, a new slogan, or another kickoff meeting. The first one is to admit the bolt doesn’t line up.

After you take ownership, a sales team evaluation gives you science-based evidence of the root causes so the next decision isn’t another tube of toothpaste in the strike plate. You can request samples of a sales team evaluation by checking the appropriate box in the form below.