Blog Mid-Q1 is a critical time for B2B sales leaders — getting off to a solid Q1 sets up the whole year, and February is the time to act if your funnel carries risk.
We’ve compiled a top 5 list of critical areas to consider as a sales leader — friction points to revenue growth and hitting your targets that need a solution.
1. 70% of Your Market Opportunity Is Untouched
Check your CRM to see how frequently mid-size and smaller accounts are being worked. Ninety percent of businesses and 50% of GDP come from SMBs, yet these buyers are greatly underserved. Sales teams tend to focus on big deals that demand their attention to land a commission-filled whale, while SMBs are left untouched. After all, SMB sales aren’t easy, don’t retire as much quota, and can be difficult to reach.
The irony is that SMB buyers need to be engaged, and when they are engaged, they buy. The typical mid-sized business executive doesn’t have time to keep abreast of every change in technology or capability that could benefit them – they are execution-focused and wearing a lot of hats. What they need is someone who understands their business to proactively share product benefits and make buying easy.
The trick is to engage these buyers with scalable delivery models that align focus and ROI. Building solutions that combine technology and sales expertise focused on the SMB segment is critical and often should be a different delivery model from enterprise teams.
2. The Real Cost of Misallocated Selling Time
Sales experts weren’t hired to hunt for intent signals, update CRMs, or chase cold lists. However, that’s where much of their time goes; research shows that 32% of sales representatives spend more than an hour each day on manual data entry — time that could otherwise be spent building relationships and closing deals. It is a misallocation that has consequences. Asking sellers to be researchers, prospectors, data analysts, and closers creates operational drag that compounds over time.
When sellers spend time on process instead of prospects, the impact shows up in lower productivity, fewer meetings, and diluted revenue opportunities.
On the other hand, high-performing sales organizations separate demand generation from demand capture. They use specialized roles, intelligent automation, and data-driven targeting to keep sellers focused on high-value activities: understanding buyer contexts, navigating complex decision processes, and closing deals.
3. The 6-Month Productivity Gap
New business development reps take around six months to become fully productive, according to 2025 industry benchmarks. During that period, companies absorb salary, benefits, technology costs, and manager time, all while generating minimal return.
This ramp challenge becomes exponential when growth requires rapid team expansion. Companies find themselves in a hiring treadmill: By the time new reps reach productivity, market conditions have shifted, or the next wave of hiring begins.
Organizations with defined sales hiring and training strategies achieve higher win rates, but many HR teams are well practiced in sales recruiting, and teams lack the disciplined approach to development to accelerate speed to green. The solution lies in purpose-built hiring pipelines, structured training frameworks, and embedded enablement that compresses time-to-productivity while improving consistency.
4. When Signals Outpace Systems
Ninety-five percent of B2B buyers conduct their own research even before contacting sales. This means 95% of the time, the winning vendor was already on the buyer’s shortlist before they ever engaged with sales. Yet many sales teams still rely on prospecting data built on static segments, batch reporting, and delayed data that miss real buying moments.
Modern revenue engines integrate intent data, trigger events, and real-time signals to identify in-market buyers before they’ve narrowed vendor selection. With AI tooling, the ability to identify in market buyers, where they are engaging provides focus and context for sales teams. This isn’t about generating more leads — it’s about generating better timing. Organizations that incorporate intent data into lead qualification strategies can see up to a 4x lift in conversion rates.
5. The Economics of Customer Lifetime Value
Closing a sale is important. Keeping and expanding that customer is where growth compounds; according to research by Bain & Company, increasing customer retention by 5% can boost profits by 25-95%. However, many businesses still prioritize acquisition over retention, creating a leaky funnel where companies constantly backfill churn instead of compounding value.
Growth models that extend beyond acquisition to recognize the importance of ongoing engagement through onboarding, support, renewal, and expansion eliminate the handoff gaps that result in churn or lack of engagement. When B2B revenue comes from existing customers through renewals, cross-sell, and upsell, retention isn’t just a cost center — it’s a growth engine.
Focusing on the post-sale experience, engaging customers at logical points of their lifecycle, and building relevance is a critical sales function. Look for ways to leverage their skills throughout the lifecycle, not just to get to close.
What Successful Growth Models Have in Common
The companies navigating these challenges share several characteristics. They view growth as an integrated system rather than a collection of independent functions. They invest in specialized capabilities such as purpose-built hiring, structured enablement, and intent-driven targeting, rather than asking generalists to do everything.
They compress time-to-productivity through deliberate process design. They extend their growth models across the full customer lifecycle, recognizing that acquisition is the beginning, not the end. And they measure what matters, using outcomes rather than activities to guide resource allocation.
Perhaps most importantly, they recognize that sustainable growth requires both art and science: human expertise powered by data intelligence, technology that augments rather than replaces judgment, and operational models that scale without sacrificing quality.
In an environment where sales leaders look to AI to help reduce time spent on manual tasks, the opportunity isn’t to eliminate human selling — it’s to make human sellers more effective by removing the friction that limits their impact.
A review and plan to leverage these strategies now could be the difference in hitting 2026 targets.
Companies looking to implement these strategies are increasingly turning to integrated growth models that combine specialized talent, data intelligence, and operational scale. Learn more about iQor’s Growth as a Service (GaaS) approach.
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