The 2025 Market Spotlight Report: The Status Quo Trap
Ask a group of revenue leaders what’s holding back growth, and you’ll likely hear some familiar answers: macroeconomic uncertainty, budget constraints, shifting buyer behavior.
But when we surveyed over 1,400 revenue and operations leaders for the 2025 SPM Market Spotlight, a different pattern emerged.
The real obstacles to growth? It turns out that they’re mostly internal.
The Call is Coming from Inside the House
Internal? Yes. We were surprised too. But the data was very strong on this point: leaders overwhelmingly say the barriers to growth are found inside their orgs.
What kinds of problems did they name? Turns out they touch a number of different areas: misaligned teams, changing salesperson motivations, unreliable KPIs, and missed coaching opportunities.
What was even more shocking was what comes next.
Despite the fact that leaders have known about these problems for years and can even quantify their impact (often millions in lost revenue), most leaders say they’re not doing anything about them.
Why is this? Interviews suggested a strong way to understand these numbers. What leaders told us is that most of these problems — again, even though they’re quantifiable drags on the business — have for the most part become normalized. They’re background noise; just the cost of doing business.
That’s the real takeaway. When problems stop feeling like problems, they stop getting solved. That's what makes them dangerous.
The Disconnects Have Been Normalized
Over and over, leaders in our study pointed to breakdowns that have quietly become business as usual. Here are some of the biggest:
Growth in Plain Sight
We asked leaders to name the top factors holding back revenue. The #1 answer: “talent gaps.” That ranked ahead of competitive pressure, customer retention, budget cuts, and even economic conditions.
But when we asked leaders what they’re prioritizing this year, “sales effectiveness” ranked near the bottom of their lists. Below things like expanding into new markets, increasing penetration in existing markets or launching new products took priority.
We call this the Commercial Effectiveness Paradox. It’s a paradox because it outlines a clear gap between what leaders say matters and where they choose to invest.
The report goes into more detail about why this gap exists, and what the data tell us. But the short answer is that sales effectiveness often falls through the cracks because it lacks a clear owner. To boards and investors, internal optimization may be viewed as incremental, not transformative. And because it doesn’t come with flashy metrics or a launch plan, it rarely gets prioritized.
This matters because a team can have the greatest strategy, but if the talent (sales and otherwise) isn’t able to execute, strategies stall. Growth slows not because the strategy is wrong, but because teams aren’t set up most effectively to deliver on it.
Alignment Isn’t Just Broken. It’s Untapped
Another breakdown that’s come to be seen as part of the cost of doing business: internal alignment. 92% of leaders estimate its impact to be as high as 15% of total revenue. For a $1B organization, that could be up to $150 million in lost revenue.
But only 21% of leaders say they’re actively addressing alignment issues.
So, what’s going on?
In interviews, leaders offered a few explanations. As with the case above, external strategies are often easier to define and are more visible to stakeholders. Internal effectiveness work is slower and crosses more teams. More seriously, alignment issues tend to get ignored because misalignment rarely shows up all at once. Instead, it builds quietly, between comp plans and sales motions, between KPIs and the behaviors they’re meant to drive. And once those problems have been around for years, they get accepted as normal.
Incentives Shape Behavior, But Are They Aimed at the Right Outcomes?
A similar pattern shows up in incentive design.
82% of sellers say they’re more motivated by long-term impact than short-term bookings. But only 31% say their current plans reflect that.
When incentive structures reward a narrow slice of impact, sellers shift their attention to what pays. That shift affects how they spend their time, what they prioritize, and how they show up for customers.
Compensation plans send a message. If they reward speed over strategy or volume over value, leaders should not be surprised when behavior follows. The opportunity is not to pay more but to pay smarter, aligning incentives with outcomes that grow the business, not just the pipeline.
What’s at Stake
Individually, each of these data points might seem like a minor inefficiency. But collectively, they point to something bigger: systems and structures that haven’t kept up with the way value gets created today. The issues aren’t lack of effort; they’re disconnects baked into the system.
The cost isn’t hypothetical. As we noted above, most leaders can reasonably quantify what these problems are losing them.
These Problems Are Fixable
The gaps we’ve highlighted, misalignment, outdated incentive models, underdeveloped execution, don’t have to be permanent. They are fixable. But fixing them requires attending to issues that aren’t always addressed.
In fact, information from high-performing teams validated this. For them, the biggest wins came not from adding more people or chasing more deals, but from getting more out of the systems and teams that are already in place.
The good news? So few teams are fixing these things, that even by making small improvements, you can put yourself far ahead of most of your competitors.
What the Market Spotlight Delivers
The Status Quo Trap takes a hard look at the operational limits most sales orgs have quietly learned to live with, and breaks them open.
The goal is to give you the insights that let you figure out how to identify the largest drags on revenue, and then the playbooks for fixing those issues.
Download the report to get so much more data and information about what leaders are experiencing, and what the best ones are doing about it.
