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Most sales leaders treat velocity like a speedometer. They glance at it, note the number, and either press harder on the gas or wonder why they’re stuck in traffic. But velocity, in its truest sense, has never been just about speed. Ask any physicist and they’ll tell you: velocity is speed with direction. This distinction matters more than most revenue teams realize.
The scientific method didn’t survive centuries of human inquiry by chasing what feels right. It survived by demanding evidence, embracing failure as data, and refusing to mistake correlation for causation. Sales teams, ironically, do the opposite. They celebrate wins without understanding why they won. They replicate strategies that worked once in conditions that no longer exist. They build forecasts on hope dressed up as pipeline.
What if we stopped managing revenue like gamblers and started treating it like scientists?
The Control Group You’re Ignoring
Every pharmaceutical trial has a control group. It’s not optional. It’s not a nice-to-have for companies with extra budget. It’s the foundation of knowing whether your intervention actually works or whether you’re just watching the natural course of events unfold.
Sales organizations rarely create control groups. They roll out new processes, tools, or compensation plans across the entire team and then argue about whether it worked. Some quarters are up, some are down, and everyone has a theory. The winning theory usually belongs to whoever speaks loudest in the room or has the most recent success.
The scientific approach asks a simpler question: what would have happened if we did nothing? Until you can answer that, you’re not measuring impact. You’re measuring coincidence.
This doesn’t mean randomly selecting half your team to use an inferior process. It means being thoughtful about rollouts. It means comparing territories with similar characteristics. It means resisting the urge to change everything at once because it makes separating signal from noise impossible.
Observation Without Judgment
Scientists observe before they hypothesize. They watch. They measure. They record what is, not what should be. Sales cultures often do the reverse. They know what good looks like and spend their energy trying to force reality into that shape.
The problem is that reality doesn’t cooperate. Deals take the path they take, not the path your sales methodology chart says they should take. Buyers make decisions for reasons that don’t appear in your qualification framework. Your best rep closes deals using techniques that would horrify your enablement team.
When you observe without the weight of “best practices” crushing your peripheral vision, patterns emerge that don’t fit the narrative you’ve been telling yourself. You might notice that your longest sales cycles often come from leads that looked perfect on paper. Or that your team spends the most time on opportunities that represent the worst fit. Or that the deals that close fastest share a characteristic no one thought to track.
This is where velocity actually lives. Not in the average of all your deals, but in the patterns that separate the fast from the slow. The scientist doesn’t ask “how do we make all deals faster?” The scientist asks “what makes some deals naturally fast, and can we create those conditions more often?”
The Half-Life of Sales Strategies
In chemistry, half-life measures how long it takes for a substance to lose half its effectiveness. Sales strategies have half-lives too, but most organizations pretend they don’t.
A strategy that works brilliantly today has already begun its decay. Markets shift. Competitors adapt. Buyers grow numb to approaches they’ve seen before. The curve isn’t linear, which makes it deceptive. Things work until they don’t, and the transition can be sudden.
Scientific thinking acknowledges decay as a feature of every system. Nothing lasts forever at full potency. The question isn’t whether your current approach will degrade, it’s how quickly and what you’re doing to detect it before revenue reflects it.
This requires leading indicators, not lagging ones. Conversion rates between stages matter more than closed deals because they show deterioration earlier. Response rates to outreach matter more than pipeline created because they reveal market saturation before it crushes your funnel. Time to first meeting matters more than quota attainment because it exposes friction while you can still do something about it.
Most revenue teams are flying by looking in the rearview mirror. They’re analyzing last quarter while this quarter develops problems they won’t see until it’s too late to fix them.
The Replication Crisis
Science is currently grappling with a replication crisis. Studies that seemed bulletproof can’t be reproduced. Results that changed entire fields turn out to be statistical flukes or methodology errors. It’s humbling for disciplines that pride themselves on rigor.
Sales has the same problem, but nobody talks about it. A rep crushes quota using a certain approach. The company studies what they did, builds a methodology around it, trains everyone else on it, and wonders why it doesn’t work at scale. The uncomfortable truth is that most sales success is less replicable than we want to believe.
Context matters more than process. A technique that works for one rep with their personality, their book of business, their relationships, and their timing might be useless for someone else. Worse, it might be actively harmful because it forces them to be someone they’re not.
The scientific approach doesn’t try to clone success. It tries to understand the underlying principles. What made that approach work for that person in that situation? Which elements are universal and which are unique? What can be taught and what can only be hired for?
This is uncomfortable because it means accepting that your best practices might not be best for everyone. It means acknowledging that the playbook that got you here probably won’t get you there. It means being honest about the gap between the company you wish you were and the company you actually are.
Measurement Changes the Measured
The observer effect in physics tells us that the act of measuring something changes it. Put a thermometer in water and the thermometer changes the water’s temperature, even if only slightly. Watch an electron and you affect its behavior.
Sales metrics do the same thing. Tell your team you’re measuring activity and they’ll create activity, regardless of whether it’s valuable. Measure pipeline coverage and they’ll inflate pipelines. Measure close rates and they’ll cherry-pick opportunities.
The question isn’t whether to measure. The question is whether you’re honest about how your measurements warp behavior and whether that warping moves you closer to or further from your actual goals.
Some distortion is productive. If measuring proposal-to-close time makes reps more thoughtful about when they send proposals, that’s useful. If it makes them delay sending proposals until the last possible moment to game the metric, you’ve created theater.
The scientific approach treats metrics as experiments. You measure something, you observe how behavior changes, and you evaluate whether the change improved outcomes or just improved the metric. They’re not the same thing, and confusing them is expensive.
The Null Hypothesis You’re Afraid to Test
In statistics, the null hypothesis is the default assumption that nothing special is happening. Scientists spend enormous effort trying to reject the null hypothesis, to prove that their intervention actually matters. Most fail. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. It keeps us from fooling ourselves.
Sales organizations operate with the opposite bias. They assume everything they do matters. Every new tool, every training program, every process change, every strategic initiative is presumed valuable until proven otherwise. But proving otherwise requires admitting failure, and failure isn’t celebrated in revenue organizations the way it is in laboratories.
What if you flipped the assumption? What if you started with the belief that most of what you’re doing probably doesn’t matter much, and you had to prove that it does? How would that change your priorities?
You’d probably do less. You’d probably focus more. You’d probably stop layering new programs on top of old ones before you’ve determined whether the old ones work. You’d create space for your team to actually execute instead of constantly pivoting to the next silver bullet.
The irony is that doing less often produces more, but only if you’re doing the right less. And you can’t know what matters until you’re willing to test whether things don’t.
Compound Effects and the Long Game
Scientists understand that small differences compound over time into massive divergences. A chemical reaction that’s one percent more efficient doesn’t seem like much in a single iteration. Run it a thousand times and it’s transformative.
Sales velocity works the same way, but the time horizons make it invisible. Reduce your average sales cycle by two days and nobody notices. Reduce it by two days consistently for a year and you’ve added an entire sales cycle to your calendar. Your team closes the same deals in eleven months that used to take twelve. That’s not a rounding error. That’s eight percent more revenue capacity from the same resources.
But two days is too small to celebrate. It doesn’t make a good slide at the quarterly business review. It doesn’t feel like progress when you’re in the middle of it. So companies chase bigger, flashier changes that promise dramatic improvements and usually deliver disappointment.
The scientific mindset embraces incremental improvement because it understands exponential effects. One percent better every week doesn’t feel like anything. One percent better for a year is transformation. Fifty-two percent better is the difference between a company that survives and one that dominates.
This requires patience that most revenue organizations don’t have. Boards want growth now. Investors want trajectory now. Sales leaders want results now. But velocity, real velocity, is built through consistent small improvements that take time to manifest.
Systems Thinking Instead of Hero Worship
Science is skeptical of genius narratives. Yes, individual brilliance exists, but breakthroughs almost always emerge from systems that enable discovery, not from lone actors who defy them. Progress comes from good processes applied consistently, not from waiting for lightning to strike.
Sales culture loves its heroes. The rep who came from nowhere to lead the board. The leader who turned around a struggling region. The founder who closed the impossible deal. These stories are powerful, and they’re often misleading.
They’re misleading because they ignore the system that produced the hero. They ignore the luck that placed the right person in the right situation at the right time. They ignore all the people who did the same things and failed because circumstances didn’t align.
When you worship heroes, you optimize for outliers. You try to hire more superstars. You let top performers operate by their own rules. You tolerate behavior from high achievers that you’d never accept from average ones. You build a culture where success is treated as proof of virtue and struggle is treated as proof of inadequacy.
When you think in systems, you optimize for sustainability. You ask what enables success and what prevents it. You look for obstacles that slow everyone down and opportunities that elevate everyone’s ceiling. You build an environment where good people can do their best work, not a gladiatorial arena where only the strong survive.
The question isn’t whether individual talent matters. It does. The question is whether you’re building a business that depends on finding unicorns or a business that helps normal humans perform extraordinarily.
The Scientific Revenue Organization
What would it actually look like to manage revenue like a scientist? It would start with intellectual honesty. Admitting what you don’t know. Questioning what you think you know. Being willing to discover that you’re wrong about things you’ve been certain of for years.
It would mean treating every quarter as an experiment, not a referendum. Running tests deliberately instead of accidentally. Measuring what matters instead of what’s easy. Being patient enough to wait for real data instead of making decisions based on anecdotes and instinct.
It would require building a culture where failure provides information, not just consequences. Where changing your mind based on evidence is rewarded, not punished. Where “I don’t know” is an acceptable answer that leads to investigation, not a career-limiting admission.
Most importantly, it would mean understanding that sales velocity isn’t about going faster. It’s about understanding the forces that create speed and the friction that prevents it. It’s about applying those forces more deliberately and removing that friction more systematically. It’s about direction as much as pace.
The scientists who study velocity in physics don’t try to make everything go faster. They try to understand how things move. Sales leaders should do the same. The speed will follow. The direction has to come first.
Revenue under the microscope looks different than revenue on a dashboard. It’s messier, more uncertain, more complex. But it’s also more real. And real is what pays the bills.