In the third quarter of 2023, a national business services company I'll call Meridian booked $38M in new ARR. It was the largest quarter in the company's history by a margin of nearly 2x. The board celebrated. The CEO wrote a memo. Two analysts upgraded the rating. And inside the sales organization, almost no one could tell you why it had happened.
That last sentence is the entire story. Not the $38M. Not the memo. The quiet, uncomfortable fact that the organization had just produced its best quarter ever without a working theory of why.
The next four quarters, predictably, looked nothing like Q3. The slope flattened. The forecast wobbled. Two analysts downgraded. The CEO wrote a different memo. And somewhere along the way, the org started referring to that quarter the way you'd refer to a weather event — something that happened to them, not something they did.
This is the pattern almost every sales organization runs at some point. A quarter outperforms — pulled forward by a single mega-deal, a market tailwind, a comp acceleration, a competitor stumble — and the org reads the result as proof of system. The board reads it as proof of product–market fit. The CEO reads it as proof of strategy. The sales team reads it as a license to ease up.
Then the slope flattens, and everyone is surprised.
The four blocks of the diagnostic.
When I walked into this engagement, the leadership team wanted to talk about win rates and deal velocity. I asked them to walk me through the $38M instead — specifically, the four blocks I use to diagnose any spike-versus-system question:
- Deal concentration. What percentage of the quarter was carried by the top three deals?
- Repeatability. Of the deals that closed, how many came through the company's strongest, most-named play — and how many came through one-off paths?
- Behavioral attribution. Which of those deals had the company's standard discovery and qualification moves applied? Which closed despite the absence of those moves?
- Survivability. If the top deal disappeared, would the quarter still have hit? If not, the slope is fragile in a way the dashboard isn't showing.
The answers, for this particular $38M quarter, were uncomfortable. The top three deals represented 65% of the booking. Only 10 of the closed-won deals came through the strongest play. Behavioral attribution showed that the strongest deals had been closed by exceptions, not by process. And without the top deal, the quarter wouldn't have hit the original commit.
What the illusion cost.
The $38M illusion didn't bankrupt the company. It cost something subtler and harder to measure: three quarters of operating drift. Three quarters where leadership treated symptoms as confirmation, scaled hiring against an unrepeatable result, comped against an unrepeatable result, and built a forecast philosophy around a quarter that had nothing to teach.
The diagnostic — when we finally ran it — wasn't sophisticated. It was just honest. Four blocks. Four uncomfortable answers. And one conclusion: the org had a spike, not a system, and pretending otherwise was the most expensive thing it could possibly do.
The slope that came after the diagnostic was less dramatic. No $38M quarters. No memos. Just a slope that compounded — quarter over quarter — built on plays the team could actually run, against ICPs the team could actually find, with moves the team could actually repeat.
That, in the end, is the only kind of slope worth defending.