“My reps are calling on the right customers.”

I’ve heard this from sales directors, commercial heads, and CEOs. I hear it often enough that I’ve apparently developed a face. A sceptical one. The kind that answers before I do.

The statement is almost never malicious. It’s a reasonable belief held by people who are paying attention. It’s just rarely verified. And when we verify it, the belief and the data don’t often agree.

What we usually find

When we overlay actual call data onto customer classification, a pattern emerges consistently: a meaningful share of calls are landing on customers who shouldn’t be receiving that frequency, while genuinely high-value customers are being under-served.

Some A-tier customers are getting less face time than C-tier customers who’ve never converted. Some customers are being visited despite no commercial relationship and no realistic prospect of one.

The gap between the sales director’s picture and the field’s reality isn’t a reflection of bad intent. It’s a reflection of how human behaviour actually works under pressure.

Why the gap exists

Reps don’t deliberately avoid good customers. They respond to incentives, both explicit and implicit.

Relationship momentum. It’s easier to visit someone you know than someone you should know. Comfortable relationships accumulate calls. New relationships require energy, and energy is finite.

Geographic convenience. The customer on the way to lunch gets visited. The customer requiring a detour doesn’t. Proximity drives frequency in ways that have nothing to do with potential.

Avoiding friction. High-value customers are often harder to access. Busy specialists. Demanding pharmacy managers. Gatekeeping receptionists. The calls that count are often the calls that cost the most.

Lack of visibility. Reps don’t always know which customers are genuinely high-value. The CRM data isn’t trusted. The segmentation isn’t clear. They make judgment calls based on intuition rather than information - and their intuition is shaped by the same biases as everyone else’s.

None of this is a character flaw. It’s entirely predictable. Which means it’s also fixable.

The recovery process

Fixing the gap isn’t about working harder. It’s about working differently.

Step 1: Baseline reality. Map six months of actual calls against customer classification. No judgment. Just facts. Where did the time go?

Step 2: Identify the gaps. Which A-tier customers are under-visited? Which C-tier customers are over-visited? Where is effort misallocated relative to potential?

Step 3: Make it visible. Share the analysis with reps directly. Not as criticism - as information. “Here’s where your time went. Here’s where your time could go.” People respond to evidence differently than they respond to instruction.

Step 4: Redesign the call plan. Build minimum call frequencies into the system rather than leaving them to discretion. A-tier customers get first claim on capacity. What remains flows to B and C. The system does the work that willpower can’t sustain.

Step 5: Track the transition. Weekly monitoring of call pattern changes. Acknowledge progress. Address backsliding before it compounds.

What one engagement showed us

For one client who was confident their reps were calling on the right customers, the data told a different story: a significant share of calls were going to the wrong customers.

After 90 days of focused transition, the shift was meaningful. Calls to genuinely high-value customers increased substantially. Revenue per call improved - better-matched customers respond better. And visits to friendly-but-unprofitable customers dropped without damaging the relationships; quarterly contact replaced monthly contact, and nothing broke.

The total call activity didn’t increase. The distribution changed. Same effort, different outcomes.

These are one engagement’s results and not a guarantee of what any specific team will see. But the direction is consistent with what the underlying logic predicts: when calls go to the right customers, the returns improve.

The uncomfortable part

Nobody enjoys hearing that their belief doesn’t match reality. Sales directors have spent careers building judgment about where reps should focus. That judgment has real value.

But judgment without data is opinion. And opinion accumulates errors over time - quietly, invisibly, in ways that don’t show up until you look.

The question isn’t whether your reps are calling on the right customers. The question is: how would you know?

If you can’t overlay actual call patterns onto customer value, you’re trusting. Trusting is fine for personal relationships. It’s a fragile foundation for commercial decisions.

The face I make

That sceptical face? It’s not doubt about the person. It’s doubt about the claim - because the claim is almost always unverified.

“My reps are calling on the right customers” is a statement that can be verified. In my experience, it’s assumed far more often than it’s checked.

The commercial leaders I respect most aren’t the ones with certainty. They’re the ones with questions. “Are my reps calling on the right customers? Let’s find out.”

That instinct - verify before you trust - is the starting point for every improvement we’ve made in this work.

The data is almost always more honest than any of us. The job is to look at it.