I just picked up a great book on improving the quality and ultimately the top line performance of your sales team. Most sales organizations don’t understand that A players are critical to giving your business the proper growth potential. And finding a majority of A players on any given team is rare. Can you beat the 80/20 rule building your sales team?

Topgrading for Sales , a new book by Bradford D. Smart, Ph.D. and Greg Alexander, convinced me that you can break the prevailing law of mediocrity in your sales force. And in their brief and easy to read book that pack it with specific methods and tools that will convince you too.

Here are 5 obvious reasons you should be packing you sales team with more A players–Topgrading:

Revenue: Assure your company’s financial goals are consistently met and exceeded. Smart and Alexander make a compelling case for their Sales Benchmark Index Formula. This simple formula can quickly demonstrate how closely 5 simple measurable indexes of sales performance directly forecasts your revenue success or failure:

Activities x Conversion x Transactions x Talent x Time = Revenue

Innovation: Smart people that are aggressively attacking their market of opportunities are amazing barometers of success and change. If you are stacking your sales with A players you will have a competitive advantage with these players sense of market trends, timing, and priority.

Bench Strength: A team full of A players give you a depth of leadership talent ready to step into any gap. This bench strength will develop not only within the company, but also outside of your four walls because A players are highly connected.

Stronger Margins: Fact–A players sell with a value based approach, which means they sell at higher prices. A players are not concerned with maintaining margin because they sell a value system not a widget.

Talent Magnet: This is probably one of the biggest reasons to be Topgrading, beyond revenue. A players and the success they bring to your company combines to create a talent magnet. Everyone wants to work for successful people, in a successful environment. Talent will start coming to you.

One of the biggest, “ah-ha, someone else gets it,” moments in this books for me was this series of statements that I think company leadership and sales management should frame on their walls:

“Sales has too long been an art. It is perhaps the last bastion of aimless gut-feel decision making in the business world.”

“Sales…has escaped…scrutiny”

“…no coincidence that there is a 40 percent turnover rate in sales jobs and that 40 percent of sales reps fail to meet annual quota.”

Topgrading is about eliminating enormously expensive mis-hirers and securing top producers to fill your sales force. I highly recommend you reading Topgrading for Sales, evaluating your sales team(s), and then pursuing their strategy to stack your team with A players.