There's a test I use early in most engagements. If your best salesperson resigned tomorrow, how much of what they know would leave the building with them?
If the honest answer is "most of it," your revenue is people-dependent. That's survivable at $5M. It caps you somewhere before $50M, and it materially reduces what the business is worth to a buyer.
Seven signs, in rough order of how often I see them.
1. Your forecast is a feeling
Ask three people for the quarter and get three numbers. Not because anyone is careless, but because there's no shared definition of what makes a deal likely.
A forecast is only as good as the stage definitions underneath it. If your stages describe what the rep did rather than what the buyer did, the forecast is a mood.
2. Pipeline lives in spreadsheets
The CRM exists, but the real pipeline is in someone's sheet, and everyone knows which one is true. That's a signal the system is reporting rather than operating.
3. Five reps give five different answers
Ask each of them why a buyer should choose you over the alternative. If you get five genuinely different answers, you don't have a sales story — you have five improvisations.
69%
of B2B buyers notice inconsistencies between what a company's website says and what its sellers say.
Gartner, March 2026 (n=646 buyers)
Buyers check. When the story they find doesn't match the story they're told, trust breaks before the first real conversation.
4. Onboarding is shadowing
A new rep's ramp plan is "sit with Dave for two weeks." Which works, right up until Dave leaves, or until you need to hire three people at once and there's only one Dave.
Ramp time is one of the cleanest proxies for whether a system exists. Systems compress it; people-dependence stretches it.
5. Every escalation reaches the CEO
Marketing points at lead volume, sales points at lead quality, RevOps points at the data, and the tiebreak lands on your desk. Weekly.
If you are the integration layer between your own functions, you are the system. That's the most expensive possible place to run one.
6. Account growth is accidental
Existing accounts expand when a customer happens to ask, not because anyone owns and works a growth motion. Expansion is treated as good luck rather than as a plan with a name on it.
7. Nobody can find last year's thinking
The strategy deck exists somewhere. The call recording was never listened to again. The reason that big deal actually stalled lives with the rep who worked it.
Organizational memory that isn't captured isn't memory. It's a rumour with a good track record.
What this costs you
People-dependence has three prices. Growth is capped by how many exceptional individuals you can find and retain. Every departure resets progress. And an acquirer discounts what they can't see repeating without the current team.
None of it is fixed by working harder, and none of it is fixed by a tool. It's fixed by writing down how you sell, and then making sure the writing-down keeps living after the person who did it moves on.