Alpha Score

Alpha Score is a CRM-verified composite that grades a sales rep against the open market on three axes — revenue, win rate, and velocity — and returns one number on a 0-to-5 scale. It exists because the industry's default metric, quota attainment, is set inside one company by one finance team and is not comparable across employers.

The score is built the way Wall Street builds factor models. We pull verified deal records straight from Salesforce or HubSpot, normalize each rep against a peer cohort defined by role, segment, and average deal size, and combine the three z-scores into a single number with weights tuned against actual hiring outcomes.

Formula

alpha = 0.45 * z(revenue_TTM)
      + 0.35 * z(win_rate_TTM)
      + 0.20 * z(1 / cycle_length_TTM)

score_0_5 = clip(2.5 + alpha, 0, 5)

z(x) is the rep's z-score within a cohort of at least 50 peers at the same role, segment, and deal-size band. TTM is trailing twelve months. Velocity is inverted so that faster cycles produce a positive contribution.

Worked example

An enterprise AE selling six-figure cybersecurity deals closes $2.1M in trailing twelve months against a cohort median of $1.6M (z = +0.9). Her win rate is 27% against a cohort median of 22% (z = +0.7). Her cycle length is 71 days against a cohort median of 96 days (z = +0.8 after inversion).

alpha = 0.45 * 0.9 + 0.35 * 0.7 + 0.20 * 0.8 = 0.81
score = 2.5 + 0.81 = 3.3

A 3.3 puts her in roughly the top 25% of enterprise cyber AEs. Her quota attainment that same year was 88% — below the company's "100% club" cutoff — because finance set her number based on a $2.4M territory plan, not market reality. The Alpha Score sees the performance the comp plan hides.

When it's used

Reps use it inside salary negotiations because it travels between companies. Recruiters use it to filter inbound, since RepVue's 2024 data shows median quota attainment hovering near 43%, which means a "100% of quota" claim on a resume is a top-decile signal that almost no one can verify. Sales leaders use it to compare a rep on a rough territory to a rep on a fat one without rewriting comp plans.

Common misconceptions

Alpha Score does not measure effort, coachability, or culture fit. It does not predict next quarter — it grades the last twelve months. It is not a replacement for a hiring loop; it is a filter that removes the candidates whose self-reported numbers do not survive a CRM pull. And a high score on a tiny cohort (fewer than 50 peers) is suppressed, not inflated, because we would rather under-rate a niche seller than fabricate confidence.

Related WinsAbove concepts

Read the long-form mechanics on the Alpha Score product page and the validation work on the methodology page. Compare against the metric it replaces, quota attainment, and the underlying input it leans on hardest, win rate. For the framing borrowed from baseball analytics, see replacement-level rep.