This is the mechanism that turns a manageable problem into a crisis, and it is caused entirely by people doing their jobs well.
How it works
Relevance decay makes each sale slightly harder. A capable team responds by doing more: more follow-up, more outreach, a little more discounting, more time per deal. The numbers hold.
Because the numbers hold, nothing escalates. Because nothing escalates, the underlying cause is never examined. And because the compensation is distributed across many people making small extra efforts, nobody can see the total.
Why it is invisible in reporting
Almost every business measures outputs and not the effort required to produce them. Revenue, deals closed, pipeline value: all held steady. Cost per acquisition rises, and it rises slowly enough to be attributed to market conditions.
The signal that would reveal it is effort per unit of outcome, and it is one of the least commonly tracked figures in any company.
The three tells
Rising touches per close. More conversations, more follow-ups, more people involved to reach the same result.
Discounting that has become routine. Especially when it happens earlier in the conversation than it used to.
A team that describes the market as harder. Often accurate about their experience and not about the market, and worth investigating rather than accepting or dismissing.
Why it ends badly
Compensation has a ceiling. It holds until someone leaves, a budget tightens, or the effort required exceeds what the team can produce. At that point the numbers move suddenly, and the decline that arrives looks abrupt while having been in place for years.
The response is then usually aimed at the visible drop rather than at the decay underneath it, which is how a business ends up replacing a sales team that was the only thing holding the position together.
What to do instead
Track effort per outcome alongside outcome. It is the only widely available number that reveals decay while it is still cheap to correct, and it costs nothing to start recording.