Five Steps for Beating Your Team’s Sales Quota
An estimated 40-50% of sales reps don’t make quota, and that leads to a high percentage of sales teams missing quota, too. Ultimately this qualifies as a failure of sales management and only a holistic approach can lead to improving on these results.
What are some of the reasons for this?
First, managers may not be hiring the right reps.
Legendary Alabama football coach Bear Bryant used to say, “You can’t make chicken salad without chickens.” And if you don’t hire the best people you’ll end up with sub-par results, no matter how well you manage them.
It’s not always obvious from looking at a resume who the best sales people actually are. The success of some reps is due more to the brand equity and offerings of the companies that they’re selling for than their sales skills. And too many managers rely on intuition and a quick assessment based on first impressions; they may feel that the only route to sales success is the one that they themselves took.
Secondly, new reps are often not properly onboarded.
The first couple weeks of a new rep’s time at a company can set her up for success – or failure. Onboarding needs to consist of more than the four hours of filling out forms for HR.
Too many new reps are just thrown into the deep end and expected to swim. Many first year reps don’t make quota, but that isn’t necessarily because they can’t in the future. Sometimes “on the job training” is being used as a substitute for a true onboarding process.
Based on the industry that you’re in and the type of sales that you’ve hired the person to do (inside, field, transactional, consultative, etc.) you’ll need to have a training program that meets their particular needs. And even if they came over from a competitor, you’ll need to educate them on your company’s view of the industry and customer, as well as your products, services, presentations, and cases — your company’s entire sales methodology.
If reps and teams aren’t meeting quota there may be a simple reason: the quotas aren’t realistic.
Setting quota is a careful tradeoff between making it challenging yet attainable, versus too easy (on one hand) or impossible (on the other).
Leading companies don’t just impose quotas from the top down but involve the sales team in creating them. The reps know the customers better than anyone and will have the best ideas on where growth can come from, and what’s standing in the way of them closing more deals.
Reps who have been involved in creating the quota will be far more invested in reaching it, too
Earlier I mentioned that coachability is a key attribute to look for when hiring new reps. But it doesn’t help if they’re coachable but you’re not coaching them.
Weekly coaching sessions with individual reps and/or the team should include going through their accounts and opportunities at a detailed level, as well as working on improving skills through role plays and practice.
Finally, in many companies there’s a poor alignment between marketing and sales.
Companies today need to take a revenue approach that bring sales and marketing together. That begins with the writing of a written Service Level Agreement ( SLA) in which marketing commits to what it will deliver to sales, and sales commits to what it will produce and how it will respond to qualified leads from marketing. Marketing and sales need to have a common understanding of the market and the buyers, and even what a “lead” is.
Marketing can also be instrumental in creating the later-stage content that helps sales reps close deals.
Finally, you need the technology and metrics in place to facilitate cooperation between sales and marketing, and the generation of and appropriate response to new, qualified leads.
In this post I’ve only touch on some of the key points along the way to beating your team’s sales quota. I’ll be expanding on these in a webinar for SMEI on November 4, 2014. I hope that you’ll join me for that, and for the following Q&A.
Louis Gudema is the president of revenue + associates, which helps companies significantly increase revenue through measurable improvements in sales and marketing.
