10 Success Factors For Quotas : Part 1

improving sales quotas

Sales Quotas : what makes setting good ones so challenging?

We see 10 issues that make a difference when setting quotas. Knowing the causes and leveraging these success factors could help you set clear quotas for your organization.

1. See Beyond a Single Number. When executives design a good sales compensation plan, the team steps back and admires the final product. To the design team, it’s not a comp plan, it’s a sales compensationprogram.

But the quota, is simply a number. It carries the same level of impact as the sales compensation plan but often lacks the attention it requires. No matter how high or low the number, nobody really likes their quota. From a rep’s perspective, his boss might have just come up with that number yesterday to try and dole out the punishment from above. In truth, the work that goes behind a good quota may not be simple at all. Emphasize the importance of a good quota-setting process and don’t let its seeming simplicity minimize its significance.

2. Remember the People. Quota setting is about the people and the process as much as the numbers. If managers and reps are in the dark, or their input isn’t reflected or explained in the result, the same effect could be produced by just giving them a number. If they understand the process, the process is transparent, they have input, and they see the results of their input the resulting quota will be better received by all.

3. Involve the Right Team. Quotas involve a different set of players than sales compensation. During the sales compensation process, sales or human resources is often in the driver’s seat. With apologies to finance organizations across the world, many wild quota-setting rides begin and end with these very bright people behind the wheel. Finance, unfortunately, rarely has visibility, like the front line, on where the market opportunities are. Instead, their vision is usually set to investor requirements for growth. Finance often needs some market-sensitive guidance. Make sure the quota-setting team, including finance, is oriented toward market opportunity as well as corporate growth expectations.

Jay Klompmaker, longtime professor of business administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, likens the necessity of including both finance and front line sales reps in the quota setting process to the old anecdote of a group of blindfolded people each feeling only one part of an elephant.

“One group feels its leg and thinks it’s a tree.Another group feels only its trunk and thinks it’s a snake. But multipleperspectives are critical to understand the whole situation. With quotas, you have to include the top and the front line. You get a much better view of what’s happening if you include both groups. And, you’ll get more buy-in and active participation from that sales force when they’ve got some role in that quota setting,” he says.

4. Don’t Get Lost in the Legacy. One of the most popular quota-setting approaches is called The Way We’ve Always Done It. This familiar but flawed quota approach has a way of living on like a crazy old aunt who shows up at Thanksgiving. She may not be perfect, and nobody can understand her, but we only have to deal with her once a year, and that’s easier than changing our address. If your quota process isn’t working, be a champion of change, not a defender of the legacy.

5. Get a View from the Bottom-Up. One of the easiest ways to set quotas is to divide the big corporate number and allocate it down to the organization in some pro-rata fashion like size of territory or portion of total sales. While it’s easy, it’s also a one-way street from the top of the organization down to the field that usually results in a disconnect and reluctant quota ownership by the field. By combining a bottom-up view with the top-down expectations, you can consider granular information from the field on account opportunity and reconcile it with a bird’s eye view of how that opportunity looks across markets and overall macro forecasts or trends for market growth.

This is a 2 part series.  Click here for the second series.