How to Help You Sales Team Meet Their Sales Quota Every Single Time

It’s that time of the year when numbers become extra important. You begin to search for good news on your leaderboard.

While your sales team has sold enough units to register a solid financial performance, most of your reps are faltering at meeting one goal: their sales quotas.

You wonder if you should spare your team's managers and Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) this quarter. Or should you come down strong because the same story has been repeated for a few quarters?

If your sales organization has consistently failed to achieve sales quotas, then today’s article has you covered. You’ll learn the importance of setting challenging (but attainable) sales quotas, their types, methods of setting them, and strategies you can use to ensure they are met. Let’s begin by looking at the basics of sales quotas.

Let’s begin with defining sales quotas, establishing why you need to care about them, and identifying top objectives for setting them.

What is a Sales Quota?

Why are Sales Quotas Important?

Sales quotas not only help in assessing the health of your sales team, but they are also important because:

• You can become more profitable: Sales quotas facilitate data-driven decision-making that, on average, can make your company five percent more productive and six percent better than your competitors.
• Motivate your employees: If the sales quotas you set for your sales reps are challenging yet attainable, it will motivate them to perform at their best. Setting good stretch goals can create a lot of momentum and energy in your organization.

Three Main Objectives of Sales Quota Goal Setting

Here are the three main objectives for setting sales quotas for your reps and managers.

1. Evaluate the Performance of Your Sales Team

In their sales performance report, CSO Insights found that sales organizations were hitting their revenue goals (from 88.9 percent to 93.9 percent in the last year). However, it wasn’t because of their sales performance.

The quota attainment numbers hovered around 54.3 percent (slightly increased from 53 percent last year). Seleste Lunsford, the Chief Research Officer of CSO Insights, says: “...most organizations reported that they were making their overall numbers because the economy was good.”

However, sales metrics like conversion rates, quota attainment, and win rates were faltering. In a healthy economy, your revenue goals might be met even without an annual improvement in your sales team's performance. Sales quotas let you dissect how your reps are genuinely performing.

2. Improving Sales Productivity

Your sales reps aren’t machines that can dial numbers for 12 hours every day and function on little sleep. If you identify poor sales performance, you must re-evaluate your sales process and rethink your sales quota numbers, which is crucial for effective sales performance management.

Appropriate compensation for beating sales quota will incentivize your reps to work at the peak of their energies and hit their numbers. It’s important to remain realistic, so your sales reps and managers don’t get burnt out. Practice radical candor and self-care!

3. Increasing Your Sales

You can set benchmarks by setting quotas and spotting the top-performing team members who meet them. You can also identify the working sales techniques and try to replicate them across your sales organization.

Close CRM offers real-time leaderboards based on any metric. This allows you to evaluate the individual performance of your sales reps and how the entire team is faring.

Instead of looking at the overall numbers, sales quotas allow you to identify the bottlenecks, transform your sales organization, and increase your sales.

Six Types of Sales Quotas to Establish for Your Sales Team

Now that you’ve had the skinny on sales quotas let’s look at their five types. Remember that every sales organization has varied issues, so the quota that will work for you will be based on what you need to improve in your team.

Ready to conquer the sales world? Explore comprehensive sales manager training guidance in my article.

1. Revenue/Profit Quota

One of the most common types of quotas is based on the revenue the sales team is expected to generate in a specified time frame. Your reps can reverse engineer the number of product units or subscriptions they need to sell to earn these revenue numbers.

If a company sells products or services with different profit margins, then this quota could also be based on the gross revenue generated from the performance of a sales organization. This is called profit quota. And it makes both the top-line numbers and the associated cost of selling as important. However, it incentivizes your sales staff to sell items with higher profit margins.

2. Activity Quota

If you want to ensure that your reps are well supported for closing business by other team members that aren’t directly involved in selling, then you can use activity quotas. It might make more sense for companies with long sales cycles.

As evident by its name, it incentivizes sales reps to perform sales activities like scheduling meetings, making phone calls, and sending follow-up emails, which you can easily automate with the email sequences feature we’ve built into our sales CRM.

Keep track of the activities your sales reps complete using a CRM built for action:

‎You can extend it to activities that don’t directly translate into sales but ensure that your reps enhance their sales outreach. For example, you can schedule specific times in your calendar to perform certain sales tasks in Close.

This makes it easier for you and your team to predict the number of people you can reach any given week.

3. Volume Quota

Under this quota, you can motivate your sales reps to sell as many product units as possible in a specified period (generally a year). Depending on the kind of business, it could also be registering as many users or generating as much revenue as possible. To measure and project the impact of various volume quotas on revenue, use our revenue growth calculator.

If you’re a venture-funded startup focused on top-line revenue growth, volume quota might be ideal for your sales organization.

Seeking higher revenue growth? Learn how CRM can make it possible.

4. Forecast Quota

You can also set a forecast quota based on the historical sales data of specific territories, the past performance of your sales team and reps, and your expected business growth. It’s the financial goal that your sales team member or territory needs to hit in a specified period (generally a month or a quarter).

In Close, you can easily view forecasted sales in the Pipeline view. It gives you the expected value of leads in each stage that sales leaders can use to cast company-wide goals.

‎Hate the idea of dealing with spreadsheets and are just generally not a numbers person? That’s no excuse to avoid discipline in forecasting. We’ve made it easy for you to get started with our free sales forecasting template.

5. Revenue Quota

Using revenue-based quotas as a sales metric rewards gross dollars brought in. Put simply, if a sales representative focuses on high-value contracts, they can meet their sales target with just one or two sales and is possibly a great candidate for enterprise sales.

6. Combination Quota

Many organizations prefer using a combination of different quotas. For instance, a sales manager can set a volume quota on top of an activity quota. So, reps need to make a certain number of calls weekly while closing a certain number of deals and bringing in a defined revenue value.

It’s a great way to provide smaller milestones to help your team achieve their quotas. Your sales reps are focused on quality and quantity in their sales process. But don’t combine many different quotas, as it will confuse your sales team, and the sales reps will lose focus on what’s important.

Four Methods of Setting Sales Quotas to Meet Your Sales Goals

Do you follow the approach of adding 10 percent to your last year’s goal for setting your sales quotas? Then you’re not doing it right. Here are four methods for setting and optimizing your sales quotas. You can use the one that fits your organization, depending on the market and the types of your accounts.

Method 1: Past Performance

If you feel your last year’s performance can predict the future, you can rely on the past performance method. This method involves taking your sales numbers from last year as the base and increasing them by a certain percentage (dependent on market conditions, competition, and the like).

Once the sales leader makes an estimate, it’s divided into sales quotas for every division, team, and individual rep. The past performance method is a great fit for markets with high potential. However, it isn’t the best in saturated and competitive markets.

Method 2: Market-Opportunity

Under this method, you can combine historical info with the characteristics of the market. You start with the opportunity in an account and use a larger predictive model to estimate the potential in a territory. For instance, if you’re selling software to government agencies, the organization’s headcount might correlate with the potential revenue you can make.

Method 3: Top Management Downward

Guesswork isn’t ideal in sales. However, sometimes it makes sense for the top management to estimate the total sales for the next year (especially during new business development situations). Executives calculate numbers based on market conditions, financial goals, and the company’s projected growth.

Sales managers then break them down for individual reps based on their gut feelings and mathematics.

In this method, it’s important not to let internal politics and overambitious goals dictate the quotas assignment. Collaborate and get insights from your front-line sales managers and SDRs to understand the promising territories and realistic quota numbers based on their selling abilities.

Method 4: Bottom-up

The bottom-up approach starts with every sales rep's historical performance. Once you know the reasonable number of deals your sales organization can close, you can consider the new sales quota at the upper bound of your sales reps’ ability.

Close CRM provides you with an overview of the sales activities, so sales managers know the typical closing rates of their reps, and they can forecast the quota for the coming period based on it.

‎You can also combine the above methods to arrive at the final sales quota estimates. Remember, though, to come up with achievable and reasonable numbers that keep your sales organization and management happy.

What to do When You’re Not Making Quota?

The 2019 Sales Performance Study by CSO Insights mentioned above found that 29.9 percent of the revenue came from new accounts, and only 47.3 percent of forecasted deals were closed.

However, it’s essential to understand that these percentages are the average across the industry. You’ve got an advantage because just by reading this article, you’re embracing sales performance management.

This consistent substandard performance calls for the attention of sales leaders. If you’re in the same boat, look at your historical data. It will show you where you need to make improvements.

Then, use these strategies to ensure your sales reps consistently hit their quotas. Set short-term and long-term goals and specific benchmarks you want to hit and incorporate these into your overall sales plan.

Generate More Qualified Leads

For the last four years of the CSO survey, improving lead generation has been a top objective of sales leaders. Yet the “inability to generate enough qualified leads” was also cited as the second biggest challenge. The reason is probably that salespeople are still generating most of the leads.

The survey goes further to establish poor alignment between sales and marketing. Indeed, even the definition of a lead is mostly not agreed upon between the two departments.

Sales and marketing need to agree on a process for nurturing their leads. Their goals should be in sync, and their communication should be consistent. I’ve already written and talked about the importance of sales and marketing getting their shit together.

Speak to More Prospects

Cold calling more prospects is a no-brainer for generating more leads and closing more deals. Indeed, a well-optimized workflow paired with powerful features of Close CRM (like our built-in predictive dialer).

However, what if you’re dialing as many numbers as possible but not actually speaking to more prospects? There’s a limited amount of numbers you can dial every day, so you also need to focus on reaching more people.

Improve Your Sales Call Script

It’s one thing to get on more cold calls and reach more people, but their conversion rates will be low unless your reps are prepared. Your representatives must already use a sales call script to structure their pitches and polish their processes. If you aren’t, here’s a free template you can use to get started.

If your reps are already using call scripts, I want to remind you that they need to be managed, maintained, and updated. So, ask your sales reps to return to the drawing board and integrate the changes in your product and the market in their call scripts.

Involve your sales team to share their successes and insights from calls to develop new creative ideas. Up-to-date scripts can substantially elevate the overall effectiveness of your sales team! You can also check out the sales call checklists I’ve created for reviewing the performance of your junior reps here and senior reps here.

Improve Objection-Handling Skills

Your reps will mostly end up with difficult prospects who tell you they are not interested in buying right now. They will also object to your price, features, and the like. This is also good news, as you got a prospect interested enough to engage with you (they could have always turned a blind eye!).

From there, it’s about training your reps to learn more about the needs of their leads. You want your SDRs to remain attentive on their calls so that they can later communicate the value of your product in a better way.

It starts with creating an objection management document listing all the common objections your reps have encountered in your industry. Alongside they will write down short answers, get feedback from ten or more people, and then learn the responses after modification.

I’ve shared 40+ examples, tactics, and rebuttals on overcoming sales objections here that your sales team can use to upgrade their selling game and ensure their sales conversations move forward.

Don’t Let Prospects Go MIA

Many deals are lost because the prospect goes silent, and the sales rep gives up engaging after two to three re-engaging attempts. A lead might go dark for various reasons, including a change of leadership, loss of budget for the project, and a more fitting competitor.

For those with whom you already had a decent conversation, you should follow up to gain context and share updates about your product. Make sure to follow up like the best sales teams worldwide do. Sometimes it might even take 41 emails and voicemails to close a deal!

Stay on Top of the Sales Pipeline

More opportunities in your sales pipeline lead to more revenue for your company every month. They help you get some context of the current deals, better understand the performance of your SDRs, know the sales forecasts that are off, and manage the expectations of your team.

In Close, you can use the Opportunity Funnel Report to see how each stage of your pipeline is performing, plus track key funnel metrics like sales velocity, time in the stage, and average time to close.

‎You can also check the Pipeline View to monitor individual deals in your pipeline and see whether they’re on track to Close.

We conduct sales pipeline review meetings every Monday at Close. And we recommend you do the same so that everyone on your team is on top of current obstacles and can brainstorm potential solutions.

Weekly meetings are also an excellent opportunity to clean up your pipeline and ensure that your data is current, coach your SDRs/managers, and share action items so your team remains focused on meeting their sales quota.

6 Sales Quota Templates, Resources, and Examples

Now that you have all the necessary information to set realistic sales quotas, it’s time to put the knowledge into action. Here are a few templates, resources, and an example.

1. Klipfolio Sales Quota Attainment

The business analytics tool, Klipfolio, has compiled all the KPIs for sales teams. The above example shows sales quota attainment: the time it takes to achieve a quota.

How it will help you: You can get a basic introduction and a practical example of sales quota attainment.

2. Sales Forecast Templates by Close

As a sales leader, it’s useful to know what’s coming down the pipeline and forecast your sales for a quarter. These compiled templates help dissect what your business will look like in the future.

How it will help you: There are several templates, including what businesses they work best for. Any sales team with any kind of business can quickly get started.

3. Sales Quota Threshold in Excel

The above Excel sheet shows your top-performing sales reps and how they fared every quarter.

How it will help you: If you’re using Microsoft Excel to maintain your sales dashboard, creating a clustered column chart will prove useful for quickly setting sales quotas.

4. Strategic Sales Compensation Report Card

The strategic sales compensation report card is based on a chapter from the book What Your CEO Needs to Know About Sales Compensation. It will help the C-suite create effective compensation for your sales team.

How it will help you: You can get a quick rundown of how your sales compensation plan fares by filling out the card yourself and requesting each of your team members to do the same. You can then compare your results and decide the potential actions.

5. Yesware Sales Quota Calculator

Whether you want to take a bottom-up or top-down approach, the Yesware Sales Quota Calculator is an easy way to crunch the numbers for you.

How it will help you: You can input the required data in their XLSX file to quickly find the quotas for every territory.

6. Volume Sales Quota Example

Mark is a sales rep for a SaaS company and has a sales quota of 50 subscriptions per month. While the pay structure might vary, he’s likely to receive a commission for every subscription he sells and a bonus on reaching his quota.

How it will help you: If you’re a SaaS exclusively focused on achieving top-line numbers in a specific period, you can take inspiration from the above example.

You can also explore the sales dashboard templates we’ve compiled here. Following the instructions in the article, you can design one that prioritizes sales quotas!

Implement These Strategies to Consistently Meet Your Sales Quotas

If you only look at your top-line revenue numbers, then the purpose of sales quota might not become apparent. However, if you delve deeper into comparing the actual deals your reps and managers closed vs. the forecasted business at the beginning of the year, you’ll understand its importance.

In this article, you learned about the various types of sales quotas, methods of setting one with templates, and strategies you can experiment with if you’re not meeting your quota.

As a sales leader, now you have all the resources to evaluate your sales systems, fix bottlenecks, and set your team up for success!

Looking to build and scale a winning sales team and process? Grab our book: The Startup Sales Playbook. It features the best sales tips and tactics around!