Congratulations on an amazing 2017. We all accomplished so much together to elevate sales and the profession of sales enablement. While we have much to celebrate, we still have a lot of work to do, especially around sales attainment.
You probably aren’t aware that industry averages for sales quota attainment are lower than expected. Depending on who you talk to and what data you look at, sales quota attainment can be as low as 25% to 40%. There are a small number of companies that are actually getting close to 100% sales quota attainment.
With hundreds of sales enablement tools available in the sales tech stack and so many competing priorities, sales enablement leaders are struggling to figure out where to focus and what to do next. CROs have priorities. CMOs are asking for access and more product enablement. Sales Managers are looking for answers. Salespeople are hungry for less noise.
Let’s proclaim 2018 “The Year of Sales Attainment” to help us collectively prioritize where we spend time. The top deliverable of sales enablement is to help bring salespeople to peak performance and to exceed their attainment goals. So, what does attainment mean? I would look at it two ways:
Quota Attainment: The measure of salesperson performance is based on whether they reach their sales targets in a given period, or not. If our salespeople have reached their attainment goal, they have attained quota. If the salesperson has only achieved 50% of their sales quota, then they are at 50% attainment.
Distribution of Quota Attainment: The percentage of salespeople who hit quota is a very important metric too. It highlights a healthy business if the distribution of people hitting their quota sales attainment is high. What we want to avoid is a small number of people crushing their numbers and carrying the team. That is not a healthy state of a business.
Here are four strategies to help increase quota attainment at the rep level and also to increase distribution of quota attainment. Let’s focus on this goal together. Here is what G.O.A.L means:
Get The Data
Correlate coaching activity and enablement initiatives with attainment data. Work closely with sales operations to get this data. With the data correlated and hooks between data sources, it’s finally possible to see what’s working and what’s not. Here is a blog on metrics that matter.
Overcome Manager Fear Of Coaching
It’s our job to empower managers to consistently do more sales coaching. Let’s set expectations and cadence to help managers do regular team coaching huddles and 1:1s to improve performance and develop their teams. Here is a guide on sales coaching or managers.
Amplify Your Content
Partner with Marketing and subject matter experts to share winning sales content. Share just-in-time-content, in context. Crowdsource best practices and prescribe winning content. Build a system and process to track content effectiveness. Find out how here.
Lift Your Teams With Stories
Create a culture of learning and best practice sharing by sharing winning stories. Use storytelling to create competitive advantage by having your top sellers share why they are winning and how they are winning. Here is a blog on storytelling.
Any time our sales enablement program lifts our team’s ability to hit quota, top-line will be massively impacted. Sales enablement and a maniacal focus on sales attainment data is the path to success in 2018.
Here is a short four minute too. Let us know what you think.
