10 reps, 20 demos each, only 3 hit quota
Brendon Cassidy, the Founder of Cassidy Ventures, wrote this article a couple weeks ago about learning in a sales environment and how the responsibility of the sales team’s growth falls on the VP of Sales’ obsession with training, on-boarding, and consistent coaching.
“50% of sales people miss their quota. And that’s a conservative number. In SaaS companies, stats have that as high as 70%. Regardless, it’s a problem,” said Cassidy.
The concept of Learning in a sales environment is often overlooked as a solution to missed quotas because of the overwhelming emphasis on activity-based metrics (ie. # of dials, # of demos booked, # of opportunities created, # of closed deals, etc.).
Sales is a Science, Right?
Let’s say I have 10 reps all “fully ramped” with 20 demos per month, but if only 3 of the 10 reps hit quota for the quarter, how do I improve only 30% reaching quota? The activity-oriented solution suggests investing in more SDRs, tools, and time spent on generating more dials and booked demos. However, the often less-emphasized element of sales is the actual execution of each activity in one’s sales process. This pain point is the main reason why we started Noteninja: to provide tools and insights focused not only on optimizing the well-documented economics of sales, but also finding transparent ways to measure the effectiveness of each reps’ execution of the sales process.
“Stop measuring activities, and start measuring effectiveness.”
Over the past 6 years, I’ve worked my way from cold-calling hundreds of prospects a week to carrying a monthly sales quota, from hiring and managing a small team of SDRs to building out and implementing a sales playbook. Having bits of experience with most of the responsibilities in a sales organization, I’ve compiled and attempted to answer the following questions dealing with the harmony between the inevitable differences in salespeople and the accountability for standardized execution of an effective, scalable sales process.
Ctrl-C + Ctrl-V (copy/paste)
- How can I effectively and consistently hold my SDRs accountable to following my playbook each and every call?
- Which value propositions do my SDRs have a difficult time uncovering value for and piquing curiosity for?
- How deep are my AEs digging to uncover the actual root of the need/problem?
- Which AEs close more opportunities when facing…
- certain competitors?
- or certain objections from the prospect?
- or certain needs from the prospect?
- What steps and/or questions in the sales playbook need more vetting and clarification to reduce sales ramp time and more effective hand-offs from SDR-to-AE-to-Customer Success?
From my experience in sales teams and speaking with VPs of Sales in SaaS companies, accountability is one of the most important values in a sales organization. There are amazing software tools and methodologies in place to create accountability for activities: quotas and commission structures, call tracking, power dialers, e-mail tracking, and more investments in 1-on-1 coaching.
Repetition and replication are cornerstones for scaling successful sales training and coaching. So the question becomes this: are we giving our sales teams the tools to not only call faster and demo more frequently, but also learn more consistently and close with more certainty?