Why You’re Missing Your Quota and How to Fix It

Tiffani Bova, Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist, Salesforce

Only slightly more than half of salespeople met or exceeded their quotas last year. Worst of all? This is the fifth year of decline.

There is a litany of reasons why this is happening. Even in 2018, unrealistic sales expectations continue to be built off of poor forecasting, and resources that are spending less than 50% of their days in actual selling activities are pushed to sell more. Beyond that, sales organizations, as well as individual sales reps, are still not capitalizing on all that is available today such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation, and predictive capabilities to improve the likelihood of attaining quota.

It’s not about volume.

Sales used to be a numbers game. If you call a certain number of prospects, you are bound to generate a certain number of meetings or opportunities to sell as a result. But in 2018, that is no longer necessary. If you have a CRM system and are still doing call lists the same way as a year ago, then there’s a missed opportunity to improve sales performance. Using and committing to your CRM system, and really taking advantage of analytics and artificial intelligence, is the only way to try and free up the time reps need to meet (and exceed) those quotas.

You can’t make customers buy faster.

Simply put, customers are going to buy at their own pace. It’s important to walk that tightrope between actually doing your job of selling, making your quarterly number, and also maintaining your role as a trusted advisor. Remember that customers often aren’t on the same timeline as you. Customers don’t care that your quarter ends in three weeks and you need that deal to make your quota. However, there are ways to keep things moving forward. Focus on the logistics of quotes, pricing discounts, and approvals — and how these can become much more seamless, automated, and timely. Nothing is worse than losing weeks of time due to paperwork delays. You might not be able to make a customer buy faster, but you can certainly make the process to reach a decision much quicker.

To read the complete article, Why You’re Missing Your Quota and How to Fix It, visit Quotable.com.