Scaling Mount McQuota – The muddled middle of sales performance

VPs of sales tasked with hitting quota for the quarter ultimately rely on their teams making their numbers. When handling a sales team, we all see that bell curve distribution between the handful of stars that are absolutely crushing it, and the newbies on our team we have to nurture to productivity. It’s the men and women in the middle that we ultimately rely on to make the quarter’s number.

It’s precisely this cohort that presents the biggest challenge to sales performance management, and also its path to a whole new level of performance as a team.

Typically, mature sales organizations have 70% or more of their team clustered around the average sales quota performance number. Stars on the team beat the average by anywhere between 30%-100%. And that’s a sign that we’re probably walking right past a gold mine of easy wins. What techniques in customer engagement and solutioning make the difference between a strike-outs in the hands of the average team member and home-runs in the hands of our stars? It’s the mystery that makes sales success into a black art for the average rep, and frustratingly unpredictable endeavour for leadership.

Insights into the best practices of our stars, contextualized and shared with our average team members is an incredibly effective tool we could leverage to move the needle of our sales team performance.

A 10% improvement in closing the gap between our average performers and our stars would yield a huge 30% improvement in team performance!
Here’s how it’d break down for a 10 or 100 person sales team.

• 10 Reps @ 300K Target Quota  
  Preventable Lost Leads 45
  Lost Leads Saved 10%
  Lost Lead Value/Month $450,000
  Coaching Impact/Mth $45,000
  Lost Sales/Qtr $1,350,000
  Coaching Impact/Qtr $135,000
  Losses/Rep (Monthly) $45,000
  Monthly Value/Rep $4,500  
  Losses/Rep (Quarterly) $135,000

• 100 Reps @ 300K Target Quota
  Preventable Lost Leads 45
  Lost Leads Saved 10%
  Lost Lead Value/Month $450,000
  Coaching Impact/Mth $45,000
  Lost Sales/Qtr $1,350,000
  Coaching Impact/Qtr $135,000
  Losses/Rep (Monthly) $45,000
  Monthly Value/Rep $4,500  
  Losses/Rep (Quarterly) $135,000
  

Now that’s an easy win in theory, but as sales practitioners we’ve walked past that El Dorado because unlocking it has always been too darn hard! The very aspect that makes it a high RoI lever – the large number of reps in the middle – also makes it incredibly hard to fix it with the tools we’ve traditionally used to fix problems around performance – reviews, buddying and training – methods that just don’t work well at scale.

With the latest advances in Artificial intelligence, we finally have the technology to help us take a crack at this problem in a new way. Tools like Salesken listen in on every sales conversation and the Artificial Intelligence technology analyses every customer interaction to give you and every member of your team deep insights into what’s working, what’s not and what’s making the difference between being a Hall-of-Famer versus grinding it out in the minor leagues.

We’re excited to enable a generation of sales professionals with the tools to truly transform their performance and find quicker paths to success!