Sales managers, are you measuring the rate of your rep's improvement? (If not, you'd be advised to pronto)

"Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.” Benjamin Franklin 

What’s the point of raising quotas if your reps haven't increased their capabilities to sell by at least the same percentage increase? 

What’s the logic behind increasing individual quotas by 5% if your reps haven’t similarly improved their sales capabilities by 5%? 

Here’s a question for sales leaders: what data are you using to measure if your reps are ready, or capable, of selling more (from one year to the next?) 

Sales analysts like CSO Insights have been reporting for several years that the percentage of sellers hitting quota is dropping in B2B sales. We’ve all heard that. 

The typical knee-jerk response is to blame the rep. 

However, I believe this “quota gap” is more reflective of a growing “readiness gap.” 

A readiness gap meaning that companies are not appropriately investing in coaching (Click here to read how sales coaching can boost sales by 20%) and developing their reps at a rate that keeps pace with their target revenue growth rate. Thus, reps are not ready to hit their targets. 

I know that many sales leaders associate the term readiness solely in conjunction with on-boarding new reps. 

However, a sales career ideally is a progression from entry-level to skilled professional. Each step along the way requires a different level of readiness. 

In the era of the data-driven sales culture, it seems to me that we need a metric for capabilities and readiness and the rate at which they change. 

Then, if leaders want to arbitrarily increase quotas at the start of a year, at least they would have data to illustrate how big of hole they’ll be digging for themselves. 

If anyone has such a metric they use with their reps, I’d love to learn about it. 

You can’t measure your rate of improvement, as either a sales leader or a rep, if you’re not investing the effort to improve.

Good selling,

Peter C. Mclees, Sales Coach and Trainer

Smart Development

petercmclees@gmail.com

Mobile: 323-854-1713

We help sales managers coach their reps to accelerate profitable sales.