Building a performance distribution curve on your sales teams
Posted by www.makanasolutions.com Admin on Tue, Sep 16, 2008 @ 08:05 AM
Below are two graphs that show two different sales teams quota attainment distribution. The graph is an important piece of analysis you should do before you set your quotas for next year. The graphs show the distribution of performance. The y-axis is the percent of reps and the x-axis is the percent of attainment so you can easily see how many are producing for the company.
The first graph screams trouble but is often what we see. In this case most of the reps have not achieved their quota while a few are well over. Unless you have a completely new team who haven't been in the position for the whole year, the possible explanations all require attention. These kind of curves can occur for three reasons:
• Your quotas and territories are out of balance. Your few top performers have rich territories and do not need to work as hard as others to find business. If you can't rebalance the territories, the quotas should be individualized to reflect a realistic opportunity.
• Your team has the wrong skills. Reevaluate the skills needed for the job and either train the team or make organizational changes.
• Your quotas are overallocated. Many executives overallocate the quotas so they have a better chance of reaching the company goal. However, it is demotivating to the team if they aren't able to reach these artificially high quotas. You are better off hedging your bet by making sure at least 60% are overquota. They will cover for those who don't make it and the team overall will feel like winners.
The second graph is what you want. A nice bell curve where most of the team is successful.
