TL;DR – If you struggle to hit your revenue goals, instead of increasing quotas, fix the foundation.

Yesterday, Toni Hohlbein, CEO of Growblocks, hit the right nerve with these two lines in his Linkedin post:

“We need to increase quotas. Else we won’t hit our revenue goal.”

Every time I hear this, I feel sorry for the sales team…

I triggered a strong reaction from me.

It makes me cringe because I’ve also heard this too many times.

Here’s the thing

It’s the ultimate example of shortsightedness in B2B SaaS. Why would increasing quota suddenly increase revenue?

And if we believe we can increase quotas, then why wasn’t this higher target the target in the first place?

The way to fix the gap in revenue realization isn’t achieved by increasing quotas and encouraging even more desperate sales behavior. 

It isn’t achieved either by ignoring the facts of slow sale cycles, poor win rates, or the increasing amounts of discounts you need to give to buy deals. 

These are all signs of a much bigger underlying problem:

• segmentation is too wide
• your positioning is vague (or completely absent)
• your value proposition is not valuable

It’s a foundational problem – and as such, the answer is sorting the foundation, not the symptoms. Then, and only then, can you increase quotas. Not just 10%, but in multiples.

Question for you to reflect upon

What desperate sales behavior can you spot in your SaaS business? What if you’d address that?

 

Be Remarkable

 

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