The Holy Grail of Enterprise Sales: Proving a Repeatable Sales Process

(This is the second in a three-part restructuring and build-out of a previous post.  See note [1] for details.)

In the prior post we introduced repeatable sales process as the Holy Grail of enterprise software sales and, unlike some who toss the term around rather casually, we defined a repeatable sales process as meaning you have six things:

1. Standard hiring profile
2. Standard onboarding program
3. Standard support ratios
4. Standard patch
5. Standard kit
6. Standard sales methodology

The point of this, of course, is to demonstrate that given these six standard elements you can consistently deliver a desirable, standard result.

The surprisingly elusive question is then, how to measure that?

• Making plan?  This should be a necessary but not sufficient condition for proving repeatability.  As we’ll see below, you can make plan in healthy as well as unhealthy ways (e.g., off a small number of reps, off disproportionate expansion and weak new logo sales).
• Realizing some percentage of your sales capacity?  I love this — and it’s quite useful if you’ve just lost or cut a big chunk of your salesforce and are ergo in the midst of a ramp reset — but it doesn’t prove repeatability because you can achieve it in both good and bad ways [2].
• Having 80% of your salesreps at 100%+ of quota?  While I think percent of reps hitting quota is the right way to look at things, I think 80% at 100% is the wrong bar.

Why is defaulting to 80% of reps at 100%+ of quota the wrong bar?

• The attainment percentage should vary as function of business model: with a velocity model, monthly quotas, and a $25K ARR average sales price (ASP), it’s a lot more applicable than with an enterprise model, annual quotas, and a $300K ASP.
• 80% at 100%+ means you beat plan even if no one overperforms [3] – and that hopefully rarely happens.
• There is a difference between annual and quarterly performance, so while 80% at 100% might be reasonable in some cases on an annual basis, on a quarterly basis it might be more like 50% — see the spreadsheet below for an example.
• The reality of enterprise software is that performance is way more volatile than you might like it to be when you’re sitting in the board room
• When we’re looking at overall productivity we might look at the entire salesforce, but when we’re looking at repeatability we should look at recently hired cohorts. Does 80% of your third-year reps at quota tell you as much about repeatability – and the presumed performance of new hires – as 80% of your first-year reps cohort?

Long story short, in enterprise software, I’d say 80% of salesreps at 80% of quota is healthy, providing the company is making plan.  I’d look at the most recent one-year and two-year cohorts more than the overall salesforce.  Most importantly, to limit survivor bias, I’d look at the attrition rate on each cohort and hope for nothing more than 20%/year.  What good is 80% at 80% of quota if 50% of the salesreps flamed out in the first year?  Tools like my salesrep ramp chart help with this analysis.

Just to make the point visceral, I’ll finish by showing a spreadsheet with a concrete example of what it looks like to make plan in a healthy vs. unhealthy way, and demonstrate that setting the bar at 80% of reps at 100% of quota is generally not realistic (particularly in a world of over-assignment).

If you look at the analysis near the bottom, you see the healthy company lands at 105% of plan, with 80% of reps at 80%+ of quota, and with only 40% of reps at 100%+ of quota.  The unhealthy company produces the same sales — landing the company at 105% of plan — but due to a more skewed distribution of performance gets there with only 47% of reps at 80%+ and only a mere 20% at 100%+.

In our final post in this series, we’ll ask the question:  is repeatability enough?

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Notes

[1] I have a bad habit, which I’ve been slowly overcoming, to accidently put real meat on one topic into an aside of a post on a different one.  After reading the original post, I realized that I’d buried the definition of a repeatable sales model and the tests for having one into a post that was really about applying CMMI to the sales model.  Ergo, as my penance, as a service to future readers, and to help my SEO, I am decomposing that post into three parts and elaborating on it during the restructuring process.

[2] Unless you’ve had either late hiring or unexpected attrition, 80% of your notional sales capacity should roughly be your operating plan targets.  So this is point is normally subtly equivalent to the prior one.

[3] Per the prior point, the typical over-assignment cushion is around 20%