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Welcome back to The Weekly Pitch. We're excited to introduce our new 6-part series on solving the high-performing sales team puzzle. Today's Feature Story gives a sneak peek.
Our Weekly Chart illuminates a demoralizing and continuing downward sales trend––too many reps and teams are missing quota.
Finally, in The Closer, we reshare a crucial insight from one of our most popular articles––why the daily call and email tracking is dead and what to measure instead.
QuotaPath recently surveyed over 450 leaders from finance, rev ops, and sales and found that 91% of organizations fail to hit sales quotas.
Although these reasons are unsurprising, it's incredibly frustrating to see unrealistic quotas and sales goals make the list.
Have we evolved from "growth at all costs" to "sustainable growth" in the sales world? This data suggests that we need to do more work around goal-setting.
Few professions would find this high failure rate acceptable. The most recent State of Sales report from Salesforce and RepVue's Hitting Quota in Tech benchmark confirms rep confidence is historically low, and reaching quota is more challenging than ever.
Forrester's research from last March claims only 47% of all B2B sales organizations hit quota. Then, shockingly, say, "That's not a bad thing."
Actually, it is bad. Jason Lemkin from SaaStr recently posted a LinkedIn poll with over 1,800 votes. The results show that 66% of us are burned out.
Unfortunately, since our provocative "Reverse Buffer" post almost three years ago, we've seen little change in how we set goals, hit goals, and outperform in sales.
Our hope with this series is to assess the current state and help solve the high-performing sales team puzzle so more of us hit goals, feel engaged, and take pride in the work we do every day.
Here's a sneak peek into what's in store over the next few weeks:
Part 1) Go-to-Market Strategy: Building a roadmap to master the marketplace.
Part 2) New Business Sales: Creating a framework to start and keep winning new deals.
Part 3) Customer Renewals: Keeping the excitement burning with existing customers to minimize churn.
Part 4) Expansion Sales: Growing and expanding happy customers.
Part 5) Sales Culture: Diving into the heartbeat of an engaged and motivated sales team.
Part 6) BIG Announcement: Wrapping up with a series summary and announcing something new from The Weekly Pitch
Over the next few weeks, we'll share plenty of insights and strategies with dashes of inspiration! Stay tuned for the first installment.
This article from July 2021 is more relevant than ever. We stubbornly still track daily activities from our CRM or sales engagement platform––namely calls and emails with fewer and fewer booked meetings to show for it.
Track the number of new relationships per opportunity per month instead. We all know the number of decision-makers needed to sign off on a deal continues to increase.
Let's task and compensate our reps whenever a decision-maker gets added to an opportunity. Give bonus points when we get that new DM to attend a meeting.
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Start your week with the stories and insights that matter most to the sales community.