3 reasons why Sales isn’t making quota

And how to fix them

👋 Hey, Toni from Growblocks here! Welcome to another Revenue Letter! Every week, I share cases, personal stories and frameworks for GTM leaders and RevOps.

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How many of your reps are struggling right now?

I’m willing to bet it’s a lot of you reading this right now.

Quota completion is down across the board in SaaS.

And why wouldn’t it be?

Winrates are down.

ACVs are plummeting.

And it’s taking longer to close than ever before.

Basically, everything is shit in SaaS.

And while the above is true (to an extent at least).

If you talk to enough customers and folks like I have, you begin to see some patterns emerge.

Today I wanted to talk about the quota problem and the 3 reasons why you’re experiencing them in the first place.

Reason 1: You have a lot of MQLs that don’t go anywhere

This happens way too often.

You’re overpacing MQL targets on the year.

Marketing is celebrating. High fives all around.

But your sales team? They’re closing not much.

This is usually where Marketing will pass the buck.

Because they’re getting inbounds. It’s not their fault sales can’t close, right?

And who gets unfairly blamed? The VP Sales.

But when you start to split those MQLs, you start seeing a different picture.

All of a sudden, the vast majority of those MQLs are low-intent leads.

Webinars, white paper downloads, etc.

But the “true” inbounds, the demo requests? The stuff that you thought you would get when you heard the Marketing MQL target - not so much. Really the same as last year, if not a bit worse.

The problem with this scenario is that unless you’re a CRO who’s willing to unblend the top funnel, this kind of problem will be totally invisible to you. 

Reason 2:  You’re booking the wrong meetings

Another team I worked with had a successful outbound team.

I’m talking 10-12 meetings a month per SDR (considered successful these days).

But the team couldn’t figure out why they weren’t converting.

So we broke it down.

Where were all the closed/won deals coming from?

Over 50% of them were in the US.

But where were SDRs booking most of their meetings? Outside of the US - of course…

If you don’t have a strong handle on these details - you will run into trouble. 

Reason 3: You don’t get what your AEs are doing

One of our customers asked us to look at their sales team.

They were convinced their AE team was weak and should get completely replaced. 

We looked at the data for them, and split it into inbound, outbound, upsell referral and prospecting.

What we found was pretty surprising:

While inbound and outbound were the volume channels driving 80% of Opps, both of those channels had terrible close rates. 

Almost 75% of revenue won, however, came from self-prospecting. 

Obviously, no AE will hit target if they are unable (their fault or not) to convert 80% of the volume efficiently. 

What we found was pretty silly once we saw it. 

AEs focused on companies +500 employees. 

While all the inbound and outbound efforts went towards easier-to-book audiences in the 50-250 employee range. 

AEs just knew what would convert and help them get closer to their target. 

SDRs and Marketing booked wherever they could book the most meetings the easiest. 

In the end, all of the above seems like super obvious stuff. 

But for some crazy reason, when you are in the situation, people struggle to see it clearly. 

One way to figure this out is simply to leverage your data. And yes, maybe with some outside help to get started. 

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