Design to overachieve

Sales reps and managers - at the time of writing this article it's midway through the year (2024), and you're probably thinking about how to close out Q2 and plan to win in H2.

Here are a few tips on how to ensure you pace to achieve target over the rest of this year, but this is applicable to forecasting for attainment at any point in time.

My hope is this helps you get your ducks in a row to proactively design for success. This exact proactive thinking will make the difference between consistently winning, losing, or simply coasting to mediocrity. Here we go!

I. Know your metrics inside and out.

Any seasoned rep or manager will tell you these are tablesteaks.

• What are your conversion rates? You need to know what % of your leads convert to qualified leads, qualified leads to sales ready, and sales ready to closed won. Ultimately, you need to know your win rate on qualified leads as a key metric.
• What's your avg deal size and sales cycle? This will empower you to get predictive based on your pipeline.

You can simply work with your revops team to get this data, if you can't source it yourself. Get the numbers, write them down, and aim to improve QoQ. Remember, what doesn't get measured, doesn't improve.

II. Use your CRM like a pro, like a PRO!

That's what you are, you're a professional. This maybe the simplest requirement for any focused rep. Don't view this as admin, you're dead wrong. This is your compass to consistent quota attainment. If you're diligent in documenting the following, you'll be way ahead of the game:

• Opportunity stage - be critical of yourself here, and aware of your positive/negative biases as a rep. Put each op at the right stage, not the most optimistic or pessimistic, the most realistic.
• Projected closed/won date - take this seriously. If you're just taking the last day of the month or quarter, it tells me you really don't have any kind of in depth understanding of the prospects buying process or when the deal will really close. You're also leaving tons of space for these opportunities to roll into the next month or quarter, because delays happen all the time. Really assess the buying process to get a sense of when the deal could truly close, and always punch up in effort to get the deal over the line as early as possible.
• Notes - don't rely on your memory, trust me it's not that good. Use AI tools to automate note taking if you want, but science has already taught us that we retain 20-30% more when we write it down. So... write it down, and do it after every single prospect engagement.
• Tasks - see above. Don't rely on your memory, that's amateur hour. Give yourself time based targets and leverage your CRM as a tool to help you manage your day/time, every day. Your CRM tasks should dictate 50% or more of your daily sales activity. Otherwise, you're probably being too reactive.
• Reasons for closed/lost and closed/won - the more you document these details, the more you can review and understand where you get stuck and where you win. Great for skills development.

Truth - most good (not great) reps leave money on the table because they're simply inaccurate in real pipeline management and projections. Poor reps have never committed to this, and will fail time and again. Great reps understand and harness the power of their CRM.

III. Overlay your pipeline w/your target.

Now the gettins' good and this is where it all comes together. If you know your metrics, have leveraged your CRM to help you accurately assess your positive vs quota, you can estimate your path to attainment and work backwards to calculate how to fill the gap.

Truth - if don't have 3-5x coverage of your quota (in sales qualified), you're in trouble. Don't deny this because you don't want to accept it, if you do you're designing to fail. This should scare the living sh*t out of you if you're short, and should drive you to act with urgency.

• Review your total pipeline for all sales qualified leads projected to close within the month/quarter/year. This should amount to 4-5x your quota for that same period of time.
• If you want to get really accurate, work with your revops team (if necessary) to get a view of your weighted pipeline. A weighted pipeline assigns a probability percentage to each deal in a sales pipeline based on its likelihood of closing. If your CRM is built well, this will be in place for each pre-sales stage. Here you're looking for 2-3x coverage.

You should know this data inside/out, it will give you a real estimation of your projections at any point in time (of course w/out including any new ops which might come from marketing or SDRs).

IV. Close the gap!

If you're short on coverage (and most always are), you can run the above practice and work backwards to understand how to fill the gap.

Hot tip - you want to do this with urgency. If your sales cycle is 3-6 months, for example, you need to get opportunities in motion right now to achieve target by the end of the year.

Too frequently, reps are left wondering HOW to close the gap. The truth is you know how, you'd just rather not. Rough. If that's true, you're going to struggle to consistently win. Otherwise you love to run the #s and get to work.

Here are a few ways to close the gap:

• Go back to every opportunity which has gone cold or was closed/lost (say within 3-12 months of current time) and re-engage. Often we find timing was the issue, or we even had the wrong prospect. This account can still be prospected and revived. This is low hanging fruit.
• Ask for referrals! If you've closed business in the past 6 months with customers who you know are happy, just ask them if they'd recommend anyone else who could benefit from their own experience with you and your product. You won't get many, but some > none.
• Prospect competitors of your current customers. Without giving any sensitive information away of course, engage the top competitors of your largest/most valuable wins. Odds are that their challenges are similar, you have a leg up and can probably move through the sales process a bit faster with these prospects, vs totally cold prospects.
• Get outbound! Cringe right? WRONG! If you're uncomfortable with this, I suggest you seriously consider your career path. Your job is to build pipeline and close new business, period. The constant differentiator between good and great reps (in my experience), is that great reps are ALWAYS hunting. This is true for recruiters, SDRs, founders looking to fundraise, and reps looking to surpass quota.
• Do the math - sales is both an art and a science. The art is the understanding and appreciation of human behaviour. The science is applying the math to win. It's still a numbers game people. Know your numbers! You need to know your connect rate and meetings booked rate for cold calls. You also need to know your reply rate and meetings booked rate for your emails. Social is a bit harder to measure, but should be a serious part of your outbound practice.

Ultimately here, you're looking to identify how many ops you need to self-source, how fast, and what those # demand of you daily. This will dictate how many accounts you need to prospect, what volume of outbound activity you require, how frequently, and you have to commit to this activity daily. Yes, daily. That's simply the discipline of sales.

Remember, this is an art and a science. Harness both and capture the power of these practices. I believe you'll be significantly more likely to win consistently if you do.

Please feel free to comment, add any POV on what I've missed, what you'd modify/add, and pls share w/your network.

Let's crush!