The Impossible Quota

Read time: 3 minutes

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Ever been handed a quota that felt completely made up?

Leadership needs 20% growth. So your quota goes up 20%. No extra budget. No additional support. No real explanation. Just a bigger number and the same resources to hit it.

At first, you try to rally. But by Q2, the cracks start to show. The pipeline isn’t there. The math doesn’t work. Your top reps check out. People start leaving. And you’re left rehiring and retraining… just to rinse and repeat the same mistake next year.

The underlying root cause is that most quotas and targets aren’t based in reality.

If the Math Doesn’t Work, Neither Will Your Team

Here’s a simple way to test if your quotas are grounded in reality:

Quota = Average Order Value × Close Rate × Number of Closed Deals

To reverse engineer it:

Opportunities Needed = Quota / (Average Order Value × Close Rate)

Let’s say your rep’s annual quota is $1 million. Your average deal size is $50,000. Your team’s close rate is 20%. That means the rep needs to close 20 deals, which means they need 100 qualified opportunities over the course of the year.

If your top-of-funnel engine only produces 60 qualified opps per rep, then that quota isn’t aggressive. It’s impossible.

When that rep misses target, it’s not a performance issue. It’s a failure in goal setting and supporting them with proper GTM processes.

Reps Convert Demand. They Don’t Create It.

There’s a widespread myth in sales leadership: that putting a rep into a new territory will somehow generate new revenue at the same pace as other territories. The flawed thinking is that demand will follow headcount. That activity equals pipeline.

It doesn’t.

Salespeople are not magicians. They convert demand that already exists or demand that is generated through deliberate outbound, marketing, and brand efforts. They don’t create demand out of thin air just because you assigned them a number and plopped them in a territory.

Yes, great reps prospect. They hunt. They find deals others miss. But they are still working within the limits of what’s possible in their market and the demand you marketing team can generate. When leadership ignores that, reps don’t get creative. They get frustrated.

We then wonder why sales rep tenure is shrinking. Imagine that half your income is tied to performance to a plan that is made up from fantasy land… It’s not a healthy environment.

Good Leaders Stress-Test the Target

Before you assign any number, ask yourself:

1. Can a rep mathematically hit this number based on how we actually generate pipeline today? Not a hope and a prayer they will generate demand from nothing.

2. Are we basing targets on controllable inputs, like opportunities, deal size, and win rate? Or just last year’s revenue plus a wish?

3. Are we building quotas bottom-up from real funnel data, or top-down from a board slide?

4. What’s the cost of being wrong? Attrition? Burnout? Constant rehiring?

If you can’t answer these questions with confidence, then the quota is a guess. And you’re at best hoping to hit your target. And hope isn’t a strategy.

Pipeline Should Be Goal #1

Start with a clear understanding of your funnel.

Do you know how many opportunities a rep needs per month to hit their number? Do you know where those opps are supposed to come from? Do you have the capacity through marketing, outbound, referrals, or SDRs to generate that volume consistently?

If the answer is no, then it doesn’t matter how talented your reps are. They don’t have the raw inputs to succeed.

Pipeline is the life line of your organization and needs to be the number focus above all else.

TL;DR

If your reps are missing target, don’t blame them, check the math.

• Most quotas fail because no one reverse-engineered the opportunity requirements.

• If you don’t have the pipeline, the number won’t get hit no matter how good your team is.

• Sales reps don’t create demand, they convert it.

• The result? Burnout, attrition, wasted ramp time, and missed revenue.

If the math doesn’t work, neither will your team.

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