New Year, New Goals: How successful sales reps exceed quotas through reverse engineering

New Year, New Goals

As we enter the new year, we tend to set personal goals, like lose weight or save money, and we map out a plan of how we’ll achieve those goals – go to the gym more often, direct deposit $100 a week into your savings account. Similarly, a new year also means a new quota for sales people. And similarly, we need to map out a plan of how to achieve those quotas.

Activity Plans

For some goals there can be a statistical correlation between the activities performed and the desired outcome. If we take our weight loss goal for example, eating fewer calories and exercising daily should result in weight loss. You might arbitrarily set a goal of consuming 1500 calories per day and running 5 miles a week – but is that really the right combination of activity to reach your goals? We need to find the right formula over the right time horizon - and then track it.

Finding the Formula

You might make it through January with your 1500 daily calories and 5 miles a week on the treadmill, but then you look in the mirror or stand on the scale, and you don’t see the results you’re looking for. Now what? You start eating even better and exercising even harder? Or do you do the opposite and just give up? It’s so hard to know exactly how much or what to do.

This isn’t dissimilar from the process sales people go through at the beginning of a sales year – most sales reps try to do the right activities, but aren’t really sure how much to do and over what time period. Then when they look at their sales and pipeline and see that they’re not where they need to be… then what?

But there's an answer - you can create your own personal formula! You can build a plan that gets you results above and beyond your goals and you’ll know EXACTLY what you need to do – no guessing, looking at lagging indicators, or just randomly doing more stuff.

Of course, people are successful without the formula – many sales reps exceed their quota without a mathematically created plan, much like many people are in good shape because they just generally do the right things. And, after enough experience you kind of know what to do to reach your goals. But even those “top performers” could always do better by following a plan of the activities that produce resultsl.

The point is, with the right formula, you’ll be able to reach and exceed your goals more consistently.

Reverse Engineering Your Sales Goal

To be more effective and efficient, you can reverse engineer your daily activity formula starting with your historical performance stats – like average deal size, win-rate, and activity conversion rates. Put it in a spreadsheet along with your new sales goals, apply conversion rates, and work back to determine what you need to do on a daily basis to hit your goals. Performulus' unique reverse engineering process also helps reps build personalized plans that produce predictable results. It's as easy as 1-2-3:

1. Start with your desired sales goal

2. Enter historical data, like average deal size, win-rate, and conversion rates

3. Select the optimal mix of pipeline development activities

Performulus then generates a personalized activity plan, and with seamless Salesforce integration, automatically tracks plan performance.

“With Performulus we can create a roadmap to success for our staff members”

– Ryan Kyes, President, Alliance Financial & Insurance

By focusing energy and effort on the right activities, Performulus customers are reaching and exceeding their goals. But don’t just take our word for it, watch this video to hear from the customers themselves.

“If we check these boxes in Performulus, I know what our outcome is going to be. I’m seeing consistent effort, leading to consistent results.”

– Dave Taylor, CEO, FirstMark Insurance Group