It’s crazy to think that we purposely design our organizations to fail. Who would think of that, particularly in selling? We are driven to succeed, to over achieve our goals. We constantly talk about winning.
If this is true, why do we see year after year of declining performance and results?
For example, we see percent of people achieving goals declining—today roughly 40% of sellers are achieving or exceeding quota? To most of us, it’s unimaginable, but why do we see this persist YoY, even continuing to decline?
We see win rates plummeting. I was quoted once saying, “I fire people whose win rates fall below 30%…” Yet today we seem to accept win rates of 15-20%.
Our prospecting outreach is failing at every increasing rates. Several years ago, it took 200-400 touches to get a response, today it take 1000-1400 to get the same response, tomorrow 5000 +?
20% of our people are generating 80% of our revenue, year after year. What are we doing to raise that to 30%, 40% and more?
Tenure is declining, today, average tenure is 11-18 months, at all levels. We know the real and opportunity costs are enormous, yet tenure continues to decline. And we see similar trends in engagement.
We spend millions in our tech stacks, but CRM compliance–the most fundamental utilization metric is abyssmal.
And our customers don’t want to see us! They want rep free buying experiences, even though it’s more difficult and they have higher levels of regret.
And I can go on, data point after data point reinforces continued declines in performance across too many organizations.
There was a time, when the reaction to any of these results was; “What’s wrong? Why is this happening? What do we need to change to get back on track? What is this costing us–in expense, opportunity, reputation?”
Many would push back, saying, “We are meeting our revenue and growth targets! We are scaling at unbelievable rates! Look at our market cap, we are unicorns!”
Those would seem like signs of success, but when you start peeling back the data, seeing win rates of 15-20%, 20% of their people driving 80% of their revenue, 40% of their people achieving their quotas, you realize they are underpeforming their potential! They should be doing so much more! Imagine, at virtually $0 incremental cost, getting win rates to 30-40%. This can virtually double revenue!
Rather than accepting what we get, what would happen if we constantly looked at how we could improve? What if we started asking, what does it take to improve win rates? What would be the impact of more of our people achieving goal, how do we do this? What would it take to get more people to respond to our outreach, rather than how do we reach more people?
Our jobs as leaders is to maximize the performance of every part of our business.
We don’t design our organizations to fail. But it seems we aren’t driven to maximize their performance. And, to me, that is a failure.
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