According to a mini-survey that Ryan Reisert posted on LinkedIn, only 20% of the 297 SDRs who responded said they reached their quota every month.
What’s the reason for this?
Could it be that targets set by management are too ambitious? Or are salespeople too often making avoidable mistakes?
We sat down with Ryan to dig into the most common sales mistakes that every rep must avoid. He identified the mistakes and gave advice on how to solve them.
Never miss target again - scroll 👇 to find out how to avoid the common mistakes in sales that can really trip you up!
1. Low or unfocused activity
One of the first things to look at if you’re not making quota is - are you doing enough?
Ryan told us about this common sales mistake:
“It’s always important to understand the maths in sales. For the most part, it’s a numbers game, so you have to make sure the figures add up.”
“Most salespeople will know their target number, but do they know the number above that number or the number above that?”
Ryan is talking about the figure above your quota - the one that shows if you’re feeding enough prospects through the sales funnel in order to hit your target (e.g.: meetings booked or deals closed).
You can run them through a simple check to work out if you’re putting enough in at one end to get the required result at the other.
Let’s break this down:
You’re a quota-carrying SDR; what’s your target for the month?
Let’s say, for example, it’s 10.
What’s your average close rate? For ease, we’ll make it 10%.
So for every 1 meeting you book or deal you close, you need to have at least 10 active opportunities. Which means that to secure 10 meetings or deals, you need to be speaking to at least 100 people.
Okay - let’s pause here for a second and double-click on this idea. What actually is an active opportunity?
Ryan said:
“This can’t just be someone who you’ve spoken to in passing. There needs to be some form of commitment from them to be considered a genuine opportunity.”
“You need qualified, forecasted opportunities.”
“You can’t count on someone as an active opportunity if you’re sitting waiting for them to reply.”
Remember this point; we’ll dig a little more into this in the next sales mistake.
Now, back to our maths - what’s your dial-to-connect rate? Because not everyone you cold call will pick up the phone.
And how many people do you need to be speaking with in order to get the right number of active opportunities?
You can keep going up the line, reviewing the number of actions you need to take at each stage, reverse-engineering until you know exactly how many people you need in the pipeline to reach target.
Ryan also said:
“This maths isn’t just to show you if you’re doing enough activity or not, but it can also show you if you’re doing enough of the right things.”
As a salesperson, you might be run off your feet busy doing a wide variety of tasks, but if you’re not focusing on enough of the ‘right’ activities, then you may struggle to make quota.
Ryan’s key takeaway on this sales mistake:
“It’s a quality versus quantity thing.”
2. Relying on unscheduled activity
Touching back on our definition of an active opportunity here.
One of the best indicators that you have an interested prospect is a calendared next step.
Ryan went into more detail:
“Are you just hoping that someone will reply and come through for you? That’s not enough. That’s not an opportunity.”
“If you don’t have something in the calendar with the right stakeholders and a business case in place, then you can’t really count that as an active opportunity.”
After all, you’re a business professional calling another business professional, with an offer to see if you can help them with a pain point.
If there isn’t any velocity towards a deal, then the prospect likely isn’t interested in pursuing it, and you may be wasting precious time.
Ryan adds:
“If the person you’re speaking to is trying to evade the next scheduled step, that’s a problem.”
“So what I’d do instead is say something along the lines of:”
“Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to get you the information you want, but I'm just gonna assume the timing's off right now.”
“If you have a look at this information and decide you’d like to speak with me again, then come back to me.”
“Essentially, if you’re not ready to commit to that next step, then there’s no next step - it’s pretty obvious.”
Sometimes there’s no attempt to schedule the next interaction, which leaves salespeople having to follow up at a later date and chase for a response.
By planning in and scheduling your next interaction ‘in the moment’, you can better gauge the prospects’ commitment, wasting less time in the process.
The best to solve this sales mistake: if it’s not in the calendar, it doesn’t count!
3. Prospecting to only one decision-maker
Usually there are multiple decision-makers in an organisation, all of whom will play a role in whether or not the deal gets closed.
Yet often, salespeople target just one person in an organisation. Then later down the line, more people are looped in.
These stakeholders will therefore not have had the same nurtured experience through the decision-making process, and could ultimately slow down or stop your deal from happening.
So it makes sense to surround your target from the beginning. Speak to multiple decision-makers in the organisation from the start; get to know each stakeholder’s needs and requirements as you go. This is called multithreading in sales.
Ryan said:
“It could be as simple as connecting with someone on LinkedIn and saying:”
“Hey, I’m meeting with (x) from your organisation later on today to talk about (y). I’m looking forward to working with your company if it’s a good fit.”
Sales mistake top tip:
Give each decision-maker the necessary information to help them make an informed decision. This shows you’re ready and willing to provide them with value.
This simple action easily solves this sales mistake. It increases your chances of booking a meeting and even exceeding your quota.
4. Targeting the wrong prospects
The outbound sales process all starts with targeting. If you’re targeting the wrong people, you’re not going to make sales.
But this sales mistake is easily cleared up. Your B2B sales lead list is absolutely crucial!
Ryan said:
“The list is the strategy. Targeting is everything.”
“Hey sales leader. Hey CEO. Hey, whoever’s complaining about a sales team missing quota. Did you set the strategy?”
“Did you give them the list of accounts? Because if you didn’t - it's not on the reps if they’re missing target - assuming they did everything else right.”
Ryan’s point here is that one of the fundamental aspects of B2B sales is the people you target. Ideally, this should be set by someone high up in the organisation.
It shouldn’t be the role of those contacting the list to set the list.
And did you know that Cognism is a great tool for finding the contact details of people you want to do business with?
Watch our video to see Cognism in action 👇
5. Replacing closed deals with only one active opportunity
Ever heard of hopium? It’s a phrase Ryan used to explain what happens instead of strategic pipeline replenishment.
Basically, what he means is that if you have 10 active opportunities and you close one, you need to replace it with another 10 active opportunities to close another.
You can’t hope that another will spring from the other 9 active opportunities - the maths suggests that’s not likely.
Ryan said:
“If I have 10 active deals in my pipeline, and I close 10%, I have to replace it with another 10 when I close a deal. I can’t just replace it with one more.”
“Because the other 9 are not likely to close, based on the numbers. But most people cling onto these deals - they don’t add more into their pipeline and they rely on hopium to see them through.”
And sales pipeline replenishment doesn’t stop there. If you need an additional 10 active opportunities to book one more meeting, then you need to be having an additional 100 conversations and so on.
Sales mistake top tip:
Reverse-engineer the activity needed to produce the target outcome.
Ryan added:
“When I explain this to people it blows their minds, but if you follow the maths it makes sense. You need 10 to book 1 using this example conversion rate, so you can’t book another from 9 - you need 10 new ones.”
6. Stopping activity once quota has been reached
Okay, so you’ve managed to book your target number of meetings or closed your target number of deals. So the work can stop, right?
Wrong! A common sales mistake that reps make is to reduce their activity once the monthly quota is made. But all this does is slow the pipeline for the following month.
Fewer people being added at the top of the sales funnel simply equates to fewer people converting later on.
Ryan told us:
“We celebrate the wins - which we should, of course - but then we forget the work that needs to be done after.”
“You hear it all the time from salespeople, ‘I’m good, I’m done for the month’, and all I think is, well next month is going to suck for you.”
“But you need to be consistently committed to the process. Because after the win, you need to be doing your replenishment, and if you don’t do that now, you’ll be short next time.”
The bottom line for this sales mistake is:
Whatever work you do today will impact your numbers in the following days and months. So don’t stop activity just because you’re doing well!
7. Trying to reach quota at any cost
At first glance, this doesn’t sound like a sales mistake. Shouldn’t reps always be trying to reach quota?
But consider this:
As an SDR, your professional reputation, salary, job security, bonus and more rely on your job performance. Which is measured by the number of meetings you book or deals you close.
By design, there’s a conflict of interests here.
Sales reps want to reach this quota at all costs. They want to be seen as a high performer. They want to secure their role into the future.
So then they sometimes start to push a little harder on those deals that don’t quite fit the bill. SDRs push through less qualified leads, leading to time wasted on giving demos to prospects who aren’t right for the product.
Or AEs manage to close the deal on those prospects, but because the product doesn’t solve their pain points, the customer is unsatisfied and has a negative experience.
Ryan had a solution for this sales mistake:
“Offer salespeople a percentage of commission for the lifetime value of the client. Either that or quota relief based on successful clients they brought in.”
“They’re far more likely to focus on the correct customer fit, and they’ll be more invested in the customer success and enablement processes.”
“Or arguably and more importantly, incentivise sales teams based on their daily net new conversations and completions they have each day.”
“This is really the only metric that matters if you want long-term, predictable, scalable results.”
Sales mistakes: key takeaways
So to recap, here are 7 of the common sales mistakes and what you can do to help reshape the outcome.
Save our infographic to help you avoid the pitfalls and meet your monthly targets 👇
