In the competitive landscape of SaaS businesses, accurately setting and achieving sales quotas within specific time periods is a crucial benchmark for success. Sales quota attainment is not merely about reaching a revenue target; it’s a KPI that provides a comprehensive measure of your sales team‘s efficiency, effectiveness, and performance within your designated time frame.
It serves as a measure, indicating whether your team is on track to meet its objectives, or if strategic realignment is needed. Furthermore, it helps identify your top performers, those who consistently meet or exceed their quotas, serving as role models within the team.
Sales Quota Attainment Formula
The formula for calculating quota attainment is simple — actual sales divided by total sales quota, all multiplied by 100, and shown as a percentage.
Quota Attainment = (Actual Sales / Quota) x 100
For example, if your company’s quarterly goal was to generate $100,000 in revenue and you actually generated $90,000, then your quota attainment would be 90%. This number can also be applied to individual reps or divisions within the sales organization.
Sales Quota Attainment Calculator
Your Quota Attainment
0% attainment
Why Quota Attainment Is Crucial for SaaS Companies
Quota attainment is a crucial GTM metric for any organization with a sales-led go-to-market motion — and SaaS companies are no exception.
Especially if a sales capacity modelis your primary means of revenue forecasting, percent attainment is a critical financial assumption that impacts top-line growth. Keeping a close eye on monthly and quarterly attainment at both the individual and team levels is critical to understanding whether or not you’re on track to hit your revenue goals.
But beyond tracking performance to high-level goals, quota attainment can also contribute to understanding:
- Product-market fit. Looking at quota attainment alongside win rates can help you assess whether or not your product positioning is effective for the prospects you’re targeting.
- Pipeline quality. Quota attainment is a potential lagging indicator of pipeline quality issues. If the team is missing quota, don’t just assume they’re performing poorly. Look to the quality of inbound and outbound opportunities to see if there’s a more systemic issue in the sales process.
- Sales rep ramp. Historical insight into the sales ramp rateof existing reps to full attainment should inform new hiring plans.
As is the case for all financial and operational metrics, you won’t get much value out of quota attainment if you look at it in a vacuum. Always evaluate it in terms of other critical sales performance metrics, such as deal conversion rate, average deal size, and annual contract value.
How to Improve Your Sales Quota Attainment
While the formula to calculate quota attainment is simple, there are so many different variables that impact whether or not you’re hitting your targets.
The mathematical answer to increasing quota attainment is to increase sales. But if you’re falling behind sales targets, consider these options for making improvements.
Improve Sales Enablement and Training Programs
Do your sales reps have the content and product expertise needed to persuade potential customers? You want to arm your sales team with all the playbooks, case studies, and insights into the product roadmap possible to maximize the effectiveness of their calls with prospects. If all of your reps are struggling to hit quota, it may be indicative of an issue for sales managers to address on the enablement front. Collaboration between product marketers, sales professionals, and operations leaders can help improve sales training.
Rethink Your Commissions Structure
Low quota attainment may be an issue of motivation for your sales reps. Look at your commissions structure and consider whether or not it is properly incentivizing reps. If you have a particular product line or customer segment that you want to increase win rates in, add incentives for reps to sell into those accounts. Getting creative could spark new motivation that leads to stronger sales productivity and better attainment rates.
Evaluate Potential Team Changes
The worst-case scenario for low attainment rates is that you have underperformers on the team. While it’s not ideal, being able to track quota attainment at the rep level helps sales leaders understand if there are specific salespeople who aren’t getting the job done. Think about how you can support them during a slump. Or, if the issue is more consistent, consider moving on.
Sense-Check Your Sales Quotas
It’s possible that low attainment rates are the result of overly-aggressive quotas. Maybe as your business scaled, you didn’t build the right headcount plan for new reps on the team. If you’re expecting existing reps to hit higher quotas as the company scales, that strategy has a breaking point. Make sure your sales strategy finds a middle ground between reasonable and aggressive quotas and get better at recognizing when it’s time to bring new hires on to increase capacity.
Predict Pipeline & Bookings with Strategic Finance Software
Learn more
Track More Than Just Quota Attainment in Mosaic
Quota attainment is a critical metric for your sales-led SaaS business, but you won’t get deep insight into your team’s performance without additional data.
Instead of tracking an attainment percentage alone, look closer at bookings and opportunities won against a goal, sales cycles, conversion rates by stage, pipeline trends, and more. Mosaic helps you do just that by integrating with all of your most important source systems — CRM, HRIS, ERP, billing systems, and data warehouses — and presenting sales performance metrics in real time. Automate data aggregation and metric calculations so you can focus more on uncovering the strategic insights behind sales data.
Sales team performance dashboard in Mosaic
Reach out for a personalized demoto learn how Mosaic can help you find insights into where you could improve quota attainment.
