Attainment

Revenue divided by quota, per person, per period. Rolled up by summing revenue and quota, never by averaging attainment percentages across people.

DefinitionRevenue divided by quota, per person, per period. Rolled up by summing revenue and quota, never by averaging attainment percentages across people.

The averaging error

Two reps at 120 and 60 percent with quotas of 1m and 3m are not at 90 percent; they are at 75. Sum the numerator and the denominator.

Against target, in the tile

Year-to-date revenue against annual target is attainment; the delta beside it must be on the same period, or the tile compares a year figure to a quarter's move.

How it is computed

Revenue credited to a person in the period divided by that person's quota. Team attainment is total revenue over total quota, never the average of individual percentages.

Example

Three reps: $900,000 on $1,000,000, $300,000 on $200,000, and $500,000 on $800,000. Team attainment is $1.7 million over $2.0 million, 85 percent. The average of the three percentages is 101 percent, which is wrong.

Where it goes wrong

Averaging percentages. A rep with a small quota and a big quarter pulls the average up and hides a shortfall on the large territories.

Articles that use this term

Coverage and territory · Sales teams

A new rep's first ninety days, from the data: the list that replaces shadowing

What a newly hired rep should be given on day one from the book they inherit: the accounts ranked by revenue with days since last touch, the returning lines that were bought and dropped, the dormant accounts with their cadence and run rate, the open deals with slip counts, and the tier cadence that says who to call first. A ninety-day plan in three lists, the measures that say whether the ramp is on track, and why it beats a week of shadowing.

16 Sept 20263 min read Territory, capacity and quota planning

Activity and outcome measures: which belong in compensation, and which do not

Why paying reps on activity measures produces activity and paying them only on outcomes produces sandbagging, the three tests a measure passes before it goes into a plan, the rep controls it, it cannot be gamed by logging, and it reconciles to a ledger, which coverage and outcome measures pass, which fail, the coverage-at-cadence exception that passes all three, and the identity that every credited dollar in a plan is a ledger dollar once.

16 Sept 20263 min read Territory, capacity and quota planning

Five data checks before the commission run, so the payout is right the first time

Five checks a sales operations team runs on the crediting data before commissions are calculated: credited revenue equals the ledger, every split sums to one, every credited line has an assignment in force on its date, overlay credit sits apart from split credit, and every rate and threshold is on the current plan version. Each with the failure it catches, the exception list it produces, and why a payout corrected afterwards costs more than the check.

16 Sept 20262 min read How-to guides

How often should sales data be refreshed? A cadence per measure, not one for the tool

Why 'real-time' is the wrong answer to how often sales data should be refreshed, the cadence each measure actually needs, weekly for coverage and pipeline, monthly for share of wallet and concentration, quarterly for norms and segments, annually for definitions, what a refresh more frequent than the measure's cadence does to the reader, and the export schedule that follows.

16 Sept 20262 min read Territory, capacity and quota planning

How to measure sales effectiveness: five ratios from the ledger and the CRM

Five ratios that together describe whether a sales team is effective, each computed from exports the company holds: coverage at cadence, meeting-to-opportunity conversion, win rate by segment, revenue per touch, and share of wallet against the norm. Why activity counts and quota attainment are not among them, how the five are read together per rep, and the one-page view that replaces the activity dashboard.

16 Sept 20263 min read Board and management reporting

Level and trend: why the direction outranks the number on almost every desk

Why the level of a measure, 52 percent concentration, 74 percent OTIF, 88 percent lock-up, is the least informative thing about it and the trend against the measure's own history is the finding, the four exceptions where a level is a hard threshold, the window a trend needs, the consecutive-period rule that separates a bad month from a deterioration, the trend of the reference itself, and the rule that every level on a report carries its trend beside it.

16 Sept 20263 min read