10 Mistakes You're Making in Building a Sales Team

Sales are the lifeblood of any business. Beating the plan yields optimism. Missing the number could mean a scramble for survival. Without sales, your business literally has nothing.

For this reason, I want sales to be scalable and predictable for our companies. And yet, “art form” is often a phrase used to describe sales. Art is neither scalable, nor predictable. Science is. When it comes to adding science to my sales team, I turn to my friend and advisor Mark Roberge, sales scientist, Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot, and author of the new book, The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to Go from $0 to $100M.

Here are the ten mistakes Mark sees many businesses make when scaling sales:

Mistake #1: Hiring salespeople with your gut

Hiring rock star sales people is the most important aspect to sales success. Yet, so many organizations “wing” the entire hiring process. Every sales context is different and, thus, every company has a different ideal hiring profile. Appreciate the uniqueness of your sales context, establish a theory of the hiring criteria that will work for you, and be disciplined about scoring every candidate against that criteria. As you bring on salespeople, this process enables you to learn from your mistakes, iterate, and hone in on the perfect hiring profile.

Mistake #2: Under-utilizing the sales compensation plan

The sales compensation plan is the most under-appreciated tool in the CEO’s toolkit. In thinking back to the major strategic re-directions we navigated at HubSpot, many of them were instigated by aligning the sales compensation plan with the desired strategic change. Whether looking to enter a new industry, gain market share with a particular product line, or expand into a new geography, the sales compensation plan will be the most effective driver of change.

Mistake #3: Mis-aligning sales and marketing

Traditionally, sales and marketing are two groups that have not gotten along. Marketing perceives sales as a bunch of over-paid spoiled brats. Sales feels marketing sits around doing arts and crafts all day. In an age with the majority of buying journey’s starting online, this dysfunctional relationship is the kiss of death for a company.

A properly aligned sales and marketing team is a pre-requisite to a healthy business. Quantify the deliverables that marketing and sales should commit to one another. At HubSpot, we call this agreement the Sales and Marketing Service Level Agreement, or SMarketing SLA. For example, marketing will deliver 1,500 leads per quarter that are contacts from Fortune 5000 companies within the retail, manufacturing, or technology industries. Sales will call these leads within 2 hours and convert 20% of them into sales pipeline within 30 days. Measure the SLA progress and share the report daily with the entire team. You are now empowered to manage your sales and marketing funnel every day!

Mistake #4: Not planning far enough in advance

It takes 2 months to hire a new sales person, 3 months to ramp them to full productivity, and a 4 month sales cycle to close a deal. This situation is not uncommon for a business. If anything, these timeframes may be on the aggressive side. Yet, even with these assumptions, it takes 9 months from the decision to hire a new salesperson to the time when they are fully productive. If you are a sales driven organization, your 2015 results are largely baked with the team on board in Q1. Most of the hiring you are doing now is driving your 2016 results. Plan ahead.

Mistake #5: Making forecasting, rather than coaching, the sales manager’s primary focus

Many sales managers spend the majority of their time managing the sales forecast and pipeline. This is a lost opportunity. Managers should spend the majority of their time coaching and developing their sales people. Effective sales coaching increases sales productivity. The best coaches diagnose the one or two skills that will make the biggest difference in a salesperson’s performance and customize a coaching plan to that skill. They use metrics to conduct the diagnosis. I call this process “metrics-driven sales coaching”.

Mistake #6: Motivating through fear rather than metrics

I always ask candidates why they want to move on from their current employer. Many of them complain about the fear-based, micro-management of their current environment. This type of militant management style does not motivate sales people, especially today’s millennial generation. Instead, automate a daily dashboard stack ranking the team on total dials, total connects, total discovery calls, total demos, total sales, etc. Send the dashboard out every day to the entire sales and marketing team and include the CEO. As a result, salespeople will be able to understand where they are gravitating from the “success blue-print” and self-diagnosis the areas in the funnel where they need work. At the end of the day, the salesperson, sales manager, and the company are on the same team. Enabling everyone with the daily metrics will provide the motivation and discipline you desire.

Mistake #7: Letting new salespeople shadow top performers

“Welcome to our company Bob. Do you remember our top salesperson, Sue? For your training, you are going to shadow her for two months.”

The shadowing approach to sales training is neither scalable nor predictable. In my experience, top salespeople are at the top for different reasons. They all bring a unique “super-power” to the table and lean into it heavily. A ride-along sales training strategy may dissuade sales people from leaning into their super-power. It may also encourage them to pick up bad habits from their peers. Instead, create a sales process. Certify salespeople by quantifying their aptitude with each stage of the sales process. Provide enough detail in the sales process to guide the salesperson but don’t make it too constraining that the salesperson cannot apply their “super-power”.

Mistake #8: Buying technology for management rather than the front-line salespeople

The majority of sales technology purchased over the last few decades has been purchased for the sales leader to conduct pipeline reviews and manage forecasts. The end result? The front-line salespeople do not use the software. Data integrity suffers and the original utility of the purchase is never realized.

In the last year, we have seen an explosion in sales technology that actually benefits the salesperson. It helps the salesperson sell faster by removing admin tasks and streamlines the processes they conduct dozens of times per day. It helps sales people sell better by illustrating the full buyer context to the salesperson at all times. Furthermore, technology that benefits salespeople is the best path toward capturing the data that sales leaders need to run the business. Try Hubspot's free product www.getsidekick.com as a starting point for your organization.

Mistake #9: Not experimenting enough

Every sales context is unique. Who do you sell your product to? How complicated is your product? How expensive is it? Is your product sold direct or through partners? Do most sales originate from inbound leads or outbound calls? Is it 1995 or 2005 or 2015? Varying answers to these questions call for varying approaches to the sale. Establish a baseline funnel. Form some theories on how the funnel can be improved. Devise and execute experiments. Iterate and improve.

Mistake #10: Relying on outdated demand generation techniques

When was the last time you bought something from a cold caller? How about from a piece of direct mail or unsolicited email?

Today’s buyer is empowered by the Internet. They are no longer receptive to outbound calls, emails, or advertising. In fact, buyers invest in technologies to keep these messages out of their lives. Today’s buyer begins their journey online, with a search in Google or question in social media. Yet, organizations continue to poor the majority of their sales and marketing budgets into outbound demand generation. Diversify your efforts with an inbound strategy.

Hire a journalist and team them up with the thought leaders and domain experts at your company. Have the journalist produce an eBook, a handful of blog articles, and a few dozen social media messages every month. Align the content with the questions your buyers have at the start of their journey. Help buyers find you.

Written by

Dave Kerpen

Sales Statistics

Employee Engagement: "It's Not in My Job Description"

For me, the sentence, "It's not in my job description", is a huge red flag.

It's a sure sign someone is not a team player.  It's a sign someone is a taker, not a giver. It's a sign someone is self-centered, putting their importance ahead of others.

I think I've said before how influential summer jobs can be, and today I'd like to share with you why I feel so strongly about the phrase in the title of this post.

Between my second and third years in university, I worked in the drill squad of the world famous Fort Henry Guard, based in Kingston, Ontario.

One of the unofficial mottoes of the Guard was "Remain Flexible".  The meaning of this was that, at any time, you could be asked to be a sentry, on gun drill, tour guide or cleaning up. Duties for sentry duty or gun drills were assigned each day, but sometimes we had more visitors than expected, which meant you had to be prepared to take on some new assignments.

While this may have been just a summer job, I think these principles hold true in any well-run organization.

In larger organizations, we tend to be slotted into narrowly defined roles and responsibilities that make it hard to be as flexible as we were at Old Fort Henry.  In smaller organizations, the ability to be functional in job roles outside your core responsibilities is vital.

At one company, our purchasing manager lost both parents within weeks of each other.  She was overwhelmed not only with the loss, but also the responsibilities of attending to both their estates.  As a result, she found it difficult to keep up with her job responsibilities, and purchasing was an area in which we were extremely thin on manpower.

While this was happening, we were also having quality issues with a company that supplied a critical laminated material for one of our products.  They were unable to identify for us whether the issues was the result of a fault in the lamination process or a defective batch of material. We knew we needed to find an alternate supplier for this lamination, and the process for finding one was normally managed by purchasing.

Because of the quality issue, we were prevented from manufacturing a product for one of our key customers, who were anxious to know when we would be able to re-commence supply.  They needed answers, not excuses.

I offered to take the lead on finding alternative suppliers because, in the end, it was a customer-driven issue: we had a customer who could not market their product because we were unable to supply a critical component.  So, while my job role was sales, handling a purchasing issue was also a way of solving a supply chain issue for a customer.

The more I researched companies who made one of the materials in the lamination we purchased, the more I came to realize there were literally only a handful of companies in the world who had the capabilities of making the material used, let alone being able to meet our specifications.  (Our customer thought there would be hundreds of companies who made this material and changing suppliers could be done in a couple of weeks). We were fortunate that two of those suppliers were located within a half-day's drive of our plant, so I visited them both to get a better understanding of the challenges in making the material we needed.

One of these suppliers analyzed samples of the lamination we used - both past and current - and determined that the incumbent had, despite protests otherwise, switched recipes and companies they purchased their materials from.  We now had scientific evidence to support our allegations there had been material substitutions.

A few weeks later, when our purchasing manager returned from bereavement leave, I took her to meet the company we felt represented the best opportunity to supply the lamination we needed.  This gave her a chance to see the plant as well as meet the executive team and allowed me an opportunity to transition the supplier search back to her so she could begin qualification trials.

Taking on a task normally done by purchasing gave me some insights into the challenge purchasing people face in searching for and selecting suppliers.  Given the circumstances, it helped forge a stronger relationship between sales and purchasing While helping the company respond to a customer in need.

When I left this company, the purchasing manager was the first person to come into my office and give me a hug and tell me how much they'd miss me.  I was really touched by this and it is a moment I will never forget.

I hope you can see that, in this situation, the roles of sales and purchasing were very strongly interdependent. Had we stuck to our job roles, we might still have solved the supply chain issue for our customer, but at the cost of several weeks being unable to supply them. Blurring the lines between sales and purchasing in this case demonstrated that our company really required a team effort to survive - and thrive.

Posted by Ronald Jamieson

The Power of “So What?”

You've gotta talk pain and pain relief when marketing to your ideal prospects. Take advantage of a sarcastic-sounding question that's actually a powerful marketing tool.

I suspect all of us have heard—and used—the phrase “So what?” many times. Delivered in a certain tone of voice (you know the one), it’s a snarky question guaranteed to fuel conflict.  Asked another way, however, it’s a powerful marketing tool.  When asked in a tone of genuine curiosity, “So what?” elevates our marketing from the realm of “I’m blah with blah blah and we offer blah blah blah” to the realm of “I know that you experience this type of pain, and here’s how I relieve that pain for you” 

Have a talk with yourself
In my opinion, it’s best to start by asking yourself  this pointed question. 

Whenever you identify a feature of your product and service, haul out the “So what?” guns.  This will force you to think from your client’s perspective and identify clearly why anyone cares about that particular feature; in other words, it will start you digging down to the benefit your product/service provides.

Once you’ve come up with an answer, ask the question again. Keep asking it until you’ve really drilled down to the essential value provided. Then move on to the next feature of the next service/product.

Going through this process is not necessarily fast or  easy. However, with determination, focus on the powerful marketing messages you’re creating, and massive amounts of chocolate, you’ll become much more clear on exactly how you provide value to your clients.

The big clue
How do you know when you’ve truly answered the question in a way that will improve your marketing results?  When your answer describes the emotional outcomes you create for your client : a feeling of financial security, or confidence, or relief, or personal power, or satisfaction...you get the idea.

The next step
That’s step one.  Step two is checking in with your clients to determine if what you  perceive as high value is the same as what they perceive.  Many times you’ll be beautifully aligned with how your clients are feeling and thinking. However, to simply assume you know what they most value is just begging to waste time, money, and effort on marketing messages that fail to address what’s important from the client’s perspective—which, after all, is the one that really matters.

How do you confirm or disprove your hypothesis about your product’s/service’s crucial value?  Ask.  Spend some time creating a survey that will genuinely take five minutes or less to complete, then send it to your customers.  You can do this at no charge by using a service like SurveyMonkey, you can ask for help with a posting on your company Facebook page, or you can tweet it.

As with any type of communication, your request for input has to answer the client’s question, “What’s in it for me to take time to do this?”  Here’s where the ethical bribe comes in.

You can arrange to put the name of everyone who responds in a drawing for a $100 gift card to the store of their choice; you can limit the drawing to the first X people to respond; you can send all respondents a $5 card to a local coffee shop.  This tangible bribe is, naturally, in addition to pointing out that getting guidance directly from your customers is going to allow you to improve your level of service and the amount of value they receive from you.

Once you’ve gathered your data, it’s crucial to acknowledge your clients’ input and to promptly start addressing any concerns that you uncovered.  Asking how you can improve and then failing to act on the information is a sure-fire way to create bad feelings—and decreased revenues.

Fer instance...
I’m launching a business called Stepping Into Big. Here’s one way to describe it:
Stepping Into Big, LLC, offers a highly collaborative, 90-day, business-building program comprising three modules. Delivery focuses on where the client is and where she wants to end up. Derailers addresses those mental and operational obstacles which have gotten her off track in the past. And Delivery looks at the challenges she faces in actually implementing her ideas. Clients finish the 90 days with a high-level Master Action Plan for moving forward as well as more detailed individual action plans in five key success areas. 

Yawn. 

Okay, maybe not a huge yawn, but, really: Why would I just list attributes of the service instead of addressing the prospect’s pain and the type of pain-relief outcomes she can expect from working with me?  Would the following description perhaps resonate more with my ideal client?

Are you so paralyzed by all the things you could do to grow your business that you struggle to decide what you will do?  Do you cringe when you think of all the great ideas that never get implemented?  Then maybe it’s time to get some help so you can start creating a bigger business as well as a bigger life.  In just 90 days, the Stepping Into Big co-creative process will get you out of overwhelm and into control. You’ll feel confident, clear, and calm after we’ve developed a strategic Master Action Plan as well as detailed, tactical individual action plans in five key success areas to get you out of neutral and moving briskly down your road to success. Stepping Into Big provides a guiding hand for your journey to genius.

Bottom Line
We owe it to ourselves, our businesses, and especially our customers to clearly and compellingly share our value.  If your product or service is the answer to a prospect’s prayers, I think you actually have an obligation to that prospect to make it clear how you move them from pain to peace.  Asking the tough question “So what?” will make it easier to connect with the people whom you can best serve—and isn’t that the point of it all?

I shook the dust of W-2 work from my feet in 2000 and never looked back. Now, as an implementation specialist, I use the Take Action Now System (tm) to create customized action plans that propel clients down the road to more clients and more money.

Kathleen Watson

9 Ways Social Media Marketing Will Change in 2014

Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News

From the decline of Facebook use among teens to Twitter's IPO, if there is one thing we know for sure about social media, it's that few trends hold on for long — so marketers need to stay on their toes.

With that in mind, we asked nine successful entrepreneurs how they are planning on altering their social media marketing strategies in the next six months, based on their predictions for the new year. Here's what they had to say. 

1. Graphic software will rise.

 

Posts on Facebook with photos get 53% more likes, 104% more comments and 84% more click-throughs than text-based posts, according to Kissmetrics. With the rise of Pinterest and Tumblr, it's going to become increasingly important to produce content in visual form, whether it is infographics, images with text overlay or pretty quote graphics. We'll be using more graphic software to turn our written content into visual content to make it more shareable on social media.
- Laura Pepper Wu, 30 Day Books 

2. Social won't be used for sales.
 

People love to buy, but they hate to be sold. Companies currently celebrating the most success in social media focus on engagement, nurturing relationships and sharing value through their social outreach. Customers and prospects will seek out companies offering value, entertainment, discounts, help and engagement.
- Charles Gaudet, Predictable Profits 

3. Automation will explode.
 

 A lot currently rides on the shoulders of social media marketers. They have to be on top of brand voice, any current company promotions or marketing campaigns, the tools they measure social media with, the various communities on the platforms, etc. It's a lot, and it's more varied than most people are capable of doing well. In 2014, we'll see a lot of automation of the tactics (think timing, platform, structure, etc.), so social media marketers can focus on the content and the genuine social interaction. Autonomics is being adopted now and will only explode as more technologies come online in 2014.
- Brennan White, Watchtower 

4. LinkedIn will become the most important publisher.
 

Imagine a publication with more than 100 million captive readers and writers, such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson, all natively hooked into and targeted to a social network. LinkedIn will become a premium destination for industry news, and you need to take part in that ecosystem early and often. Publish original content, network among peers in groups and raise your profile now.
- Trevor Sumner, LocalVox 

5. Content will be bigger and better.
 

Simple messages and simple questions aren't enough anymore. To achieve a deeper connection with your customers, a company needs to engage on a deeper and more intelligent level. Short videos, infographics, quality imagery and polls are all ways to engage deeper. Companies need to look at the content they put out and ask themselves, "Is this shareable?" An example of a huge company that's doing this really well right now is Wal-Mart. Its content is smart and engaging, and the fan engagement is very high by comparison to its competitors. Also, companies need to focus on the fans they have and not the fans they want. If your message is always trying to reach out, you'll bore the fans that have chosen to connect with you.
- Andrew Howlett, Rain 

6. Social will need to stand out.
 

Social media has really started to mature. Therefore, it will be a lot harder to stand out. To win big in social media, you'll have to think outside the box and find ways to get your content to stand out in all the noise.
- Wade Foster, Zapier 

7. Social media campaigns will have to be paid.
 

 I assume that the most effective social media campaigns in 2014 will be paid. The key is learning how to use Facebook and Twitter's paid tools now so that you'll have an edge on the competition. For instance, are you using Facebook's advanced audience tool? It allows you to upload your email database and send specific response messages directly to your focused audience. Imagine being able to segment both email marketing and Facebook ads to your target audience. Facebook already offers these types of advanced tools, and they will become more mainstream in 2014. Similarly, Twitter is now public and has been making an aggressive push into paid advertising. If you are a brand and want to succeed on Twitter in 2014, get ready to pay for it.
- Kristopher Jones, ReferLocal.com 

8. Interactive content will trump static content.
 

Creating static content is too easy. In 2014, the bar will be raised on the type of content people choose to engage with. Expect to see content become more interactive (think software-like). The year 2013 was the year of "Top 10" lists. To get users to engage to the same degree in 2014 and subsequent years, publishers will need to make it increasingly engaging, and one effective way to do that is to make your content interactive.
- Chuck Cohn, Varsity Tutors 

9. Google+ will merge into the social scene.
 

As Google continues to merge its products, it’s becoming more and more important in the social media landscape. There are so many benefits to using Google+. It creates a strong community that allows you to use your brand and identify consumers who share an interest in your products. It also allows your brand to become more social with like-minded consumers. They provide like-minded consumers a platform to connect with one another.

This builds a strong community, which is a great way to get feedback on new and old products from real-time consumers.
- Nicolas Gremion, Free-eBooks.net

Scott GerberScott Gerber is a serial entrepreneur, author (Never Get a 'Real' Job), TV commentator and founder of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world's most promising young entrepreneur...More

Employee Engagement: "It's Not in My Job Description"

For me, the sentence, "It's not in my job description", is a huge red flag.

It's a sure sign someone is not a team player.  It's a sign someone is a taker, not a giver. It's a sign someone is self-centered, putting their importance ahead of others.

I think I've said before how influential summer jobs can be, and today I'd like to share with you why I feel so strongly about the phrase in the title of this post.

Between my second and third years in university, I worked in the drill squad of the world famous Fort Henry Guard, based in Kingston, Ontario.

One of the unofficial mottoes of the Guard was "Remain Flexible".  The meaning of this was that, at any time, you could be asked to be a sentry, on gun drill, tour guide or cleaning up. Duties for sentry duty or gun drills were assigned each day, but sometimes we had more visitors than expected, which meant you had to be prepared to take on some new assignments.

While this may have been just a summer job, I think these principles hold true in any well-run organization.

In larger organizations, we tend to be slotted into narrowly defined roles and responsibilities that make it hard to be as flexible as we were at Old Fort Henry.  In smaller organizations, the ability to be functional in job roles outside your core responsibilities is vital.

At one company, our purchasing manager lost both parents within weeks of each other.  She was overwhelmed not only with the loss, but also the responsibilities of attending to both their estates.  As a result, she found it difficult to keep up with her job responsibilities, and purchasing was an area in which we were extremely thin on manpower.

While this was happening, we were also having quality issues with a company that supplied a critical laminated material for one of our products.  They were unable to identify for us whether the issues was the result of a fault in the lamination process or a defective batch of material. We knew we needed to find an alternate supplier for this lamination, and the process for finding one was normally managed by purchasing.

Because of the quality issue, we were prevented from manufacturing a product for one of our key customers, who were anxious to know when we would be able to re-commence supply.  They needed answers, not excuses.

I offered to take the lead on finding alternative suppliers because, in the end, it was a customer-driven issue: we had a customer who could not market their product because we were unable to supply a critical component.  So, while my job role was sales, handling a purchasing issue was also a way of solving a supply chain issue for a customer.

The more I researched companies who made one of the materials in the lamination we purchased, the more I came to realize there were literally only a handful of companies in the world who had the capabilities of making the material used, let alone being able to meet our specifications.  (Our customer thought there would be hundreds of companies who made this material and changing suppliers could be done in a couple of weeks). We were fortunate that two of those suppliers were located within a half-day's drive of our plant, so I visited them both to get a better understanding of the challenges in making the material we needed.

One of these suppliers analyzed samples of the lamination we used - both past and current - and determined that the incumbent had, despite protests otherwise, switched recipes and companies they purchased their materials from.  We now had scientific evidence to support our allegations there had been material substitutions.

A few weeks later, when our purchasing manager returned from bereavement leave, I took her to meet the company we felt represented the best opportunity to supply the lamination we needed.  This gave her a chance to see the plant as well as meet the executive team and allowed me an opportunity to transition the supplier search back to her so she could begin qualification trials.

Taking on a task normally done by purchasing gave me some insights into the challenge purchasing people face in searching for and selecting suppliers.  Given the circumstances, it helped forge a stronger relationship between sales and purchasing While helping the company respond to a customer in need.

When I left this company, the purchasing manager was the first person to come into my office and give me a hug and tell me how much they'd miss me.  I was really touched by this and it is a moment I will never forget.

I hope you can see that, in this situation, the roles of sales and purchasing were very strongly interdependent. Had we stuck to our job roles, we might still have solved the supply chain issue for our customer, but at the cost of several weeks being unable to supply them. Blurring the lines between sales and purchasing in this case demonstrated that our company really required a team effort to survive - and thrive.

Posted by Ronald Jamieson

How do you know it shouldn’t have been 34%?

Suzanne Levesque

There’s a story about a consultant being interviewed by the CEO of a large company for a potential assignment.

The story goes that the CEO shoots the consultant a steely gaze, leans back in his chair and says “While I’ve been in charge of this organisation for the last 3 years we’ve enjoyed an annual growth rate of over 21%, why the hell should I hire you?”

After a pause the consultant replies “How do you know it shouldn’t have been 34%”
He gets the gig.

It’s an amusing story, and one that’s worth keeping in mind when you’re putting together a business plan or revenue forecast.

Why? Well it comes back to a topic I’ve posted about previously which is the need to challenge assumptions in business strategy.

Here we’re in the realm of “what you don’t know about what you do know” which is a bit of a mind-melter I agree but basically it’s what you’ve baked into your thinking without thinking about it.

In organisations this is referred to as your “culture”, or “how we do things around here”.
As human beings it’s how we operate in the world; it’s the accumulation of our experiences and learnings over the years. It’s just the stuff we do without thinking about it.

I remember when I joined my last company as an employee with a challenge to turnaround declining revenues in the service and maintenance division of an equipment supplier.

The first thing I needed was some data and after asking around no-one had any.

A quick trip upstairs to IT and a chat with the resident techie in the DP room and I came back down with all the data I needed.

When discussing my analysis with other managers at the next Ops meeting everyone sat around slack jawed and shocked that I had managed to get hold of data that “for years” they had been asking for.

Fortunately for me, as an outsider to a very hierarchical organisation, I didn’t realise there was a way of doing things – I just went and got what I wanted.

This might have ruffled a few feathers but I didn’t care as it quickly enabled me to zero in on what was going wrong and put in place changes that successfully reversed over 5 years worth of declining revenues.

In the case of the story with our consultant, challenging the status quo when things are going well is something that rarely happens.

Everyone in sales knows that when you’re on target you’re left alone. My old sales boss, many moons ago, used to have a phrase that he didn’t care whether I was “tap dancing on Main Street on Friday afternoon” as long as I hit my quota.

But, of course, my quota was just a number that someone made up. Of course, it was based on some historical extrapolation or an arbitrary % of some larger target number that someone else made up (based on who knows what).

What if you’re hitting your targets but only working at half capacity? What if you’re actually leaving money on the table because you’re under-selling and under-pricing?

Of course, maybe you are doing everything you can do and your performance is absolutely top notch.

But how do you know that?