Underrated Sales Metric: Ramping Quota

For our recent eBook, we asked several sales leaders to name a sales metric that more managers should be tracking. One of the sales leaders we spoke with was Box’s VP of Sales Productivity, Doug Landis.

Box’s VP of Sales Productivity Doug Landis

In Sales, it’s far too easy to focus your attention on the low hanging fruits of sales analytics (e.g. revenue, pipe, activity, lead conversion etc). However, there is one metric that can dramatically impact a company’s bottom line that no one does a great job of tracking: ramping rep performance.

In order to track your newly hired reps’ performance, you need to incorporate quota data in Salesforce. Not just their full role-based quota (e.g. $750k)—you also need to insert their ramping quota, which expires after they are no longer on a ramping schedule. As we all know, the earlier you feed your new reps the champagne you drink, the more likely they will succeed.

Early wins are critical to ensuring that a rep feels like they made the right decision to join your team and have the appropriate support to continue to succeed. If you can’t highlight how your reps are performing, then how do you justify the time and energy you spent on-boarding them? How do you identify the HIPO’s (high performers) and the laggards early on?

I can tell you this: in bootcamp (or whatever you call your onboarding program), it’s really easy to see who is going to make it and who isn’t. But it’s even more important to have the data to support you. Your leadership team, board and investors don’t see what you see, they just see the numbers. So invest the time up front to ensure you’ve got reps’ start date, cohort and ramping quota in Salesforce so you can create dashboards that show how badass your on-boarding program is (and that you’re hiring the right caliber of folks).

Doug Landis
VP of Sales Productivity
Box