Articulating Part-year sales performance…
Yesterday I posted about normalizing deal and quota terminology/timeframes across all sales roles for consistency. Another important thing to normalize is quotas to annualized numbers – especially as very few people start and leave their employer on December 31st and resume reviewers don’t have time to associate part-year tenures with part-year quotas in a 10-second glance at your resume. This is all about optics and making your numbers easy to digest for the reviewer
This is how you should articulate partial years’ performance versus quota…(see worked example in the spreadsheet below)
GOOD – Percentage achievement versus annualized absolute number quota. State the ramp-up period (e.g. 3 months) and the annualized quota number.
e.g (see bits in red in spreadsheet).
“143% on an annualized quota of 1.2m (3-month ramp)”
OR
“did 89% of annualized 1.2m quota in the 9 months up to my departure”
BAD – absolute achievement versus absolute Ramp quota.
Why not? This often makes the quota look artificially low and sometimes makes you look say more mid-market versus enterprise-focused.
e.g (see spreadsheet). “Achiveved 1m on a 700k ramp quota.”
Here the 700k reads like a mid-market quota at first glance versus the real annualized quota of 1.2m which will be perceived as enterprise-level.
BAD – absolute achievement versus full-year quota.
Why not? Because it makes you look like you sucked!
e.g (see spreadsheet). “Achieved 700k on a 1.2m full-year quota”
Even if you state it was part year the damage is done with the 700k optics.
BAD – extrapolated absolute annualized achievement versus annualized quota.
Why not? This can make achievement look exaggerated
e.g (see spreadsheet) “Achieved 1.7m annualized on a 1.2m annualized quota”
This will look like you are being too liberal with your numbers and I would expect a good sales manager to drill down on potential achievement air-brushing elsewhere…
