How can you fairly balance opportunity value for reps?

Video Transcript

Sacha: I like to try to map it out if possible and have a process that you can have some fairness to, and then add adjustments after the fact. So one really interesting thing we’ve done is if you had a set of five products, for example, you might price out what the average price for those five products are.

Let’s take a round number, say it’s $100,000 of products, of $500,000. So each account, if they hadn’t purchased anything with us in the past, would be worth $500,000. But then you’d adjust for customers and you’d say, okay, well these customers already have three of our products. So they’re worth $200,000 in terms of booking opportunity.

And then also you can layer in, well these customers are not likely to buy those products, so let’s remove some of that. And then you can kind of create a dollar value for your territory opportunity, so you can create some level of fairness from a dollar perspective rather than just number of accounts.

I’ll say all that, you know, you gotta caveat with, you know, win rates are gonna be different for your upsells, better for upsells versus new business. So unless you’ve got a hunter-gatherer kind of mix for your sales reps, you’re gonna wanna make sure there’s balance there in terms of opportunity with existing customers as well as new prospects.

Dave: Interesting. Okay, I like that. And so did you actually operationalize that by scoring accounts for what their dollar value might be worth?

Sacha: We did, yeah. We’d even tier it. So, you know, as I described there maybe your, you know, tier one larger customers would have a higher value looking at their average values, you’d make their numbers larger versus mid-size. And so we did that on an account-by-account basis. And you can kind of get as granular as practical given the accounts that you’ve got.

One of the things we do at Volante, you know, as we’re defining those SAM accounts, because it is a smaller group, we might even go down to the level of, well, we know this customer is locked up with a competitor for the next, you know, seven years. So we’re gonna take that out of the SAM because we’re not gonna have any really valuable conversations from a sales perspective, but keep them in the TAM because we can still market to them and make sure that they’re aware of who we are for the future.

So you can, you can get that granular if it’s practical and you have the intelligence.

Want to learn more?

Ready to hear more from Sacha Bakht, Director of Global Sales Operations at Volante Technologies?

You can listen to his in-depth interview in Episode 18 of the Revenue Optimists series. We’ll see you there.