Pipeline and Sales Quota Capacity, or Street Quota, are considered among the most important of all the planning outputs. If you have excellent sales cycle execution – lead generation, velocity, win rates, ASP – but not enough people capacity to both create opportunities as well as work and close deals, you will struggle to get to your targets. You may pull it out over a month or even a quarter, but the overload on your reps will not be sustainable, the quality of execution will suffer, and you will miss opportunities to drive growth. 

If you have too much people capacity, especially if your execution KPIs are not performing well, your efficiencies will be seriously and negatively impacted. You will be incurring too much expense to produce too little. 

Planning for Quota Capacity is the intersection and output of several fundamental planning assumptions. These include quotas, ramps, hiring, attrition, and attainment. In this article, we'll focus on Revenue Attainment compared to Quota Attainment.

Understanding Quota Attainment and Revenue Attainment

Quota Attainment:

• Key questions answered: How well are we closing revenue against actual quota capacity? Are we being efficient, i.e. are quotas set accurately?
• How to measure: Revenue Actual divided by Actual Quota Capacity (which is the sum of assigned quota for in-seat reps, or projected to be in-seat, compared to planned quota capacity)
• Noteworthy: You may have strong Quota Attainment, but not enough capacity and therefore miss your targets. In an ideal scenario, Quota Attainment should track to your planned attainment factor.

Revenue Attainment - which can also be considered Bookings Attainment:

• Key questions answered: Are we achieving our revenue targets? What is driving the over/under performance?
• How to measure: Revenue actual divided by revenue in plan
• Noteworthy: Revenue attainment helps you understand business plan achievement and financial health. It is important to investigate the drivers of over/under performance to reduce risk and take advantage of opportunities. This KPI drives you to adjust planned assumptions going forward.

Measuring Revenue Attainment with Quota Attainment

Monitoring attainment for both revenue and Quota Capacity is important to understand the correlation between the two. This helps you stay on top of performance and to better forecast revenue for future months and quarters. 

In our example table below, the first quarter (January through March) shows actual Quota Capacity was near the planning target, and actual performance exceeded plan by a few percentage points. However, as Quota Capacity decreased in April due to attrition, revenue performance started to decrease – despite efficient actual performance to Quota Capacity. In other words, the remaining reps performed well and were highly productive, but there just wasn’t enough total Quota Capacity to hit the revenue targets. 

Having such insights highlights the critical need to stay on top of other factors that directly influence attainment: hiring, attrition, ramps, and backfilling of lost Quota Capacity. These are just as important and impactful as pipeline conversions, win rates, and ASP.

It's best to have a reporting mechanism that can show Revenue Attainment on a monthly basis, while Quota Attainment can often be on a quarterly reporting cadence (unless your average sales cycles run on the shorter side such as <60 days, then monthly is recommended there as well). The outputs should be of high interest to the C-suite, particularly the CEO, CFO, and CRO, as well as sales team leadership, RevOps, and Finance's planning and analytics team.

Automating the Reporting and Insights

Along with all the other KPIs you are tracking or hope to additionally track, this can feel overwhelming from an ongoing data collection, normalization, and calculation standpoint so that you are getting meaningful insights in the context of your business goals and compared to your plan. The good news is that Revcast is built for this. The solution integrates easily with your CRM and offers pre-built dashboards, reporting, and AI-driven alerting on these and many other KPIs.

Here are some example screenshots from Revcast that show how this becomes readily digestible to GTM leaders and stakeholders:

‍Request a demo to see this in action to make your reporting and decisions easier and swifter, with minimal lift on your side.

Want more KPI help to measure and optimize your GTM plan? Get our ebook: "Revenue Growth: The Metrics You Can't Ignore"

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