“Why didn’t we hit quota?’”

Reading that question might give you flashbacks to some of the most stressful moments of your career.

The executive team is frustrated you missed your quarterly targets. They’re feeling pressure from investors, and the board to perform. They’ve invested in you, giving you additional headcount, call-recording software, sales training software, sales enablement tools, and software to help your scale their personalized outreach.

You’ve increased pressure on your teams to increase pipeline generation. Everyone is making cold calls, and sending out emails like their life depends on it.

Yet despite all these changes and improvements to your sales motion, you still failed to hit quota.

Questions start to pop into your head:

• Is it the economic climate?
• Is our product missing features that are important to our ICP?
• Is marketing just sending us crappy leads?
• Are we getting outpriced by the competition?
• Or do I just suck at my job? 

Logically, you run some CRM reports, talk to some reps about some of the bigger closed-lost deals from the previous quarter, and you develop a hypothesis about why you’re not hitting quota. 

You show up to your revenue strategy meeting and present your answer, hoping that it reassures your leadership team. Then, you propose your plan to do better next quarter. Yet, despite the confidence you projected to leadership while presenting your plan, in the back of your mind there’s a sliver of doubt as you think, “I hope I’m right on this…”