Top Insights From the Best: Mark Donnolo

Mark Donnolo is the author of many books and articles, including:

• What Your CEO Needs to Know About Sales Compensation: Connecting the Corner Office to the Front Line
•  "Quotas! Using Design Thinking to Solve Your Biggest Challenge" 
• and other books for sales leadership

Mark Donnolo is also the founder and managing partner of SalesGlobe, a leading sales advisory firm focused on solving your biggest sales challenges.  Areas of focus include sales strategy, customer segmentation, channel strategy, sales organization design and deployment, performance management, and incentive compensation.  For over 25 years, Mark has worked with Global 1000 organizations on strategies to grow revenue.

In this episode:

- How Sales Compensation is all about solving problems

- Why Sales Compensation is "human" (and it's not just a formula)

- What is a Revenue Roadmap and why it relates to Sales Compensation

- Hear about how many measurements & accelerators you should have

- How setting quota too high is a major problem in sales organizations (if not the #1 according to Mark)

- How much should each measure represent in a sales comp formula

- On average why only 42% of reps are benchmarked to be above quota

- When setting Sales Comp strategy, how much % of your reps should actually hit their quota target

- The 3 factors for setting correct quota - 1. Predictability, 2. Cost of Sales and 3. Motivation

- What does "Winning Ugly" mean

- How better "Challenge Questions" expand your thinking

- The 3 linchpins of solving your quota - 1. People, 2. Marketing Opportunity, and  3. Sales Capacity

- Best practices of measuring Sales Capacity: Sales Time Allocation, Level of Workload, and Quality of Talent (& using a Sales Time Optimization Tool)

- On Performance Distribution and Over-Allocation ("padding") and uplift of the sum of AE goals when setting Quota for the team and the Board

- Why and how CROs / EVPs of Sales need to educate PE and VC investors