Stupid Sales Targets - Who are they trying to impress?

Jonathan_Powell · 10 January 2021 at 8:26PM

I've always found it interesting that very senior people, sometimes the owners themselves, seem to be fooled or impressed with what is essentially fictitious numbers. In a previous role, you were judged solely on the amount of leads you could generate and a lead was counted as a working telephone number. No exaggeration, you'll get more credit for providing 10 leads, with every person called telling you to !!!!!! off, than the person who provided one lead that turned into a £1m deal with massive commissions.

On my current role I've come across this mentality a number of times but with two recent examples standing out. For context I'm providing leads for lending opportunities. I didn't log one and explained on my team call the reason was because the individual didn't earn enough and had literally zero chance of getting a loan. My boss cut me off and said something along the lines of qualifying leads is not my role and I should log everything, in turn referring it to the lending team. Forward a few weeks later and there's a U-turn in strategy as the quality of leads has fallen off a cliff and the other team is inundated with crap. This was obvious and the reason behind it is obvious; my boss being under pressure to provide growing lead numbers. What I don't understand is who is being impressed with these numbers and not looking at the bottom line? The only reason it changed was because the low quality came up during a call and the negative affect it was causing.

Second example is with targets. Our individual targets for January are the highest we've ever had. One thing we were spoken to about previously is being realistic about our predictions against those targets and don't say what we think our bosses want to hear and subsequently revising those down. Hell, in the same conversation, I was told regarding my predictions to stretch them out to get them closer to the target (that's never been achieved by anyone).

Anyone else in sales or more interestingly, in a leadership position and have an opinion on such behaviour?

ACG · 10 January 2021 at 8:54PM

If you give people targets and apply pressure and/or bonuses to hit them, people will find any way to hit them.

When I worked for a bank, I started in customer services. 95% of the time peoples calls were answered in under 30 seconds and number of unhappy customers I dealt with was low. After about 18 months they changed out role to "sales and service", at first targets were given but with no real requirements to hit them. In time the inevitable came where if you were not hitting targets you were hauled into meetings.

That lead to 2 things:
1) Really good, customer focused people leaving.
2) People do whatever necessary to hit the targets. That meant shafting customers and shafting colleagues. Call times went up, it got to the point where our call waiting time was never under 10 minutes. Complaints rocketed, compensation rocketed and sales targets increased and I spent about 10-15% of my time dealing with customers who had been suckered in to buying something, or worse, sold something they never even agreed to.

If you give people a target to generate leads, they will generate leads. If you target people against quality, they will only pass through the low hanging fruit.

TELLIT01 · 10 January 2021 at 11:14PM

When I worked on claims processing for the DWP, the number of claims we had to process in order to satisfy our KPI were constantly being raised. When I said to our line manager that it was impossible to do all the necessary checks prior to processing and still hit the numbers I was told that accuracy wasn't a KPI and wasn't checked. Therefore in the opinion of our manager the only thing that mattered was hitting the numbers. Any problems caused by insufficient checking prior to processing would be dealt with by another section. Part of their KPIs was to find errors in the work done by our team, but not to refer those errors back to us to fix.

The system was flawed from the outset because, if we did our job properly it would be impossible for that other team to achieve their own KPIs!

[Deleted User] · 10 January 2021 at 11:25PM

ACG said:
2) People do whatever necessary to hit the targets. That meant shafting customers and shafting colleagues.

This, exactly...and in the end, the business suffers.

Bungle5393 · 21 January 2021 at 9:23AM

I've been a senior manager in retail for 20 years now, and just about every meeting or conference call I've ever been involved in can be distilled down into 2 simple words - "sell more".
Targets set are often never achievable, they are designed to be just out of reach so that any bonus payment isn't triggered. The net effect of this is you have a whole bunch of people getting wound up at the fact that you're not hitting the numbers - this then has a negative impact on customers and service levels and suddenly you're at the start of a downward spiral.
Focusing on customer service, experience and added value is the way forward (I've always believed this). Taking a long-term vision of building customer engagement is what will make your business stand out and be successful. Short-term focus on hitting the numbers won't.

Fighter1986 · 21 January 2021 at 11:56AM

From a customer perspective -

Every bank, lender, utility provider, and retail outlet that has persistently tried to upsell me or cross-sell me something I haven't asked for and don't clearly need, I have cut ties with and will never deal with again so long as I live.

The only provider I have dealings with that do try to upsell me are Three; but I have to speak to them so rarely it doesn't bother me hugely and its a very soft sell.

I think the biggest reason for this attitude isn't even that of not needing or wanting what I'm being sold - it's more the not being in control.

It's my decision to make. It's for me to solicit the service or product.

I won't have that decided for me.

Sandtree · 23 February 2022 at 12:07PM

Not something new and probably not something going away any time soon.

Proper thought needs to be given to KPIs/targets but when you break the process down over multiple people you also have to ensure personal performance can be measured in isolation. So for example you could say that the lead generation team should get their commission based on the sales that those leads generate but if you are unlucky and your great leads are passed to the worst closer on the planet you get poor commission.

There will always be challenges with short term thinking too, and that's not limited to sales. A former call centre was required to answer all calls within 30 seconds and so an industrious Ops manager simply put an auto-responder into the call system such that after 29 seconds the call went to an automated message asking them to call back. Stats were hit for the first time ever but customer satisfaction plummeted. The consequences took longer to filter through by which point bonuses had already been paid out.

The reality however is that targets have to be straightforward enough for people to be measured, ideally not subjective and at least moderately quick to be measured (or at least proportional to the amounts involved). To actually do this so that no one can game them or develop negative behaviours and the short and long term business objectives is massively more difficult to do.

The one thing I would say though, even if targets have to be simple etc that doesn't mean that other BI cannot be more complex which can be used to identify emerging challenges and allow adjustments to the simpler targets to correct.

eamon · 23 February 2022 at 5:23PM

It can often be a case of "feel the quantity and nevermind the quality" of KPI's. Using poorly thought out metrics & KPI's as a management tool is in my opinion a very blunt instrument and should illustrate that the management team has no idea. Sadly not. My current workplace is full of this thinking.