Sales targets or no targets? The debate

Key takeaways

• Target-setting has a method: market appetite, serviceable capture rate, average close period, real selling time after admin, deals per rep, then the number. If a rep misses, interrogate the assumptions before the rep.

• Exceed your target and next year it goes up while your commission rate goes down. That’s a remuneration design failure, not an argument against targets.

• Kill zombie key performance indicators (KPIs). Pipeline coverage stuffed with fake deals, call cycles with no business reason, talk-time targets that get gamed. The laziest person always finds the shortest path to a badly designed metric.

• The blueprint’s real contribution is psychological safety. Safe teams perform higher, surface mistakes earlier, and tolerate the pivots a fast market demands.

• Set quarterly, not annually. A 24-month plan is fiction in the current market.

• Team-based targets let people hide. Individual accountability with a shared objective doesn’t.

I’ve exceeded my target and the next year my target was increased and my commission was reduced. You’re a victim of your own success.

Luigi Prestinenzi, co-founder, Ricavi

Give me a blueprint any day. I don’t want a benchmark of achieve this. I don’t want it, because I want to keep going.

Regan Barker, co-founder, Ricavi

Why would anyone drop sales targets?

The argument runs like unlimited leave. Remove the ceiling and hungry people go past it, because nothing tells them to stop at $5 million when $10 million is there. Give a rep a quarterly number and they’ll hit it with three weeks to spare, then sandbag the next deals into next quarter. David Fastuca lays this out fairly before Luigi Prestinenzi picks it apart. Luigi has spent his career as an individual contributor and a leader. He’s never been able to drive a team to a performance metric without someone owning a number.

Regan Barker sits between them. She loves a KPI and hates a ceiling. Parkinson’s law applies: give a meeting an hour and it takes an hour. Give a rep a target and the target becomes the finish line.

How should a target actually be set?

With a method, not a wish. Luigi’s version starts with the market. How many companies can you serve, and what share can you capture in the period? Then the mechanics. How long does a deal take to close? How much of a rep’s week is selling time once admin is removed? How many deals can one person carry? The number falls out of those inputs. When a rep misses it, the first question is whether the assumptions were wrong, not whether the rep was.

The founders are less kind to the metrics that surround the number. Three to five times pipeline coverage fills with inflated deals. Mandatory visit cycles produce visits for the sake of visits. A 90 percent phone-time target gets met by dialling your own mobile. Luigi’s own conversion from proposal to close sits between 70 and 80 percent, so a proposal quota would only push him to send worse proposals.

What’s the middle ground?

Keep the targets and change how they’re delivered. Regan’s reading is that the blueprint is really a wrapper of psychological safety around the KPI, and safe teams outperform. Set the annual number, then run it quarterly so the business can pivot when April doesn’t look like January. Make mistakes survivable, as long as they aren’t the same mistake twice. And structure remuneration so exceeding the target is rewarded rather than punished. The founders promise to revisit the question in 12 months, with Luigi’s own numbers on the table.

Questions this episode answers

Should sales teams have individual targets?

Yes, according to all three founders, with conditions. Targets should be modelled from real market and conversion data, reviewed quarterly, and delivered inside a culture where mistakes are safe to surface.

What sales KPIs should you remove?

Any activity metric that doesn’t link to an outcome. Inflated pipeline-coverage ratios, visit quotas without a business reason, and raw talk-time targets all get gamed and prove nothing.

How do you set a sales target that isn’t unrealistic?

Work from market size, capture rate, average close period, and real selling hours per rep to the number, then re-check the assumptions when results come in. If the maths doesn’t fit inside a human week, the target is broken, not the rep.