"No, it's less effort than that"

“Pushing sales people to increase their amount of sales/quota is like asking meteorologists for sunshine”.

Hmmm it doesn’t seem unreasonable in that context? You’re really asking people to work more effectively, to accomplish the same amount of work more quickly.

It’s like asking sales people what their quota should be. They pick a number that is no-brainer hittable, because there is a lot of complexity and many unknown variables in getting deals signed, so to prevent looking bad they’ll pad their number. But their no-brainer number is below what the business needs.

So you tell them their quota is going to be a bit higher. They’ll have to stretch to hit it.

And it’s even MORE important since their comp is DIRECTLY tied to hitting that number.

And yet sales people aren’t writing article after article about how self-set quotas are sacrosanct, should only settable by sales people themselves, and how clueless management is to try to get more performance above the no-brainer target.

Isn’t sales a numbers game for the most part? Like you can convert 10% of leads, so if I need 5 conversions instead of 4, I need to call ~10 more people?

A better comparison to software I think would be construction of a novel building. Try constructing a geodesic dome house with no experience, and little knowledge of the issues you might run into, but then you’re asked for accurate estimates and then pressured to shorten them.

> I need to call ~10 more people?

I need to write 10 more lines, code for 10 for minutes, etc.

Except a sale is a sale; did they buy it or did they not? There's additional nuance for whether they'll buy again or what support they need going forward, but a sale is still a sale.

A program is not just a program. A bug fix is not just a bug fix. They are not fungible, while sales, definitionally due to the exchange of money, are fungible.

Taking a narrow view, maybe. But a sale in a jurisdiction you don’t currently have other customers in could impose significant regulatory burden for relatively little gain. A single 100x sale is very different than 100 1x sales both in overhead you’ll have and in how much leverage the customer will have in the future, etc

If we consider that Fungibility is on a continuum of very low on the left and very high on the right. Where do you think most sales fall on the continuum?

I'd claim that businesses are biased toward chasing a highly fungible sales model, to the point of eliminating the need for a salesperson altogether, and so naturally sales tends to the right.