"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.

This is ridiculous. The number of LOC doesn’t define whether something is well implemented. You can’t crank out a better design or proper feature implementation by asking developers to write code faster or write more code in a given day.

> The number of LOC doesn’t define whether something is well implemented.

And a phone call doesn't mean a sale closes.

See conversation upthread.

But 100 phone calls will, there is actually no such relationship in code - in fact deleting code significantly reduces liability, I guarantee reducing sales calls will not have the same effect.