Sales leaders usually balance accountability with fairness, and it’s one of the harder parts of this job to get right. Quota numbers can start to feel unrealistic, and when that happens, you want to protect your top performers, but you also need standards to stay the same for everyone on the team. During the pandemic, plenty of businesses waited way too long to make adjustments to their quotas (or they never adjusted them at all). As a result, they ended up losing their best reps to other opportunities.
Timing matters a lot for quota adjustments. A rep who loses a big account through no fault of their own will remember how leadership responded when times got tough. The way that you handle that situation will show whether they stay for the next rough patch or start answering calls from recruiters.
A real obstacle versus plain underperformance – these two scenarios can be hard to tell apart when you’re in the middle of a situation like this. Some scenarios are going to need you to step in and give immediate relief to your team, and others are going to need your reps to adapt and push through on their own. The difference between these two actually matters quite a bit, because if you hand out relief to a rep who just needs to work harder, it’s going to demoralize everyone else on your team who is already putting in the effort!
Let’s look at the times when quota relief makes sense for your team!
What Are the Real Quota Relief Options
Adjustments are the concrete changes that you make to a rep’s targets or timeline when the original plan just stops working. This might mean that you drop their monthly number by 20%. Or maybe you give them an extra quarter to close out what’s already sitting in their pipeline. Other adjustments are more strategic – you might pull them off of new business and have them work on renewals instead.
Most sales teams have never taken the time to define what “relief” means in practice, and it causes problems for everyone involved. One rep walks into your office expecting their target to get cut in half. Another rep assumes you’ll exclude some of the deals when it’s time to calculate their attainment. A third rep hopes you’ll suspend their quota for a month or two. When everyone has a different idea of what relief should be, one of them will walk away disappointed after you make your call.
Your best move is to work out what you’re willing to give before any of your reps show up at your door. Write out the different types of adjustments that you’d actually be willing to make for a rep who needs it. Would you drop their quota by as much as 30%? Can you extend their close dates by 60 days at the most? Maybe you’d switch them from gross revenue goals to net new account targets for a month or two?
The whole point is to make sure that everyone on your team understands what’s actually possible with these relief options. When your reps know which types of relief are available, they can have more realistic conversations about what might work for each person who needs help. On your end, you’ll be able to review each request with the same set of standards.
Outside Forces That Change Your Quotas
Economic downturns are a classic example of this – they can freeze budgets across entire industries in just a matter of weeks. Your reps will be on calls with buyers who seemed ready to sign just a few days earlier, and then they find out that those buyers can’t actually spend money anymore.
The pandemic proved this point. Plenty of businesses had to slash their sales quotas by 20% to 40% during Q2 and Q3 of 2020, and it all happened really fast. Deals just disappeared overnight. Rep performance didn’t matter in this scenario, and neither did it matter how hard anyone was working – buyers just weren’t available to take meetings anymore. The decision makers who would normally sign off on these purchases were swamped with crisis management at their own businesses and had zero time for new vendor conversations.
Regulatory changes work the same way with your team. A new law passes, and suddenly your product needs to be recertified, or maybe an entire market segment gets shut down completely. The sales reps show up, make their calls, and run their demos. Everything seems like it should be working. Except that the results just aren’t there.
A sales rep can spend months building up a strong pipeline – they put in the work to grow relationships and move the deals forward through each stage, the way they’re supposed to. Everything is on track, and the numbers look promising, and then something outside of their control comes in and wipes it all out. To hold them to their original quota after an event like that doesn’t feel fair at all.
Quota relief is something that you should only use when outside forces are strong enough to actually change what your team can realistically accomplish. A couple of slow weeks isn’t enough. When entire markets shut down, or buyer behavior changes in every account, the game has changed – it’s when you’ll have to step in and adjust those targets to show your reps that you can tell the difference between a rep who’s slacking and a rep who’s up against impossible conditions.
Problems That Your Reps Cannot Control
Sometimes the problem is what they’re selling. A product defect that pops up over and over in customer conversations will drag down the performance numbers for even your best reps on the team. The same exact issue happens when you’re missing features that your competitors already rolled out months ago, or when your pricing structure stopped making sense three quarters back. Objections, problems, hurdles – call them whatever you want. That doesn’t change the fact that these barriers are very real and your sales reps are going to run into them in almost every conversation they have with prospects.
If your best sales rep runs into the same objection week after week, you’ll have to pay closer attention to what they’re telling you. When the same pushback starts coming from multiple reps on your team, something bigger is usually going on. You can’t fix this with coaching. You have a product issue, a pricing issue or a positioning issue – not an underperforming rep.
Quota relief can help on this front. Your top performers usually have the best read on what’s going on out in the field. These are the reps who spend all day talking to customers, and after a while, they get better at telling which objections will actually kill a deal versus which ones are just normal. One big caveat – they’ll only share what they’re learning if they trust you’ll make fair decisions based on that information.
If the product team needs 2 months to fix a real defect and everyone on the sales floor is still expected to hit the same quota during that time, all you’ve done is punish your reps for something outside of their control. The natural consequence is that the sales reps go quiet about what they’re hearing from customers. Reps will just internalize the blame and stop giving you the feedback you desperately need because it’s way easier than being honest about the problems that need to be fixed.
Your team has to feel comfortable being honest with you about how the product performs when they’re out there in sales conversations. The best way to earn that openness is to show them you can tell the difference between a rep who could use a bit more coaching and a rep who’s been fighting against a strategy that just doesn’t work.
Tell Real Problems from Poor Work Ethic
One of the hardest decisions you’ll have to make is figuring out if a rep legitimately needs some relief from their quota, or if they’re just coasting and not putting in the work. Giving a rep a pass when they haven’t been making their calls, or they’re skipping customer meetings, is a mistake. Letting that slide sends a message to everyone else on your team that activity and effort don’t actually matter.
Look at their activity numbers first – that’s going to be the most telling bit of information. Is the call volume where it needs to be? Are they booking demos and following up with prospects afterward? It’ll show you pretty fast if a rep is actually doing the work or just coasting along without much effort. Sometimes, even a strong performer can miss their numbers when they’re doing the right actions – markets change very quickly, or maybe the product team changed direction, and now everything’s different.
You’ll have to be able to tell these two situations apart to be a great manager. A rep who’s working hard but runs into obstacles they just can’t control probably needs some breathing room and a bit of support. A rep who’s taking shortcuts and won’t change their approach when it’s obviously not working is a different story.
You want to write down which situations qualify for relief and which ones don’t, and you want to be as specific as possible with it. Everyone on your team needs to be able to access these standards and know what they mean. Making exceptions or judgment calls on the fly without a specific reason will make your team stop trusting the whole process pretty fast.
Your top performers are always paying attention to how you take care of the weaker links on your team. When they watch you make excuses and cover for a rep who obviously isn’t doing their job, it starts to eat away at their motivation. They start to question why they should work so hard when mediocrity apparently gets the same treatment as excellence. This situation is one of the most common reasons talented salespeople walk away from otherwise great opportunities – they get tired of carrying the slack as management seems to be content to let it continue.
Check if the rep showed up for their training sessions. When matters got tough, did they reach out for coaching or help? After their first strategy didn’t work, did they try out a different strategy? A genuine effort from a rep will leave visible evidence.
Once you’ve set these standards, you’ll have to follow them each time with everyone on your team. When a rep qualifies for relief, anyone else in that same position needs to be treated the same way. Favoritism is one of the fastest ways to destroy trust as a manager, and the damage that it causes is very hard to repair.
Smart Systems That Handle All the Changes
Quota systems don’t have to be rigid – they can stay flexible so you don’t have to wait for problems to appear before you make any adjustments. Most teams build that flexibility directly into their performance tracking systems right when they set them up.
A quota bank system is a great example of how it works in practice. When reps exceed their monthly targets during stronger sales periods, they can bank that excess performance and apply it later when the business slows down. The upside is that hard work gets rewarded right away, so nobody on your team thinks they’re being punished just because they had one rough quarter. Another way you can do this is to allow your reps to roll over some of their extra performance into the next period. When a rep has an especially strong quarter and exceeds their Q1 target, it helps smooth out the inevitable ups and downs that sales work has, and it gives your top performers a bit of a cushion during slower months when they might need it most.
Quarterly adjustments can work really well for you if you’re still using one rigid annual quota model. A check-in every three months means you can respond to what’s going on in the market without having to create a new relief process each time that conditions change a little bit. Your system ends up a lot more flexible and adjusts on its own when it needs to.
Each one of these methods helps cut down on how many times you’ll actually need to make a judgment call on your own. Arguments about who deserves relief and who doesn’t won’t come up nearly as much, and you can skip most uncomfortable conversations about who qualifies and who doesn’t. The system itself takes care of most of the work.
Think about whether you and your team are stuck in reactive mode all the time, or if you have systems that can take care of the unexpected. When you always put out fires and make exceptions on the fly, it’s a sign that something’s off. Your quota structure probably needs more flexibility than it currently has.
A great framework should feel fair to everyone from the start, even before anyone has to raise their hand and ask for some extra treatment. If your guidelines can take care of the natural ups and downs on their own, then managers spend way less time on exceptions and edge cases and a lot more time on what actually matters – they coach their team and drive performance.
Level Up Your Incentives and Rewards
The biggest priority you’ll have to protect is making sure that effort still gets you the results. When your top performers start to feel penalized for factors that are out of their hands, that’s when you lose their trust and their drive to push forward – and it always seems to happen at the worst possible time. But if you hand out adjustments too frequently or react too fast every time anyone asks, you tell everyone that those targets you set weren’t all that real to begin with.
The frameworks and triggers from earlier should help you when these come up. Whatever the issue is, you’ll have to trace it directly back to the performance gaps you’ve already identified. Just remember that a relief doesn’t automatically mean you drop your standards forever – temporary adjustments, flex programs or strategic resets can all maintain fairness as you continue to hold your team to the same expectations.
Level 6 works with businesses to build sales incentive programs that hold up well when goals change or market conditions change. We offer branded debit cards, employee rewards and recognition programs – each one is built to help your sales team stay motivated for the long haul. Our clients see a better ROI and stronger sales performance across the board.