How unreasonably high sales targets ruin your enterprise deals

This article summarizes an episode of 20VC’s video series featuring Shaunt Voskanian, chief revenue officer of Figma.

Image credit: Timmy Loen

Shaunt Voskanian, chief revenue officer of Figma, warns that the technology industry is making a mistake by relying on traditional sales methods to drive growth. If the industry continues to rely on these outdated models, it will fail to reward the consultative work that actually helps a business scale.

In his view, companies that adopt a skill-based system and abandon overinflated sales targets may build long-term revenue that target-obsessed firms can no longer reach.

Changing standard sales roles

Using a traditional sales model for a product-focused company wastes both time and money. Normal customer support teams only intervene when a problem arises, completely preventing them from generating new revenue.

To fix this, Figma eliminated its standard customer support (CS) and new-sales roles to create a unified team focused entirely on expanding accounts with current customers.

Voskanian notes, “We don’t actually have a traditional CS team,” explaining that their primary job is to show customers what else they can achieve with the software.

Separating prospecting from closing creates confusion
Relying on one team to find new customers for another team to close blurs internal responsibilities. Voskanian states, “I’ve always tried to be really thoughtful about where the SDR (sales development representative) is actually adding clear incremental value in a business where you expect account executives to [generate pipeline] as well.”

Organizing the sales team

Mixing customers who buy software on their own with massive enterprise clients that require intense guidance pulls a sales organization in completely different directions. The company resolved this by separating its small customer base from its large corporate clients.

Voskanian explains that small and medium businesses utilize the self-serve plan, while everything else is handled exclusively by a dedicated sales team. This division allows the sales team to focus entirely on advising customers rather than just pushing software licenses.

“[The reps] map out that organization, and you basically have a vision of what is a best-in-class deployment,” Voskanian says, adding that the salesperson’s ultimate job is to help the customer reach that ideal state.

The problem with fake quotas

Building a financial plan by simply dividing a massive yearly sales goal among the individual representatives makes leadership feel artificially in control. While this mathematical method looks perfect on paper, it completely ignores the reality of how complex deals are actually executed.

Leaders must understand that burdening salespeople with arbitrarily high numbers does not magically generate revenue.

Voskanian argues, “My perspective is quotas are kind of made up.”

Judging performance beyond targets