The Treadmill Effect: Why 2025 Sales Targets Feel Unwinnable
Ask a SaaS account executive how their year is going and you will often hear some version of the same complaint: the number keeps moving, but the ground underneath it does not. Quota gets set in a planning cycle that has little contact with what the sales development team can actually source, what marketing can actually convert, or what the market will actually bear. The rep is left to close the gap through effort alone, and effort has a ceiling that a spreadsheet does not.
This is not a motivation problem. It is a design problem. Most quota-setting processes start from a revenue target the board has already committed to, then divide that number down through segments, regions and headcount until it lands on an individual rep’s desk. Very little of that process asks whether the underlying pipeline generation engine, sourced from marketing, outbound, partnerships and renewals, can actually produce enough qualified opportunity at the conversion rates the plan assumes. When the top-down number and the bottom-up capacity disagree, the top-down number usually wins, because it is the one the board has already been told about.
The consequence is a sales organisation that is permanently running to stand still. Reps hit last year’s number and are handed a bigger one for the year ahead, often without any corresponding increase in marketing spend, headcount, tooling or territory size. Over several cycles this compounds into a culture where missing target feels inevitable rather than exceptional, and where the people best equipped to diagnose the mismatch, the reps themselves, have no formal channel to flag it before the plan is locked.
How Quota Models Break Under Their Own Assumptions
Most SaaS quota models are built on a small set of assumptions: average deal size, win rate, sales cycle length and ramp time for new hires. Each of these is treated as a constant when in reality all four move independently, and often in the wrong direction at once. Deal size can shrink as budget scrutiny increases. Win rate can drop as competitors multiply. Cycle length can stretch as more stakeholders get pulled into procurement. When a quota is set using last year’s constants and this year delivers worse ones on every axis, the rep is being asked to hit a number that was already wrong on the day it was assigned.
A related failure mode is treating quota as a flat annual number divided evenly by twelve, rather than a seasonally weighted target that accounts for known dips, such as the summer slowdown many B2B SaaS vendors see, or the compressed selling weeks around the December and January period. A rep who is behind pace in a quiet quarter is not necessarily underperforming; they may simply be measured against a curve that does not match how buying actually happens in their market.
Ramp assumptions cause a similarly quiet form of damage. New hires are frequently given a full or near-full quota from month four or five, on the assumption that a standard ramp curve applies to every rep regardless of territory maturity, product complexity or the state of the pipeline they inherit. A rep dropped into a newly carved territory with no existing relationships is not on the same ramp as one who inherited an established book of accounts, even if their start dates and titles are identical. Quota models that do not distinguish between these two situations manufacture failure for the first rep before they have made a single call.
The Capacity Planning Gap Behind Missed Numbers
Underneath most quota disputes sits a capacity planning question nobody has answered properly: how many qualified opportunities can this territory realistically produce in a year, given its account count, addressable spend and current penetration? Territory and quota planning tools inside CRM platforms, such as Salesforce’s territory management functionality, exist precisely to model this, yet many RevOps teams still build the territory map in a spreadsheet disconnected from the CRM’s live account and opportunity data, so the plan is stale before the year even starts. See Salesforce Help for the platform’s territory and forecasting documentation.
The gap shows up most clearly when a company grows headcount faster than it grows total addressable market coverage. Splitting an existing territory in half to onboard a new rep looks like capacity expansion on an org chart, but if the split simply divides a finite account list in two, total addressable opportunity per rep has been cut rather than added to. Quota for both reps in that split territory should fall, not stay flat, yet in practice it is common for both to be handed a target close to what the single rep previously carried.
A useful discipline here is separating “logo capacity” from “revenue capacity” during territory design. Logo capacity is the number of accounts a rep can realistically engage with meaningfully in a year, given typical outreach cadences and deal complexity. Revenue capacity is what those accounts, once engaged, are plausibly worth based on their size and current spend with competitors or in-house alternatives. A territory can look generous on account count and still be a poor quota fit if most of those accounts are too small to move the number, or too locked into an incumbent to realistically switch inside the plan year.
Compensation Structures That Reward the Wrong Behaviour
Variable pay is supposed to align rep behaviour with company strategy. In practice, many plans align it with whatever the plan happens to measure, which is not always the same thing. A plan that pays commission on signed contract value, with no clawback tied to renewal or usage, rewards a rep for closing a deal that churns in month four exactly as much as one that renews for five years. The rep has done exactly what the plan told them to do; the plan simply told them to do the wrong thing.
Accelerators compound this. A steep accelerator that kicks in once a rep clears one hundred percent of quota creates a strong incentive to push every deal possible into the current period, including ones that would close more cleanly, and with a better-fit customer, the following month. Reps learn quickly which levers move their pay cheque, and if discount depth, contract length manipulation or feature bundling all sit outside the plan’s guardrails, those become the tools reps reach for under pressure. This is not a character failing on the rep’s part; it is the plan working exactly as designed, just not as intended.
Deal desk approval processes are meant to catch some of this, but a deal desk with no clear rubric, or one that can be bypassed through management exception, becomes a bottleneck that experienced reps learn to route around rather than a genuine control. Building comp guardrails directly into deal desk criteria, so that a discount above a threshold automatically reduces the commissionable value of the deal rather than requiring a separate manual review, closes that gap without adding another approval step for reps to resent.
Reward strategy guidance from bodies such as the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development stresses aligning variable pay with the outcomes an organisation actually wants sustained over time, not just the outcomes that are easiest to measure at the point of signature. See CIPD for broader reward and pay design principles that apply well beyond sales.
The Gap Between Advertised OTE and Attainable Reality
On-target earnings figures used in recruiting are frequently built on the assumption that a rep hits exactly one hundred percent of quota, an outcome that, by definition, roughly half of any well-calibrated sales team will not reach in a given period. When a company advertises an OTE figure without disclosing typical attainment distribution, a new hire has no way to judge whether the number on the offer letter is a realistic expectation or a best-case scenario dressed up as the norm.
This gap becomes corrosive once a rep is inside the organisation and starts comparing their actual pay cheque to what they were told during recruiting. Uncapped upside sounds attractive in an interview, but if the base-to-variable split is weighted heavily toward variable, and the quota underneath that variable component is one the rep cannot realistically hit given their territory, the practical effect is a much lower guaranteed income than the headline OTE implied. Contract terms around variable and commission-based pay in the UK are subject to normal employment law protections, and ACAS provides general guidance on how variable pay should be structured and communicated in an employment contract. See ACAS for that guidance.
RevOps and sales leadership can close this gap without slashing headline OTE by publishing attainment bands alongside the plan itself: what proportion of the team hit under fifty percent, between fifty and one hundred, and over one hundred percent, in the previous cycle. This turns OTE from a single aspirational number into an honest range, and it gives a hiring manager a defensible answer when a candidate asks the reasonable question of how many people actually earn it.
Layoffs, Rep Churn and the Collapse of Trust
Workforce reductions affect more than headcount. A prospect who has spent months building trust with one account executive, working through procurement, security review and internal sign-off, does not simply transfer that trust to a replacement rep when the account gets reassigned. Much of that relationship capital is lost, and deals in the later stages of a cycle are particularly vulnerable to stalling or restarting when ownership changes hands mid-negotiation.
For the reps who remain after a reduction, the effect on daily behaviour is measurable even if it is rarely tracked. Time that would previously go into prospecting or account planning gets diverted into monitoring internal signals for the next round: hiring freezes, unusual meeting patterns, changes in how forecast calls are run. None of that activity shows up in a CRM report, but it is real time not spent selling, and it compounds the same quota shortfall the organisation is trying to avoid by cutting costs in the first place.
UK employers have specific statutory obligations around consultation and notice when making redundancies, and understanding those obligations properly, both for the organisation’s own compliance and for how communications are handled with remaining staff, sits with HR and legal rather than RevOps. See GOV.UK’s employing people guidance for the relevant framework. Where RevOps can help is in the account handoff process itself: a documented transition plan for every reassigned account, including deal history, stakeholder map and open commitments, reduces the amount of relationship capital lost in the handover and shortens the time a reassigned deal spends stalled.
Building a Quota and Comp System RevOps Can Defend
None of the failure modes above are inevitable. They are the predictable output of a planning process that sets targets before checking capacity, and a comp plan that measures what is easy to measure rather than what actually matters to the business. RevOps is the function best placed to close both gaps, because it is the one team that sits across CRM data, finance and sales leadership at once. The sequence below reflects the order these fixes need to happen in, since redesigning comp before quota is grounded in real capacity just moves the same problem into a different plan document.
Capacity Audit Before Target Setting
Before any quota number is finalised, RevOps should be able to answer, using live CRM data rather than the previous plan document, how many accounts each territory holds, what proportion are already at meaningful penetration, and what realistic conversion rate the pipeline has produced over the last several cycles. This audit becomes the evidence base for pushing back on a top-down number that the underlying territory cannot support, and it gives sales leadership a defensible answer when finance asks why quota did not simply scale with the headcount plan.
Redesigning Comp Around Durable Revenue
Once capacity is grounded in reality, comp can be rebuilt so that a meaningful share of variable pay tracks what happens after signature, such as renewal, expansion or product usage, rather than paying out in full at the point of contract execution. This does not have to mean delaying all commission until renewal, which most reps would reasonably resist; a partial holdback released on successful renewal, alongside full payment at signature for the majority of the commission, changes the incentive at the margin without removing the reward for closing in the first place.
A Governance Cadence That Keeps Targets Honest
A quota and comp plan built well in January can still drift out of alignment with reality by June if nobody reviews it against actual attainment data. Building a quarterly checkpoint, where RevOps presents attainment distribution, pipeline coverage ratios and any territory changes to sales leadership, catches drift early enough to adjust rather than waiting for the annual planning cycle to correct a problem that has been visible for two quarters.
Related Reading
For more on this, see more RevOps strategy posts, including 5 Common SaaS Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them in 2025, PPC vs Organic Growth in SaaS: Balancing ROI and RevOps Strategy, and Maximize Your Sales Success: 20 Top Sales Tools Reviewed for 2024.
Why do SaaS quotas keep rising even when pipeline capacity does not?
Most quota-setting processes start from a revenue target the board has already committed to and divide it down through the organisation, with little check on whether the underlying pipeline generation engine can actually produce enough qualified opportunity to support the number. When the top-down target and bottom-up capacity disagree, the top-down number usually wins because it is the one already communicated to the board.
What is the difference between advertised OTE and what reps actually earn?
Advertised on-target earnings figures are typically built on the assumption a rep hits exactly one hundred percent of quota, an outcome roughly half of any well-calibrated team will not reach in a given period. Without a published attainment distribution alongside the OTE figure, a candidate has no way to judge whether that number is a realistic expectation or a best-case scenario.
Why does splitting a territory in half not always double capacity?
If splitting a territory to onboard a new rep simply divides a finite account list in two, total addressable opportunity per rep has been cut rather than added to, so quota for both reps should fall rather than stay level with what the single rep previously carried.
How can compensation plans discourage risky, short-term deal-making?
Tying a meaningful share of variable pay to what happens after signature, such as renewal, expansion or usage, rather than paying out in full at the point of contract execution, changes the incentive at the margin without removing the reward for closing the deal in the first place.
What should RevOps do first when rebuilding a quota and comp system?
Start with a capacity audit using live CRM data to establish how many accounts each territory holds, what proportion are already at meaningful penetration, and what conversion rate the pipeline has actually produced, before redesigning comp or setting new targets on top of it.
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