You're sitting across from your top performer, someone who's hit 120% of quota for three straight years, and you've just finished your sales target setting conversation for her territory.
The target is ambitious, sure, but it's achievable. The market is there. You've done the analysis.
When you ask if she has questions, though, she pauses.
Then she asks: "Can you walk me through how you allocated pipeline across the new account tiers?" Along with: "What coverage ratio did you assume for the channel partners?" And: "How did you factor in the CSM handoff delays we saw last quarter?"
Don't hear those as clarifying questions. They're an audit.
She's done the math in her head, and it doesn't add up. Your best rep doesn't believe your plan. She's now quietly wondering if you understand her reality at all.
When top performers stop believing
When sales target setting feels arbitrary, it hits your best people hardest.
Average performers already expect leadership to operate on hope and optimism. Top performers built their success on understanding the mechanics of their territory:
- They know their pipeline coverage.
- They know their close rates by segment.
- They know how long deals actually take, not how long the CRM says they should take.
When you hand them a target that requires a 40% improvement in win rate with no corresponding change in process, product, or territory quality, they recognize it immediately.
Here's what happens next: they don't argue. They nod. They take the number. Then, they start quietly updating their LinkedIn profile.
The trust erosion is a mental shift from "I'm building my career here" to "I'm managing risk." Your A-player starts thinking about what happens when they inevitably miss this unrealistic target. They start imagining the conversations where they have to defend outcomes that were never achievable in the first place.
That mindset shift marks the beginning of the end.
The cascading effect
When your top performers disengage, everyone notices.
Your mid-tier reps watch to see how leadership treats the people who actually deliver. If the best salespeople on the team are quietly skeptical of the plan, why would anyone else believe in it?
The damage spreads. Teams stop taking planning seriously. QBRs become theater. Forecasts become fiction. The very people you need to execute your strategy spend their energy managing around your plan instead of executing it.
The root cause is almost always the same: sales target setting happened in a vacuum. Someone decided what growth needed to be, reverse-engineered it into quotas, and distributed it across territories without ever validating whether the pipeline, capacity, or market opportunity could support it.
Your best reps can tell when numbers are disconnected from field reality.
What defensible sales target setting requires
Of course top performers want ambitious goals. The thing to keep in mind is they want targets they can trace back to specific, verifiable inputs, like:
- territory potential
- historical performance
- qualified pipeline
- capacity assumptions
- win rate expectations.
When reps can see the logic, they engage with even aggressive numbers.
The trust equation
Here's how I think about it, put in the simplest terms:
Believability = Transparency × Adjustability.
Transparency means showing the work behind your sales target setting. If you're asking a rep to grow 30%, they should be able to see what's expected to change: more pipeline coverage, higher win rates, larger deal sizes, expanded territory. They should also be able to challenge the assumptions to reality-test whether the inputs are accurate.
Adjustability means the plan moves with reality. If a major account churns in Q1, if a product launch slips, if a territory gets realigned, the target should adjust accordingly. Top performers fear being held accountable to goals that were invalidated by circumstances outside their control.
When both are present, even aggressive targets become believable. Your best reps might push back on your assumptions, but they'll engage with the plan. They'll treat it as a working document.
The question that reveals everything
Ask your best rep: "Can you explain to me how we arrived at your target for this year?"
If they can't, you have a trust problem.
The person responsible for delivering the number needs to trace it back to transparent assumptions and verifiable inputs. Otherwise, they're guessing. Your best performers didn't get to where they are by guessing.
You can fix this through a better sales target setting process. When planning happens in spreadsheets disconnected from your CRM, transparency becomes impossible. When targets are set once a year and frozen regardless of changing conditions, adjustability becomes impossible.
But when planning lives where execution happens, when your best reps can see how their territory's pipeline, coverage, and capacity roll up into their target, trust becomes possible. The logic becomes visible.
Your top performers want defensible targets. They want to see the methodology.
Give them planning infrastructure that shows the work, and watch how differently they engage with even ambitious numbers.
