Quota Check
Is your quota crazy?
Plug in your base, your variable and the number they handed you to find out.
Plug in your base, your variable and the number they handed you to find out.
Saying it feels too high won't move it. Bring the math: last year's sales, your run rate, qualified pipeline at your real win rate, headcount and ramp time. Then ask what has to be true for the number to be reasonable.
Better yet, get into planning the year before, while somebody still has the spreadsheet open. Your quota is crazy. Now prove it. walks through it, with an example you can steal. If you're the rep, start with this one. If you're the manager handing it down, this one.
Divide your quota by your on-target earnings. That one number tells you a lot about the plan, once you know what the quota is measured in.
For a new-bookings AE, 4 to 6 times OTE is a useful working range. Bridge Group's 2026 median was 4.6, and enterprise roles run a little higher. That range is really just a commission rate, stated another way. At a 50/50 pay mix and roughly 10% on new ARR, quota works out to about five times OTE. Below 3 is unusual and usually means a ramp, an overlay, or a plan with a condition in it. Above 8 the plan is asking for something the territory may not have.
Cloud consumption is a different animal, and it's the one most people on this site carry. The number is incremental revenue growth on a book, typically paid at a low single-digit percentage, roughly 1.5 to 3%, so the same arithmetic gives 15 to 30 times OTE at a big cloud provider and higher in strategic accounts. A rep carrying a $6M growth target on a $280K OTE is at 21×, and that's ordinary, not crazy. Whole-book targets (retention plus growth on the full run rate) are paid at around half a percent to one percent and run higher still, 40 to 80 times OTE, because most of that revenue would have happened anyway. How these ranges are derived.
The number to watch across all three is the implied rate: your variable divided by your quota. If it's well under what your peers are paid on the same kind of number, the plan is heavier than the multiple alone suggests. And if you closed last year, the growth the new number implies is the real measure of how much harder this year is. Whether the territory can produce it is the territory section of Quota Case; how much pipeline it takes is Pipeline Check.
These ranges come from plans at cloud providers, SaaS companies and their partners. They're guides, not rules, and roles differ. Quota ÷ OTE:
New bookings. Under 3: low. 3 to 4: favorable. 4 to 6: standard. 6 to 8: a stretch. 8 to 12: aggressive. Over 12: crazy.
Cloud consumption growth. Under 8: low. 8 to 15: favorable. 15 to 30: standard. 30 to 45: a stretch. 45 to 60: aggressive. Over 60: crazy.
Whole book. Under 20: low. 20 to 40: favorable. 40 to 80: standard. 80 to 120: a stretch. 120 to 160: aggressive. Over 160: crazy.
If your plan sits somewhere else and the range looks wrong, tell Mark and he'll take a look.
Useful things for the weeks when the deal, the number, or both are giving you trouble: pipeline math, a deal that went quiet, a discount request, and what to tell your manager.
I spent six years leading federal partner sales teams at Amazon, after plenty of years carrying a number myself. QuotaBird is mostly stuff I wish we'd had back then. Most of it's free. If the problem's messier than a little tool can handle, we can talk it through.
