Sales Recruitment Insight: When to Stop Raising Targets and Start Supporting Your Team
We’ve had regular conversations with regional sales professionals across the UK, some of whom have built their territories from scratch, and many who have consistently delivered results, and driven growth year after year, a common frustration keeps coming up. They’ve quite simply hit the ceiling of what’s achievable in fixed market area.
They’ve developed every account, chased every lead to death, and built strong relationships across their region to smash their targets year after year. Yet their sales targets keep increasing to 10 15% on the prior year, regardless of what’s happening globally to affect their customers. Eventually, it stops being a question of motivation or performance, and becomes a question of market reality and maths, it cannot just keep going up and up and up.
As a sales recruitment agency in the UK, we hear this story more often than you would realise, and it’s always baffling. Business leaders want continued growth, and sales teams want to keep achieving. But when the size of the market stays the same, the products don’t change, but the expectations rise, something eventually has to give.
The Farmer and the Field
Think of it like farming. There’s only so much of a particular crop you can grow from one field. You can improve your tools, refine your technique, fertilise, and put in longer hours, but after a certain point, it is just not possible to increase yield.
That leaves you with three options:
- You can be content with the yield the field can reliably produce.
- You can change the crop in an attempt to increase margins
- Or you can give the farmer more fields to farm.
The same logic applies to your sales team. You can’t expect continual growth from the same territory year after year without making strategic changes. When a salesperson has fully developed their patch, the question shouldn’t be, “Why aren’t you selling more? it should be, “What can we do to keep you happy?”
The Risk of Overstretching Top Performers
The best salespeople love hitting targets, and are highly driven that take pride in delivering results. But even the strongest performers will hit a natural limit if their territory, customer base, if their product range or region doesn’t expand.
When that limit is ignored, it leads to frustration as the key things that motivate sales people (commission and hitting targets) feel out of touch. Targets start to feel unrealistic, motivation dips, and eventually, it’s inevitable that those valuable team members start looking elsewhere. Often by the time the business calls us to help recruit new salespeople, the damage is already done. The problem wasn’t the salesperson, it was the environment they were asked to operate in. And unfortunately any new salesperson incoming is automatically set up to fail, unless the reasons the last person left are addressed. This can become toxic for a region, as you will go from steady support and influence, to chopping and changing salespeople until the problem is realised.
A Smarter Approach to Growth
Instead of continually raising targets, sales leaders should take a step back and assess what’s genuinely possible in each region. By asking:
- Has this market been fully developed? Can I identify the realistic growth areas for a higher target to be achievable?
- Are there opportunities to diversify products or services, to allow the salesperson more headroom for growth?
- Could we expand the territory or re-define what success looks like in order to motivate an retain these high performing staff?
Why This Matters for Retention and Recruitment
When targets become unachievable, even your most loyal salespeople will start to disengage, because they don’t just feel demotivated they can feel disrespected or almost as if they are being pushed out. Losing top talent is expensive, not just in recruitment costs, but in lost relationships, experience, and credibility.
At Zero Surplus, we specialise in sales recruitment across the UK, and we’ve seen time and again that the best organisations are the ones that balance ambition with realism. They understand when to stretch their team and when to sustain them. That mindset doesn’t just attract top salespeople, it keeps them.
The Bottom Line
There’s only so much you can farm from one field. Pushing harder won’t always deliver more. Before you raise your team’s targets again, think about whether the ground they’re working on can actually support it.
Be content with a strong, sustainable yield. Change the crop if you need to. Or give the farmer more fields. That’s how you keep your best salespeople motivated, loyal, and performing to build lasting success.
