We Should Be Talking About Seller Quotas

My CEO, Sahil, and I have been discussing the seller quota over the last several months as we bring Von to market. There's a question he keeps coming back to that I think every revenue leader should be asking: What can we do to raise seller quotas?

But instead of talking about what it would take to be able to raise quotas, we talk about win rates, deal velocity, pipeline coverage. We obsess over these metrics, but we're not obsessing over what needs to happen to be able to give our sellers bigger quotas (and bigger paychecks to go along with those quotas).

Over the last 10 years (really, even longer than that, 15 to 20 years), sales quotas have barely moved. They've grown by only about 2% per year and now average about $1M. The math has stayed stubbornly simple: to grow by $10M, hire 10 more salespeople. That equation has held for as long as most of us have been in this business.

In that same period, sales tech spend has increased 5x, from $20 billion to $100+ billion. The average annual spend per seller now exceeds $10,000. You're paying tons for a CRM, another big bundle for conversation intelligence, another few hundred for forecasting, plus data automation, engagement tools, and at least 11 other platforms crowding your stack.

And yet quotas remain flat. 

It's Not a Time Problem

Sahil’s first hypothesis for why this was the case was time. Sellers just don't have enough hours in the day. Surely that's the bottleneck.

So we ran the numbers. We analyzed the average number of external meetings on sellers' calendars across 1,200 fully ramped sellers at 50 companies over six months.

We expected to see three or four hours per day of external meetings on their calendars. That would have made sense. That's probably the upper limit for external meeting time when you factor in prep work, follow-ups, strategy sessions, and internal meetings.

The actual number we found – the average is only 1.2 hours of external meetings per day. 

When we plotted all 50 companies, none exceeded 2.5 hours. Only three were over two hours per day, ten were under one hour. This pattern held across segments: enterprise, mid-market, SMB. It didn't matter.

If you think your team is different and your reps are spending more than three hours per day in external meetings, do the math and let me know. I'll send you a bottle of champagne.

The Real Constraint: Context Capacity

If it's not time, what is it?

Every seller has a number. It's the number of deals they can run before they lose context and drop balls. Enterprise reps can typically handle 5-10 deals. Mid-market, 10-20. SMB or high-velocity sales, 30-50.

An enterprise deal might have 10 or more stakeholders. At the upper bound of 10 deals, that's 100 people to keep track of in a quarter. This constraint isn't about skills or willingness. It's about human cognitive capacity.

Sahil experienced this firsthand as a buyer. He asked a seller how they compete with their direct competitor, and the answer was, "We're essentially the same software. It's personal preference."

This isn't the answer of a brand-new, inexperienced seller. This poor seller had surely seen competitive battle cards. He couldn't hold all the competitive differentiation in his head at the same time. He dropped the ball. It's an extreme example, but it highlights what happens when sellers can't hold all the details they need in their heads.

Real Impact AI Is Late to Sales

The more Sahil and I talk about this, the more we both find ourselves frustrated that truly impactful AI seems late to sales. It's done amazing things, truly 2-3x capacity increases, for other functions.

Cursor has made engineers 2-3x more productive. Harvey is helping lawyers handle 2-3x more cases with the same headcount. Sierra is helping support teams resolve 60-70% of tickets autonomously. Open Evidence is delivering the same capacity increase for clinicians.

In almost every industry where there's a major AI player, capacity has increased. But in sales it hasn’t happened yet. ChatGPT dropped in October 2022. We're now in early 2026, and we haven't seen a corresponding increase in capacity.

This is the opportunity in front of revenue teams. 

The real ROI for AI in sales will be that sellers can handle a much larger workload than before.

What It Takes to Get to 2x

Start by figuring out where you actually are. Pull your sellers' calendar data. Find out how much time they're spending on external meetings. Have the same visceral reaction Sahil did when he saw the 1.2-hour number.

Then think about what your sellers actually need: help building account plans, faster call prep, better follow-up emails, risk identification in the pipeline, role plays, and presentations. You've probably bought tools that claim to do each of these things. The problem is they're scattered across 11 different platforms. If you give a seller more than 3-4 places to go, you've lost them.

What sellers need is an external brain that holds all the context they can't. Something that makes it easy to access information when they need it, in one place rather than scattered across a dozen tools.

One way to do this is to bring AI engineers onto your GTM team. They can review your tools, consolidate them, build the new capabilities you need, and add an intelligence layer across your full stack.

That's one path. But we've been working on this for months with a full engineering team focused on it. Our early users are saying things like "Von may have just saved me from staying up till sunrise" and "This is freakin gold...exactly what I've been waiting for." They're on their way to confidently raising seller quotas. Not because they're working their teams harder, but because the insights and context are available to make their teams better and more capable of handling more.

Sahil's Prediction for 2026

Sahil believes that by the end of this year, there will be frontier companies where $2 million quotas are realistic.

Every AE we hire at Von will have a $2 million quota. We're going to give them all the context and support they need. And we won't hire the next seller until our current team is at four hours of external meetings per day.

If you're going through financial planning right now, challenge yourself: can your current sellers handle twice the workload with the right support? Pay them what they're worth. They're the ones who will usher you into the next iteration of sales.

The math on seller quota hasn't changed in decades. AI will finally change it. The only question is whether you'll be ahead of that curve or behind it.

Want to see how Von can help your team get there? Learn more at vonlabs.ai

Sara Kinsey is VP of Marketing at Von, an AI data scientist for revenue teams.