Quota by Scraps: How Sales Teams Dirty Box Their Way to…Well…Nowhere
What the heck is dirty boxing?
It was a first for me a while ago too. In combat sports, it’s when a fighter hangs on, throws cheap little punches, and tries to “win” by scrapping instead of skill. It’s rarely elegant nor thought out, it’s not sustainable, it’s what happens when someone is in survival mode.
Maybe that hits home for your situation. Your sales team surviving from month to month.
Discounts. Promos. End of the month Hail Mary’s to get things across the finish line at all costs. Perhaps the team chases tiny little deals with so many promises vs. closing one bigger deal that actually has less of a propensity to churn. Leadership is demanding closed deals, so reps skip discovery, promise the world and live to survive another month.
But, that’s not selling. That’s scrapping.
Scrapping is not scaling
Scrapping feels good in the moment. Your reps ring the bell. Everyone cheers in Slack and the channel goes wild. Leadership gets on a call and congratulates everyone for the month, breathing only for what – 4-5 hours before the 1st hits. The thing is. The applause is a bit slow because you know, this isn’t success, it’s a dumpster fire.
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Profit margins shrink
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Your valuation takes a hit if PE is watching
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Pipeline quality nosedives
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Sellers burn out because who wants to live in panic mode forever
During one of our discovery calls this summer we had the client calculate the cost of dirty boxing their way to revenue. It was nearly eight million bucks. Eight. Million. All to scrape by month after month. Their cost of inaction? $40M. But they dug their heels in saying, we keep winning the month inch by inch (yet the little voice said – but it’s not sustainable).
Leaders, this one’s on you
If your team is scrapping, it’s because leadership is rewarding scraps. Think about that. Celebrate the number without caring how it got there and guess what… you’ve just made dirty boxing the company sport. It’s like celebrating that the team hit revenue attainment for the year, without saying that they did so by a whale account and renewals and was only 20% of it’s net new attainment. That the team hit quota when in fact only 3 of 19 reps hit (true story from one of our prospects). That’s not winning. That’s luck, scraps and gambling.
If it’s easier to clap for survival than to dig in and teach clarity, discovery, and problem-centric selling, you are the blame. Easy doesn’t scale.
Scrapping vs scaling
Scrapping is like patching a leaky roof with duct tape every time it rains. Going up on the roof for a quick fix because it patches the holes. Scaling is replacing the roof so the house doesn’t rot.
Scrapping keeps you dry for the moment. Scaling keeps your whole house standing. And if you keep patching instead of fixing, you don’t just end up wet… you end up with a house no one wants to buy and a value that is less than what you want. You devalued it.
That’s what dirty boxing does to your business. It feels like survival, but it’s quietly wrecking the value of what you’re building.
