is it difficult to attain quota at okta- any insight from the inside? did this contribute to the turnover? or did they overhire?

Question

Accepted Answer

Yes. Quota attainment at Okta is hard. I would say less than 25% are hitting quota. 
Territories are crap, and this may or may not get better in 2023. Overall, Okta sales org is quite a mess right now. This has lead to much turnover and many unhappy current reps who are hoping for the best in 2023.

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Yes and yes. Tiny territories, very few reps hitting quota and a huge turnover of reps very quickly - combination of over hiring and too high targets

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Unfortunately, this is a “it depends” response. Depends on your quota and depends on the territory. I will say the company did overhire and did assign high quotas. That was the playbook. When times were good, I’m sure they were hoping to triple the bottom line very easy. Well, times aren’t so good anymore. I would take note of how many people are in the patch and how many more they want to hire. Leadership will have to dial it back soon but, for now, they continue to saturate territories which will make it difficult to hit your quota.

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They basically tripled the sales team in between February and September of 2022, which significantly thinned account patches in the emerging section. Okta is also a very expensive solution so a lot of deals were lost due to price this year

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For the UK and Ireland market in the Corporate/Mid Market segment it is extremely hard for both SDRs and AEs to attain quota. This is due to a very small number of accounts allocated to each SDR and AE. Also targets are too high (consisting of booked meetings and SQLs for SDRs). Targets are so high that management tells reps to "work the system". One example is allocating a booked meeting for each individual from a company attending a call. So if 5 people from Acme are attending a call that counts as 5 booked meetings. Employee churn is high due to targets being too high and toxic culture. SDRs leave with no opportunities to become AE and AEs leave due to misleading information about the TAM and the percentage of inbound leads which is negligible.

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in October of 2019 70% percent of Reps were not making quota. 50% had not closed any deals at all. They focus on social justice and other warm fuzzy topics all while throwing reps into the wood chipper knowing darn well they are going to fail. OKTA is a very progressive San Francisco company with sales leadership that were disguised as such, when in reality they were recycled Oracle henchmen.

Answer

There are lots of resources to help you hit quota. The territories are small now do to the over-hiring you mentioned.

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Anonymous Q&A

is it difficult to attain quota at okta- any insight from the inside? did this contribute to the turnover? or did they overhire?