What is the reasoning behind a 35% quota attainment here if product market fit is so high?

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Accepted Answer

SailPoint has an excellent market fit from a product perspective.  You'll almost always get a seat at the table when someone is looking into identity governance.  The primary reason for the 35% quota attainment is due to the territories.  Over the years they have continued to cut down the territory size with everyone on named account lists, not geography based territories.  Enterprise reps have 35 accounts this year and less next year.  Strategic reps have 7 accounts total and going to 5 next year.  Governance is a major project for any organization so not everyone is in the market in a given year or few year span.  The population of folks on your given account list who will even engage with you in a given year can be pretty low making it hard to hit your number.  on the flip side of this, sometimes multiple accounts will be ready at the same time leading to a really great year.   The sales cycle length compounds the problem with many deals taking longer than a year to complete.  SailPoint pays well in accelerators, however it is really hard to get there and requires a bit of luck as well.
Looking at the enterprise space of 35 accounts.  maybe 12-15 are existing customers leaving about 20 net new open (before you start closing any of them).  Out of the 20, maybe 6 will engage and have some level of interest in identity.  out of that 6, 2-4 might be serious and out of that group maybe you close 2 in the year which may or may not get to your number.  
Beware, the long sales cycle comes into play with onboarding as well.  expect to take 12-18 months to get fully up and running with steady opportunity flow.  That doesn't mean you will make $0.00 until then, but it will take that long to reach a level of sustainability.

Answer

The company has growth goals as if they were smaller and faster, but like others have said, the sales cycles are indeed longer. The goals and expectations do not match what the company offers to support reps driving to hit those goals.
Leadership constantly moan about quotas being too high and when you hear it at that level with nobody around you getting even remotely close to their number, it is hard to argue.
There's also an incredible amount of turnover in the Sales and CSM orgs, which causes customer concerns and sales cycles to take much longer than they should, which impacts ability to hit quota because so much of that other work falls on the AE to manage.
The product and technical teams are fantastic, but there is a severe lack of focus in the vehicles driving pipe gen like Inside Sales and Field Marketing, who are pivotal in keeping a SaaS sales organization running.

Most of this turmoil came about after PE took the company private in 2022 and much of it feels like transition/growing pains, so many of us are hopeful we'll come out the other side and find the success we know is ripe for the taking. In the meantime, Leadership needs to decide if the vision, goals, and processes should be that of an older, slower, more mature software company, or if they want to run with the likes of Wiz, Okta, and others because currently we have the goals of the latter with the processes of the former, and that is why quota attainment is so low.

Answer

Product fit is pretty good but the targets are too high. Its a complicated sell and most customers need a lot of educating before they purchase. Its a very long Sales cycle and the product is also quite expensive. Also, most deals closed during my time there were started by reps that had long since departed.

Answer

Too many reps and not enough  prospect or existing accounts to go around.  Works for the company but not good for reps.

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Anonymous Q&A

What is the reasoning behind a 35% quota attainment here if product market fit is so high?