Attainment
Attainment is how much of quota a salesperson has sold, stated as a percentage. A rep with a $500,000 quarterly quota who books $575,000 is at 115% attainment. Commission plans read attainment to decide rates, accelerators, bonus eligibility and club qualification, which makes it the most consequential single number in sales compensation.
Read a commission plan closely and the same number turns up under nearly every clause. The accelerator triggers above it. The bonus gate sits at a threshold of it. Club qualification is a line drawn across it. Attainment is the input almost every rule in the document depends on, which means the way it is measured matters more than any individual rate printed alongside it.
Two systems can report different attainment for the same rep in the same quarter without either being broken, because attainment is a fraction and the top half of it is a definition. Bookings counts a contract the day it is signed. Recognised revenue counts it as the product is delivered. Cash collected counts it when the money lands. The same rep sits at 115% on one basis and below 100% on another, and below 100% fails every threshold in the plan. Whichever basis the plan uses belongs in the plan document in the same sentence as the word attainment, because the rep is measuring on the basis their pipeline report shows them.
Earnings do not track attainment in a straight line, and most plans hide the shape of the curve from the people living on it. A cliff at 70% pays nothing at 69% and a full band at 71%. A retroactive tier reprices an entire period on one extra dollar. An accelerator makes the points above target worth half as much again as the points below. Plotting payout against attainment from 0% to 150% for your own plan takes about twenty minutes in a spreadsheet, and it regularly surprises the person who designed the plan.
Used at team level, attainment is a report card on quota setting rather than on people. If four reps out of thirty cleared target, the two available explanations are a weak team and a bad quota, and the second is far more likely. A distribution clustered just under 100% with a thin tail above it is the signature of a target set slightly too high in a plan with a hard gate at target, and it tends to mean reps stopped pushing at 90% because the next ten points were worth nothing to them.
The same quarter, two attainment figures
A rep carries a $500,000 quarterly quota. They sign $575,000 of contract value during the quarter, including one $90,000 deal signed on the final day that is not invoiced until the following month. The plan pays an accelerator above 100% and nothing extra below it.
- Quarterly quota
- $500,000
- Contract value signed in the quarter
- $575,000
- Attainment on a bookings basis
- 115%
- Value invoiced inside the quarter
- $485,000
- Attainment on an invoiced basis
- 97%
Eighteen points of attainment turn on one definition, and the rep crosses from accelerated to below target. Their own pipeline report shows 115% all quarter, because the pipeline report counts signatures. The commission statement arrives saying 97%, and nobody has done anything wrong.
Attainment gets compared across reps whose quotas were set differently
Leaderboards rank attainment because it looks like the fair comparison: a percentage normalises away the fact that one rep carries $400,000 and another carries $900,000. It only normalises fairly if both quotas were built the same way from comparable territories, and they almost never were. A rep at 140% on a quota nobody adjusted after their patch doubled is not outperforming a rep at 95% on an enterprise book with four accounts in it. Attainment is a payout input first. Treating it as a performance ranking imports every inconsistency in the quota-setting process straight into the promotion conversation.
- How do you calculate attainment?
- Divide what a salesperson sold in the period by their quota for that period, then express the result as a percentage. A rep with a $500,000 quarterly quota who sold $575,000 is at 115% attainment. The answer depends entirely on what counts as sold, since bookings, recognised revenue and cash collected can produce meaningfully different figures for the same quarter.
- What is a good attainment percentage?
- For an individual, anything at or above 100% means the rep hit the target they were set. At team level, compensation designers typically expect somewhere between half and two thirds of reps to clear 100%, treating that as a working range rather than a benchmark. A team averaging far above target usually indicates soft quotas rather than exceptional selling.
Nearby terms
The long form lives in the guides: How to calculate commission.
Knowing the word is
the easy half
Commish pays attainment the way your plan describes it, shows the arithmetic on every line, and traces each payment back to the deal that earned it.