This is why I don't believe in sales quotas | Figma CRO

Summary

• Figma’s revenue machine runs with no traditional CS team and no traditional SDRs. CRO Shaunt Voskanian’s logic: most of the half-million customers self-served in via credit card, so the gap between what they do and what they could do is addressed through a “hunting motion” — the sales team is “majority outbound today,” but “outbound into an existing customer base. That’s the part that’s unique.”
• “Quotas are kind of made up.” The standard coverage math — need $500M, dish out $600M of quota assuming 80% attainment — is “a false sense of comfort.” Figma runs the opposite of ElevenLabs’ 20x quota: deliberately favorable quotas (“an average enterprise rep here might have three to four X their OTE for a quota, and we’re happy with that”) because strategic enterprise work is hard and the population who can do it is small.
• Seat-based pricing isn’t dead at Figma: net retention just went from 131% to 136% on an almost exclusively seat-based model, with AI usage monetized via credits starting “in a matter of a few days.” Harry’s pushback stands, though — Figma sells to designers and product people; “if you sell seats and you’re replacing labor, you’re in a tough spot.” Shaunt concedes he simply hasn’t encountered it in his buyers.
• Performance management puts behaviors and competencies at the core, not quota attainment alone — “I kind of don’t care if you as a rep hit your quota or not.” Quota is systemic and lagging; managing to it “can create lazy leadership.” If a rep grinds, generates pipeline, and executes calls well but the number lags, “what are you hoping to get to take that person’s place?”
• Structure is three distinct businesses: self-serve, PLG isolated to SMB (0–500 employees), and sales-led mid-market/enterprise/strat run like traditional SaaS — with the twist that AEs own pipeline generation, “full stop.”
• Sales teams get bigger, not smaller, at least here: ~500 in the org (roughly 300 quota carriers) supporting half a million customers — “you’re pretty freaking efficient already” — and Dylan Field is on board with adding sales headcount. The honest AI admission: Figma hasn’t solved sales knowledge sprawl and Shaunt doesn’t know if the team is equipped to train agents; Harry’s read is that implementation consultants “will do very well in the next few years.”
• Hiring doctrine: go slow over filling seats (“if you make that wrong hire, it doesn’t matter how fast you move”), take deal experience over industry experience, disfavor jumpy resumes, and treat anything less than all-in at offer stage as a yellow flag. Harry’s supporting anecdote: a founder hiring 200 reps admitted “probably 20” will be good.

Deep dive

1. Six Years, Then Self-Service Growth

• Figma had been around since 2012 and spent roughly six years building and studying customers before monetizing — “end of 2017, end of 2018” — and then growth took off through self-service: someone buys a couple of licenses online with a credit card, shares links internally, and it spreads.
• When Shaunt joined 4.5 years ago, Figma was “a hundred, maybe 50 million dollar company” — but with vastly more customers than revenue implied. He’d joined Datadog at a similar revenue stage with “nowhere near the number of customers,” so the Datadog job was clearer; at Figma, sales back then was almost exclusively calling into or responding to self-serve customers and upgrading them to higher tiers.
• Today the motion is very different: global, four segments, and majority outbound — “outbound into an existing customer base. That’s the part that’s unique.” Customers “think they’re happy using Figma”; the team approaches them with “proactive insights for how they should be… doing more with us.”

2. Curiosity Needs Prescription

• His advice to his younger self was “be curious,” but Harry pushes: buyers are cautious about giving time and don’t want to be qualified. Shaunt’s refinement: “it’s not just about being curious, it’s about being prescriptive” — what buyers actually want is “what are your best customers doing that we haven’t figured out yet?” Doing both at once “is the art of it.”
• On platform-versus-point-solution selling: the best sellers don’t focus on feature-versus-feature comparisons; they understand where the business is going and connect value to it — but “you have to be generally just honest with yourself” about where the customer truly gets the most value, and if that’s the point solution, focus there without using feature and function to get there.
• Champion-building on steroids starts with one thing: insights that make the champion better at their job — “educate them, teach them something that they don’t know that’s going to make them and their teams more effective.”

3. No customer success team: closing usage gap is a hunting motion

• Because customers made their own decision about what value Figma could deliver to them, the gap between what an average customer does with Figma and what Figma thinks they should be doing “is pretty big” even today. They asked whether closing it was a CS function or account management — “where we landed is for the most part, that is a hunting motion”: working with existing champions in some cases, but finding new prospective champions and EBs in many cases, and getting them excited about something they haven’t learned about Figma.
• Expansion now skews “a little bit more” toward new products over new seats since going multi-product — and it could involve the same users, but often means new personas rather than entirely new users.

4. No traditional SDRs — “AEs have to be responsible for their own PG. Full stop.”

• Coming from Datadog with a ~200-person SDR org, Shaunt admits he’s struggled everywhere to isolate SDR incremental value when AEs also generate pipeline. At Figma, SDRs have been redeployed onto small transactional renewals to clear strategic AEs’ plates — and remain the talent pipeline: “they’re our future reps.”
• The organizing principle is focus: “if you’re asking a rep to do 14 different things, it’s too hard for them to be good at all of those things.” So Figma runs three distinct businesses — self-serve (website plus credit card), PLG isolated to SMB (0–500 employees, since nearly all self-serve upgrade candidates were sub-500 startups), and sales-led mid-market/enterprise/strat run like traditional SaaS: a book of accounts after ruthless prioritization, map the org, envision best-in-class deployment — “that gap between those things is your job” — with constant pipeline reviews and weekly forecast calls.
• For PLG founders on intercept timing: “I don’t think it ever hurts to do it a little earlier than a little later” — the SMB team routinely loses an upgrade deal and wins it a couple of months later, and that was typical at his last company too.

5. Seat pricing isn’t dead here — net retention 131% → 136%, AI credits days away

• Against the “seat-based pricing is dead” consensus: Figma’s earnings call a couple of weeks ago showed net retention up five points, 131% to 136%, on a “pretty much exclusively seat-based model.” His hedge stays a hedge — “it is hard to predict the future on this one” — but “there’s nothing that we’ve seen in our business yet that suggests that’s dead.” AI usage starts being monetized through credits within days; one possible driver of seat resilience: “more and more builders coming into software.”
• Harry’s pushback — worth keeping: this holds because Figma sells to product people and designers. In customer support or any labor-replacing category, “if you sell seats and you’re replacing labor, you’re in a tough spot.” Shaunt’s honest concession: “that makes sense… I’m just not as knowledgeable about what’s happening in those other BUs.”

6. “Quotas are kind of made up” — Figma sets them at 3–4x OTE on purpose

• The prevailing planning wisdom — add $500M next year, dish out $600M of quota so 80% attainment still covers you — “I just think that’s made up. I don’t think that has anything to do with how people are actually going to do.” Quota is instead a philosophy about work and reward: “what is the work that needs to be done and how much reward do you want to dish out for that work.”
• Early Figma may have resembled ElevenLabs today (whose 20x quota is “probably perfect for them”): support product-happy customers, ride viral expansion — a job a wide population could do, so you index toward efficiency. Today’s SLG job — insights, champions, complex multi-stakeholder deals — “is hard work and it’s very, very strategic work,” and the capable population is smaller. Hence deliberately favorable quotas: “an average enterprise rep here might have three to four X their OTE for a quota, and we’re happy with that.”
• His quota-setting framework for founders: start with “are you pulling the market? Is the market pulling you?” Pushing the market → favorable quotas to entice great people into hard proactive work; strong market pull and transactional work → build in safety nets and lean toward the efficiency pendulum.

7. Quota Isn’t the Whole Performance Framework

• His self-declared hottest take: quota is more systemic than individual — companies set it wrong “in either direction,” and it’s “too much of a lagging indicator” (a strat rep with one account can’t be judged until year-end). Managing on it “can create lazy leadership”; he wants leaders “in the boat with the rep.” The written framework: results as one bucket (including PG), behaviors (collaboration, growth mindset, not “lone wolfing it”), and competencies — PG, discovery, pipeline management via MEDDIC and their methodology (spoken as “calm”; Shaunt calls it Figma Value Selling).
• The acid test: if a rep is “totally busting their butt,” pipeline generation is strong, and calls execute well but the number hasn’t translated — “if you’re going to move that person out of the business, what are you hoping to get to take that person’s place?” Harry’s pushback: do PG and qualification well and you will convert. Shaunt: “I agree with the exception of what if we got it wrong? What if we set the quota too high? And that happens.”
• Lone wolves get latitude if they don’t poison wells — some just say “I’m not aspiring to be a leader. I just want to do my thing, make money” — but bad apples damaging the team are different: “you can never move fast enough,” though start with feedback because sometimes they genuinely don’t know.
• Firing calculus follows: high patience for the grinder who hasn’t clicked, “a very low bar for the people who are not exhibiting the will… you can control your attitude and how you show up every day.”

8. Hiring: deal experience beats industry, jumpy resumes draw scrutiny, all-in matters

• Forced to choose, he takes the person who’s done the big deal over industry knowledge — assuming it wasn’t “just a bluebird” but managed multi-stakeholder, long-cycle deals — because “smart people can learn industries and landscapes in a shorter period of time.”
• He has a “pretty visceral reaction” to jumpy resumes — repeated 12–18-month stints — and Harry goes further: once could be culture or family, but “four times? It’s saying something.” Grit is tested via resume arcs (did they make “success out of something that wasn’t successful?”) and a take-home disco/demo exercise — the product portion kept precisely because attempting it “shows an element of perseverance.”
• At offer stage, back-channeling yields “some of the most valuable insights you can get on someone.” Not negotiating isn’t necessarily judged negatively, but not being all-in after weeks of process is a yellow one — and candidates pitting Figma against another offer make him nervous: “as soon as things are tough… they leave.” On pace: go slow and risk the hiring plan — he will never approve hiring a “solid B player” prospect. Harry’s anecdote lands the point: a founder adding 200 reps guessed “probably 20” will be good.
• The mis-hire tell is mercenary over missionary: the best earners of his past decade weren’t W-2 maximizers — “when they’re chasing that, it goes the other direction.” And the counter-story: a rep on a performance plan at his last company, coached on specific gaps instead of cut, is now “multiple promotions, one of their most successful reps” — outcome depends on environment and accountability, not just right-versus-wrong hire.

9. Sales headcount grows from here — and an honest AI gap

• Contra the efficiency-forever narrative: with half a million customers and maybe 300 quota carriers, “you’re pretty freaking efficient already.” So Figma is going the other way — “I’m pushing and Dylan is on board with more head count in sales” for the strategic work showing great results, hedged as possibly Figma-specific: “is that the case for every business? I don’t know, but not for us.”
• Ramp is first-principles per role, not one playbook: enterprise reps are thrown “into the fire” with their accounts before formal training, then get a rebuilt onboarding — soft-launched this very week — moving back to classroom-style, in-person post-COVID, covering the tech landscape, competitive positioning, best-customer patterns, and sales process end-to-end.
• The candid gaps: sales knowledge is sprawled across Slack, CRM, and enablement platforms — “we don’t have that solved yet,” and reps complain about it. Only “in these last few weeks and months” has he gotten passionate about agentic solutions to kill duplicated data entry; asked if the team can train agents, “I don’t know that we are [equipped].” Harry’s conclusion: “this is why consulting businesses will do very well in the next few years” — implementation and adoption.
• Verticalization: specialize “as early as possible,” yet Figma still has no industry-based teams — it specializes by motion and persona instead, running recently-acquired Weavy as an overlay motion. The recurring test: “are we asking reps to do too much?” Quickfire extras: the sales org he most respects is Datadog (keeps people for years, promotes from within, “mastered all the segments”); gifting is outdated — “it just feels so transparent… like a bribe”; remote teams aren’t dead but fully-remote “puts a lot more pressure on the system”; his one look-back — he spent too long observing before changing things in his early Figma days.