What’s one thing virtually every business does, no matter their industry, target customer, or product or service?
They set goals or targets.
These goals may be company-wide or department-specific. Without them, it’d be difficult for employees to understand their purpose and why they’re doing the work that’s expected of them. Goals ensure employees are driven, on-task, and producing work that impacts the business’s bottom line. They also ensure your business is constantly striving to grow, improve, and most importantly: boost revenue.
All goals are important to your business’s success, but one department for which goal setting is absolutely critical is sales.
What are sales goals?
Sales goals or targets are objectives created for your sales team to work towards achieving.
Why set sales goals?
Sales goals are critical to the success of your business. They ensure each member of your team is motivated and focused on hitting specific targets that benefit the company’s bottom line. They also allow sales reps to see the direct impact they’re having on the business, which fosters a sense of drive and momentum among reps.
Additionally, sales goals help you create benchmarks and set standards for what qualifies as success on your sales team. For example, if all of your reps are able to achieve their goals well in advance of a deadline you provided, you’ll have a benchmark for what should be easily achievable again in the future.
Sales goals also allow you to evaluate the success of your sales team as a whole and the individual reps who make up the team.
So let’s take a look at the various types of goals you might establish on your team.
You can pick and choose which of the following sales targets are best suited to your specific company, industry, and team.
1. Monthly Sales Goals
Monthly sales goals are targets to achieve by the end of each month. These goals can be focused on improving any task or job function such as prospecting, sequencing, or closing deals. Monthly goals are great for specific job function progress check-ins because daily and weekly check-ins would be too frequent to judge the success of a rep, and quarterly and annual check-ins would be too infrequent (it’d be too late for a rep to make improvements and turn around an outcome).
2. Activity Sales Goals
Activity goals refer to the various aspects of each reps’ day-to-day job functions and duties. You can set activity goals for any period of time you choose such as weekly or monthly to ensure specific activities are being completed on schedule. These goals are ideal for improving specific types of activities or job functions, such as boosting the number of face-to-face interactions a rep has with prospects every week.
3. Win Rate Sales Goals
Win rate is the percentage of deals closed in a given time period. Because win rate is just one percentage by which you can evaluate success, it’s a simple way to compare reps’ against each other and create a sense of friendly competition on the team.
4. Incentivised Sales Goals
Incentivised goals result in reps receiving a reward of some kind once they reach a set target. Incentives are typically determined by higher-level sales reps, managers, or executives and may include tangible or intangible rewards. They’re great for motivating reps and bringing a competitive edge to the team.
5. Unit Sales Goals
A “unit” is the product being sold. You can set daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly goals for your reps to sell a specific number of units. Unit goals are great if you want to focus exclusively on increasing the number of individual products your reps sell throughout a given amount of time.
6. Stretch Sales Goals
Stretch goals are a “stretch” to achieve. Any type of goal we reviewed above can be turned into a stretch goal — just base it off of the non-stretch goal you set first. Stretch goals are ideal if you want to kick motivation up a notch and focus on the future of what your sales team can likely achieve.
Do you need help in defining sales goals that drive your team to success? Get in touch
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