Fitness goals. Health goals. Personal financial goals.
Educational milestones. Personal development milestones. Career growth milestones.
As you enter 2022, this idea of hitting all your goals is weighing heavy on your mind. But when it comes to sales, you can’t just set broad annual goals.
Instead, you have to set sales targets. You can also consider creating a daily sales plan, or explore fun sales-tracking board ideas.
There are plenty of ideas you can look into to help you consistently meet your sales targets. Also, regardless of the type of your sales organization, it’s important to note that you need to prioritize sales targeting.
But how? Why do you need it? And perhaps most importantly, what is it?
Sales Target Definition
Let’s address that last question before anything else.
Your sales managers or leaders are the ones who set your sales targets for a set period of time. These are the numbers, or units, that your team leads give to the rest of your sales team. Then, your sales team members aim to reach those sales projections throughout that timeframe.
In simpler terms, your salespeople want to bring a certain amount of money into your company during a specific time period.
But let’s dive a little deeper, shall we?
Think about it like this…
You have some sort of a sales pipeline management tool, or methodology. It tracks your sales process, from start to finish. The visual aspect of your pipeline allows you to see where each potential customer lands, based on their phase in your sales cycle.
Consider those potential customers to be “sales opportunities.” You can calculate the value of each opportunity into your ultimate target.
Thus: Targeted sales, hard at work.
Like we said before, sales targets are crucial no matter what industry you are in. But if you are in retail sales, you might be more familiar with the term.
You have more hyper-specific retail sales goals, or retail targets, or retail sales objectives. However you put it into words, you get the gist.
If retail salespeople are so much more comfortable with the idea of sales targets, though, why does it matter for everyone in this line of business?
Why is it Important to Have Sales Targets?
Let’s talk about that.
Why do sales targets matter at all? Do you really need them?
Yep. You sure do. No matter your company’s size, specialty or whatever, ya gotta have ‘em.
Do you want to grow your business, or keep it right where it is now? Do you want to go into new potential deals blindly, or with some sort of structure?
Your team’s sales targets are going to keep your doors open for business. They give you a solid idea of the direction in which you’re headed. These sorts of predictions mean you will deliver on time and stay within or below your budget.
Know what else that means? You’re going to beat your competition. You’re going to beat the goals you had for yourself. You’re gonna grow a sustainable business, with happy team members and even happier customers.
How Can You Hit a Sales Target?
How Can You Hit a Sales Target?What a dream, right?
But it’s time to get to the one big remaining question:
How do I go about meeting sales targets? Especially when it comes to targeted sales today, of all days? How will I target annual sales, let alone meet daily sales goals?
No worries there, friend. We’ve got all the answers you need below, with our top tips on how to hit your sales targets every time and make more sales in the long run.
Define Your Sales Process
You can’t succeed in sales without a clearly defined sales process. So let’s define your sales process, together.
Your sales process consists of the steps you have to take from the start to finish of a successful closed deal.
Keep in mind that your steps are to be unique to your business. They will vary based on your industry, what you sell and who your customers and competitors are.
But for the sake of keeping things simple, here are the standard steps you can expect to find with a B2B company’s sales process:
First, make initial contact with your prospects. Your salespeople will demonstrate what you have to offer them and how it will improve their quality of life. Both your team and your prospect should agree that you are a perfect fit for one another.
Second, draft your initial proposal for your prospect. Present it to them to kickstart your professional relationship.
Last of all, create your final draft of the proposal. Present it to your prospect again, then both of you will sign it to close the sale.
Conduct Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is the process of assigning each lead a number value. This number value indicates the likelihood each lead is to close a deal.
You should apply lead scoring to each phase of your sales process. If you do, you will be far less likely to waste your time and resources on leads that go nowhere fast.
Good Communication
All your sales training efforts for your team might be useless after all. Bold of us to say, we know.
But here’s the thing.
Your training program and its correlating sales methodology might use the same language throughout. It might encourage your team to use that same language.
What about using the same adopted language and communication efforts while following up with prospects, though? What about when you’re ranking your opportunities? Is your language seriously the same, across the board, without exception?
If not, it poses a serious problem and leads to a big communication gap. Use the same language and communication for all sorts of correspondence. That means for your emails, direct messages, client calls and more.
If your team is struggling with their communication skills, we can fix it for you.
At Selling Revolution, we build 100 percent customizable sales training solutions for your team. We focus on standardizing your team’s communication, but we don’t stop there. More on that later. For now, though, get started by booking a call with Selling Revolution today.
Avoid These Mistakes to Get Your Sales Target on the Right Track
Maybe you have some sales targets in place already, but they’re not working for you. You can’t seem to achieve sales targets– like, at all.
You think you’ve tried everything. You come up with out-of-the-box sales meeting ideas to try to reach them. You share a unique sales graphic with the right departments every time a new problem arises. You provide roleplaying scenarios to your reps, and give retail sales goals examples to try and spark some inspiration.
What are you forgetting?
We can let you know down below. There are some sneaky mistakes you might be making within your company that stand in the way of hitting your sales targets.
It’s time to start avoiding them.
Misaligned Sales and Marketing Teams
When your sales and marketing departments cannot align themselves, you end up with a whole lot of informational silos. Not good– not for anyone around.
Your sales reps have to know what your marketers are– well, marketing. Your marketers have to know how to prep prospects for the language your sales reps will use.
How to fix it: Get your marketing and sales leads to have scheduled meetings together. You want them to be on the same page. They can cover the obstacles standing in each of their team’s ways and overcome them together.
Quantity Over Qualified Leads on Lead Generation
Don’t make the mistake of trying to get a huge quantity of leads over high-quality ones. Never. Ever. Just don’t.
You’ll end up spending way more on lead acquisition costs than you ever see in ROI.
How to fix it: Establish a reliable lead qualification process. Also work with your marketing department to address objections before you even deal with them.
Inaccurate Metric Tracking
What KPIs relate to your sales department? Are you comfortable with how much you know about your metrics?
If you are, do your metrics show you your potential for growth? Or, are you finding errors everytime you crunch the numbers?
How to fix it: Search for metric tracking services and dashboards. You can find automated tools that will do the work for you. (With a lot less human error, too.)
Thoughtless Goal Setting
Thoughtless Goal SettingYou need to set specific, actionable and realistic goals. You need key players in your company to understand what they are working toward.
No detail is too small here, so keep that in mind as you set goals as well.
Avoid broad goals, like:
“I want to bring in more revenue next year.”
(Is that so?)
Again, be specific. Give yourself timeframes, percentages and any other relevant information.
You Really Can Hit Your Sales Targets Every Time…
Okay, so remember how we said that we can help you build customizable sales training programs? You know, programs that will allow you to reach your sales targets?
Yeah. Let’s get back to that.
Here at Selling Revolution, we get to know you and your business. That’s the only way we can provide you with better quality leads, higher conversion rates and effective training.
But to get to know you, we need a little help from you…
Click here to book a call with Selling Revolution today.