Goalsetting is one of the most important components of a great sales strategy. A sales organization without any concrete and specific goals will be unable to navigate today’s complex and dynamic landscape. Getting your goals dialed in is crucial to making sure your reps are on the same page and are not wasting valuable time on the wrong activities.
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1. Set Process-Based Goals
While tracking outcomes is undoubtedly an important component of any sales strategy, you should also focus on goals that track your performance. Too many companies make their reps focus exclusively on KPIs, neglecting the key processes and systems that help them get the results they desire. This could entail setting goals about a certain number of calls or emails made every week or ensuring that your reps follow up on a regular basis. These types of objectives ensure that your reps remain focused and productive, and most importantly that they shoot for consistency and adopt processes and deeply ingrained habits that will lead them to success in the long term.
2. Focus on High-Impact Activities
An important key to setting process-based goals is to focus on the activities that actually generate revenue and sales. One of the biggest obstacles to success in a sales organization is time wasted on unimportant activities. The Pareto principle often applies in sales: 20% of the activities generate 80% of the results. With the amount of data and analytics companies have access to today, it is easy to determine which activities have the highest impact and lead to the most sales. You should set goals to spend a certain amount of time on these activities on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
3. Shorten the Sales Cycle
An overly long sales cycle can seriously damage your results in sales. If your salespeople are taking too long to close deals, or not being proactive enough in following up with prospects, your revenue will take a hit. You should set the explicit goal of lowering the sales cycle time as much as possible and try to find the sweet spot where your reps are not rushing prospects along the funnel and losing potential customers in the process.
4. Retain More Customers
A high customer churn rate can be the kiss of death for your sales company. There is an incredibly high ROI to retaining and cultivating existing customer relationships. You should try to make each prospect a customer for life- too many salespeople think their job is over when they close the deal. Having repeat customers helps boost revenue as well as save time and resources-research has shown that it is up to 25 times more expensive to acquire new customers than to keep previous buyers coming back for more.
You can either measure retention or churn, depending on if you are selling a subscription service or not- but in either case, you should set clear and specific goals regarding holding on to existing customers and keep track of the tactics that help you meet these goals. This requires nurturing and cultivating relationships with customers to ensure they keep coming back for more. Learn more about the best practices to retain customers here (link).
5. Revenue
This one is pretty straightforward. Every sales organization should be keeping track of and setting goals and targets for their revenue. It is important to adjust these goals and not be too rigid about them, or you risk demoralizing your reps.
6. Increase Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value measures the amount of revenue each buyer brings to the table. One of the most important things you can do to boost your customer’s revenue is to focus on bringing in customers that make large purchases, or who will be repeat buyers and eventually bring in large sums cumulatively, rather than just trying to get more customers indiscriminately. Setting goals related to customer lifetime value will help your reps to think more strategically about the customers they bring in, as well as drive them to focus on customer satisfaction to generate repeat purchases. You can set monthly or yearly targets for increased average customer lifetime value.
7. Boost Win Rates
A sales team’s win rate is the percentage of deals closed by your team. You should measure this over time, both individually and collectively, and set goals based on it. This is a great way to get your reps to make more calls and set more meetings while also focusing on more qualified leads that will lead to results. The best kinds of goals drive your team members to take more action, while also ensuring they don’t sacrifice quality for quantity by generating leads indiscriminately.
8. Number of Qualified Leads
Well-qualified leads are your bread and butter as a sales organization. You should set goals to make sure your team is generating and qualifying a large number of leads, and that they are not prioritizing quantity over quality. You should set strict criteria to enforce that leads are actually properly qualified.
If you’ve been struggling to hit your sales goals, it might be time to rethink your approach. The 9 principles we discussed in this blog post can serve as a starting point if you want to achieve more with less effort and frustration. Whether you need an increase in customer lifetime value, more qualified leads or lower churn rates, these goals can help you meet your objectives and achieve success as a company. The key lies in setting ambitious but realistic goals that drive deep, process-based improvements.
For more help setting goals and training your junior reps, give Attention a try.
