How to Make Sure Your Team Hits Its Sales Goals
There are a number of ways to make sure your sales team hits their goals, including their micro-goals. Some ways to help the sales team do this is by establishing dashboards, rewarding micro-wins, holding flash contests, and creating leaderboards.
1. Use Transparent Dashboards
Dashboards are the highest-value tool to measure productivity. Understand that your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, such as HubSpot, lives as a “source of truth” and that the expectation is for sales team members to log all of their activity in the CRM. Relay this message to your team: “If it’s not in the CRM, it didn’t happen.”
Dashboards can be set up to see the volume of calls, emails, and tasks over a period of time, such as the past week, past 30 days, or past quarter. You can also establish the dashboards to showcase how much-forecasted revenue is in each stage of the pipeline, broken down by sales representatives.
Deal velocity, meetings completed, and new signed logo contracts are additional examples of dashboards that can be created.
It is worth noting that some information may not be appropriate to share across team members. In HubSpot, it’s easy to set who can view each dashboard (such as a sales management team looking at revenue versus an individual contributor).
2. Reward Micro-Goals
In addition to the overarching revenue goal, consider rewarding team members for achieving micro-goals, such as who has the most new logo meetings set that month, who has the highest “open” rates on their sales sequence emails, or who has the largest growth of their average deal size from one quarter to the next.
These micro-goals contribute to the total revenue goal as enabling activities. They are also great for new team members who may not have an established customer base or a full pipeline.
3. Enable Flash Contests
The majority of sales team members are highly competitive individuals. They’re hunters looking for the next—and the biggest—deal. To help these team members hit their goals, consider having “flash contests” that directly line up with your overall revenue goal or micro-goals. Flash contests can be structured by who has the most cold reach-out email replies in a day, or who sells the most of an accessory product within a week. There’s no limit to the creativity a sales leader can have when creating these contests.
4. Provide Insight with Leaderboards
Providing insight into how other sales team members are performing can motivate their peers. Rarely do sales people want to be anywhere else than the top of a leaderboard. Providing transparency into how other sales team members are doing (such as total calls made or closed won new logo revenue) can help keep the competitive spirit alive within your sales team.
The other (and often unspoken) key benefit of the leaderboards is that it provides an opportunity for your lower-performing team members to see their own placement, to learn from highly productive team members, and to understand how they are working.
5. Understand What Motivates Your Team
Sales goals are a quantitative approach to measuring the sales team’s performance. However, salespeople are still just people. Each person is wired to be motivated in a different way, and those differences should be utilized to uncover how a team member can best contribute to the organization.
Does a salesperson perform well when they are penned in by a specific goal, such as making 200 cold calls a day? Or do they perform best when they have green pastures to explore, when it comes to hitting sales targets, and no minimum number of calls to make? Is there a sales team member who would be better positioned to make upsells to existing clients as opposed to finding new logo business?
Identifying these motivations for your team will help them perform at a higher functional level, reduce turnover, and allow you to effectively reach your collective organizational goals.
6. Reduce Distractions
In addition to chatting with sales leaders, I often coach sales team members on how to improve their productivity. One of the most common pain points is distractions—specifically, meetings and requests from internal team members at the end of a sales cycle (such as end of month, end of quarter, or end of year).
To improve the team’s productivity, the sales leader must remove these distractions when the team members need to be hyper-focused on their role and the goals they’re working to achieve.
7. Introduce Accelerators
Accelerators are not a new concept to any sales leader, but they should be mentioned because they are a powerful tool that can be used to increase sales. Accelerators are an increased commission amount earned by the salesperson when they surpass their quota, increasing the commission exponentially, the further past their quota they hit.