When developing a new sales campaign, it’s good to be ambitious with your goals, but it’s also important to be realistic about what you can achieve. Setting achievable goals can help with your business’s long-term development and allow you to monitor your goals progress more easily. But setting achievable goals is often easier said than done. That’s why it’s helpful to have some guidance in working with your sales team to develop goals you know they can fulfill.
5 Tips for Setting Achievable Sales Goals
Here is the best way to set achievable sales goals for your business:
1. Understand the Current Market
One of the most important things you can do to set clear goals and boost your selling efforts is to understand your target consumers and the current market. Using RigDig BI, you can see the current landscape of your territory and your prospects’ current behaviors. You can also see what type of products they might need and when the best time to approach them might be. Using this information, you can make more accurate predictions about what you can achieve and start developing the steps you need to take to ensure your sales campaign is successful.
2. Start From the Top
A great way to develop more achievable sales goals is to look at the big picture. Think about where you want your company to be in a few months or years. Do you want to expand your business to new locations? Do you want to create a new distribution channel or develop new products and services? Knowing what your overarching goal may be, you can see what smaller objectives you need to achieve to help you get there.
For example, let’s say you want to expand your business to a larger territory in three years. You can calculate or estimate how much that might cost your business and know how much money you need to save or generate to make that goal a reality. From there, you can determine how much you need to increase your selling efforts on a yearly basis. If those yearly sales goals don’t seem realistic, then you know to reexamine the timeline of your larger development objective.
3. Be Specific
Being specific helps you narrow down your focus on exactly what you want to achieve and also helps you develop the steps you need to take to achieve it. General goals like “increase sales” or “gain more prospects” are great starting points, but they’re very broad in their parameters. Some more specific goals might be “gain 20 new prospects this month compared to last” or “increase sales by 12% compared to last year.”
As you can see, there’s another key component to specific, achievable goals: a comparison. Having something to compare the goal to is a great way to monitor its progress and know immediately when you’ve achieved it.
4. Give Yourself a Deadline
Giving yourself a deadline can help motivate you and your team to make your goals a reality. Knowing that you only have a certain amount of time to complete the task can help boost productivity and efficiency. It also helps you monitor your goal’s progress as you go. Monitoring its progress is a great way to see how you’re doing at every step of the objective and allows you to see if you need to make changes to your strategies to ensure the goal’s success.
For example, let’s say your goal is to increase sales by 12% over the next two months. Breaking that down, that’s an increase of 6% every month. As you track your campaign’s progress, you might notice that at the end of the first month, you only increased your sales by 5%. If that’s the case, you know that you might need to change your strategies or tactics for the following month in order to achieve your goal.
5. Communicate With Your Team
When creating your goals, bring your sales team into the development process. Get their feedback on how the sales process works for them and what might be realistic to achieve in their current situation. Making the goal creation a collaborative experience can help motivate your team to achieve it and feel like they have a stake in its success. Once the goal is in place, continue to communicate with them and provide them with the tools or resources they need to achieve it. That might include different data products as well as training sessions to improve their selling skills. Successful communication with your sales team during a campaign can ensure the success of your objectives.
Achievable Goal Template
Need some more help setting achievable goals? Try a SMART Goal template. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Combining the above tips with a SMART goal template can help you further reach your objectives and allow your company to grow and flourish.