There are some set objectives for your sales team that focus on specific sales KPIs. These are known as sales goals. Some of the sales goals examples are: increasing revenue year over year, enhancing customer retention, and the list goes on.
The finance department, sales team, and the executive team will all collaborate together in order to set sales goals that will foster the company’s growth. Once the goals are set, the sales team is liable to convert them into trackable action.
There are certain things to keep in mind while establishing sales goals:
Instead of setting one big goal, you need to create smaller goals. You can also keep rewards if your sales team meets these goals. This will help to boost their morale, confidence, and productivity.
Creating and achieving a sales goal is a daunting task. The goals should neither be too big neither too small. Make sure they are aligned with the current resources and can be achieved by your sales team.
Sales Goals Examples for your Sales Team
Let’s take a look at some of the sales goals examples:
Increase your Monthly or Annual Revenue
The primary sales goal example is revenue targets. Most of the companies set the sales goal as increasing the month-over-month/ year-over-year revenues by 10%.
Depending on the type of business you have, you can set your revenue targets monthly or annually.
Why it is important: Revenue is the most important component of a company’s growth. In order to ensure profitability, it is important to create a sales goal related to revenue.
How to Achieve this Goal?
If you want to achieve any goal, you need to prioritize it. What can help you the most is a highly functional CRM system. It can improve the probability of meeting sales goals. With the help of this system, your sales rep can keep track of his own goals.
Reduction in Customer Churn
Retaining your customers is quite important if you want to ensure the success of your company. Customer churn refers to the number of customers who leave your business during a certain period. Ideally, monthly customer churn should be less than 1%.
Enhance Profit Margins
In case your company is unable to deal with recurring revenue, then one of the best sales goals is unit and margins. Units refer to the number of times your product is sold whereas margins refer to the amount of profit gained from each of the sales. It is often expressed in the percentage. Ideally, the sales goal is to increase profit margins/units sold by 10%.
Increasing the units sold is quite important as it helps in the company’s growth. It also provides you an insight into the important products generating maximum profit for your company. Similarly, margins are important too as they help in predicting how much costs can be recovered with each sale.
How to Meet this Goal?
If you want to achieve this goal of selling more units, then your sales team will have to increase activity and strive to grab more leads. To make the task easier, you can ask your sales team to use some specialized AI tools. Another thing that you can do is to provide your sales team with better training in order to generate more leads through sales calls.
Improve Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value refers to the cash value a specific customer contributes to your company during the length of their subscription with you.
Thus, you can make an excellent sales goal of increasing the total value every customer spends over the life cycle. Ideally, you can create a sales goal of increasing customer lifetime value by 10-20% year over year.
Why to set this target: As getting money from a customer you already have is much cheaper and easier than getting the same value from a new customer. The difference is around five times the cost with a new customer as compared to the old one. That is why it is advisable to improve the customer lifetime value.
How to Achieve This Goal?
To achieve this goal, the sales team should strive to upsell and cross-sell. The team should communicate with existing customers by sending them emails and managing calls for them to find out whether the upgrade is working for them or not.
A good CRM and the right tools can be beneficial in this respect. These will help the customer match his product needs.
Enhance the Number of Qualified Leads
Besides closing deals and creating revenue, keeping your pipeline filled with fresh prospects is important. So, an objective can be built around it. An ideal sales goal example in this respect can be to increase the number of qualified leads by 18% per month.
Why it’s important: Having the right number of qualified leads can increase the probability of having a greater number of close deals.
How to Achieve This Goal?
For achieving this goal, you can allocate time during your sales team’s day for researching. This way you will be able to find high-quality leads. Always remember that a smaller number of high-quality leads is always better than the high number of junk leads.
You can even take the help of various tools available these days to streamline the process.
Surge in Win Rates
If you want to bring the best out of your sales team, then increasing win rates is the best sales goal. Win rates refer to the ratio of won deals to the total number of closed opportunities.
According to research, the ideal win rate for most industries is 47% along with a 25% loss-to-no-decision rate. An ideal sales goal in this respect can be to increase monthly win rates by 5%, but if you find that it doesn’t work then you can focus on reducing the loss-to-no decision rate by 8%.
Why it’s important: Having a win-rate sales goal helps in tracking the success of the company and contributes to its growth. It can also ensure the effectiveness of the sales funnel.
How to Achieve This Goal?
If you want a surge in the win rate percentage, then you can focus on your team’s weaknesses and suggest methods to improve them. You can even guide them about the working of each phase of the sales funnel and how they can address a prospect in each phase. You can give suggestions on how to send the perfect follow-up email.
Make sure you train your team to manage the buyer’s journey in a better way by increasing win rates and lowering no-decision losses.
Reduction in Customer Acquisition Costs
One of the best sales goals is to reduce customer acquisition costs, which is the total costs incurred in the process of winning a new business, right from marketing to salaries and overhead expenses. An ideal sales goal in this respect is by reducing the average customer acquisition cost by 8%.
Why it’s important: Reducing the customer acquisition cost can help to reduce cycle time and the risk posed by customer churn.
How to Achieve This Goal?
It is very important to evaluate your sales process to check where all the spending is going. Create your buyer personas carefully by scrutinizing all the details. You need to know whether you are targeting a number of hard-to-reach prospects. Ideally, a customer’s lifetime value should be around three times their customer acquisition cost. If you are not able to achieve this, you may need to change your approach in order to target more accessible customers so that you can get more value for that.
You can ask your sales representatives to follow up with their prospect customers through email or call the ones who are already in the sales funnel. For example, you can target those customers who have subscribed to your newsletter, shared a blog post, or downloaded a demo.
Another thing you can ask your team to do is to use technical tools to gauge where the most leads are coming from, whether they are coming from emails, website landing pages, and a lot more. Then you can retarget through these areas. This process is known as and can be very beneficial if you want to move away from expensive marketing channels.
Lessen Cycle Times
Your average cycle time depicts how long it takes to convert a lead into a deal closed-won. A sales cycle is a series of events that happen during the selling of a product or service. The average length of a cycle depends on both the industry and the size of the deal involved.
According to research it has been found that, in SaaS, the average sales cycle for a closed-won deal of a value greater than $20,000 is 96 days; the average sales cycle for a closed-won deal of a smaller size [