By: Wafi Asgar

Any company that wants to be profitable needs to sell. To sell, you must have achievable goals and targets for your sales area. In this article, I highlight everything about the objectives of your company’s sales department and examples that can inspire you to establish better goals for your organization.

And it is that without sales there is no company, but a hobby. Here comes into play the essential ingredient of any business. It’s called “growth.”

We can measure growth for an online Startup business in many ways, including by:

• The number of users or sessions in your application
• The percentage of registrations to your newsletter
• The time users spend on your website
• Or the number of comments left on your blog

You’ve jumped into the pool of the venture because you feel you have great ideas and a lot of ambition. I will not deny it: that is certainly needed. It always takes a little passion to drive us in the face of a new challenge.

But if you want to succeed and grow, you need to increase sales! This is not always easy or simple. Regardless of how your company is financed, the first years of activity are usually the most delicate of any small or medium business. This is when more things are pending, and when you do not have all the resources to do them all.

At a minimum, you need:

• Find a good product/market relationship.
• Define your acquisition strategy.
• And design a sales funnel that converts your prospects into leads, so that, finally, they become your customers.

Do you think you have everything ready?

So, let’s educate ourselves at these few steps so you can find the best targets to boost your business growth quickly!

Put Your Feet on the Ground

Even before you start thinking about incentives or commissions, you need to thoroughly review your business plan and ask yourself: Is my annual benefit goal realistic?

Doing so is simply a matter of reviewing the analysis you have already done: from information about your sector or prices, to what clients you have previously worked with, the number of prospects you can reach and how many potential customers arrive new each day.

It may now be difficult to answer the previous question. To simplify it, three main factors determine whether you are going in the right direction:

1. Determine the goals of your company
2. Start with what you already know. Even if your business is less than a year old, you already have enough data on how everything should progress in the next 12 months.
3. Pay attention to the number of new buyers who purchased your product or service in the last year.

Then answer the following questions:

How many funds did you spend on your company?

How fast is your customer base growing?

What is your ideal scenario? And the least desired?

Looking back on the past with hindsight, you can find out where you want to go in the future.

Evaluate the potential of your market

When you sell water to a someone who is thirsty, you can achieve your sales goals without blinking. Before, you have to discover the nuances of your market and industry to understand if there is a real need behind what you sell.

But in addition to that immediate need, how much space do you have to grow?

Sometimes, aggressive sales can be a great solution to capture customers before your competition does it for you.

Evaluate your sales team

What can you do with the resources you have currently available?

Before sending your salespeople to meet their sales goals, make sure they are achievable or, at least, have an answer about how to do it. Always remember that the success of a sales team is based on trust, and that starts with yours.

However, when you have little experience of a service, it is common to underestimate the duration of your sales process.

Create a Professional Sales Team

Sales are sometimes like crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a ship, you must give the best tools to your sellers to get to land safely. And this means having the resources and putting in place the essential mechanisms that provide you with a vision of whether what you are doing works.

One of the main ways to motivate a sales team is through technology. These facilities will make your work more enjoyable and will serve to solve your possible needs. Providing the commercial team with the right technological tools is essential to help them develop the sales process successfully. In this sense, an app for commercials that includes catalog sales and mobile CRM to automate processes and facilitate reports guarantees working with the right information at all times. As we will see below, technology is the best ally to motivate a sales team.

Properly Reward Your Sales Team

In the world of entrepreneurs, where the culture of responsibility prevails, transparency, and orientation to experience, being too aggressive a salesman damages the reputation. The days when the shallow and fast-talking salesperson underestimated both client and colleagues have already ended. Now, a culture of friendly competition is advocated, where the interest of all is to bring as many sales as possible.

As much as you think that your business culture and the benefits of your company are reasons of sufficient weight, the reality is that your sales team needs one more reason to reach – and break records! – Of those sales objectives. And linking your commission structure with the number of new clients you bring to the company or the milestones you get is a great way to keep your sales focused on those numbers. It is the secret basis of any sales strategy to stay in constant growth towards the long term.

Combining competition with compensation allows everyone to be able to know that being the best is worthwhile. Maintaining mutual respect and enjoying a job together while at the same time they work individually to improve themselves.

Think about the commission structure before you start

Nothing works better than an excellent commission structure for your business. How you compensate for sales performance will dramatically change both your growth and your learning. 

Calculate the Objectives of the Monthly and Ideal Sales Department

Keeping track of annual sales goals also means paying attention to your changes from month to month.

Whether your sales rise or fall, it is crucial to keep track of what these changes are due to.

Is your product or service affected by a seasonal issue?

Or has the product undergone any changes in recent times?

To check if anything is affecting this data, you need to know your ideal monthly sales goals. You can do it by backtracking on your steps from the realistic annual revenue goal that you need to achieve as a company.

With this number, you can calculate:

• The monthly sales goals of the company.
• The monthly sales objectives for the department
• The individual monthly sales goals.

You cannot stimulate sales by distributing a reward in equal shares. You must transform your goals into incentives that your sales team can achieve.

Look at your sales levels and previous experience to know what their capabilities are, and thus avoid discouragement.

There are also other things you can check:

• Ease of access to potential customers.
• Vertical in which they are.
• Market forces that may hinder your objectives.

This is the best way to avoid getting disappointing results. Do not expect to reach your sales goals in the first attempt. There are only three components to the success of any startup: build, measure, repeat. Your sales goals work the same.

Obsess with the Objectives of the Activity

The hardest part of sales growth is that, sometimes, it does not matter what you do. You cannot force a lead to pay. 

You do not have control over the results, only on your actions.

Your team can achieve amazing results if you focus on what they do, instead of just obsessing over the results. They are called activity objectives-and are based on repeatable actions that served to close sales in the past. For example, it is a case similar to football. When the player scores a goal, it does not mean that he wins the game. His goal was to complete a pass.

The trophy can be a motivation that moves him to that point, but when he runs through the field, his sole purpose is to make each movement correctly. If they do that, they will be doing everything possible to ensure success.

If your sales team adopts this mentality, they will be able to achieve their goals every month.

SMART Goals

Another excellent way to boost the growth of your sales team is to create an objective based on growth over the previous period. You can use a percentage or a total monetary value. What matters most is to create a SMART goal: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and limited in time.

Specific: Be always precise and clear of what you are seeking to achieve. When goals are accurate, the performances generated are significantly higher compared to vague goals.

Measurable: Make your goals measurable with deadlines to track progress and drive you, to also offer smooth execution. 

Achievable: It needs to be realistic. Is it actually attainable? Time and effort are wasted if this is not the case.

Relevant: Don’t go off track. Make it align with other business goals.

Time-based: Set a deadline. A deadline helps eliminate procrastination. It reminds you the time is ticking and you need to get something done soon. The purpose is to motivate employees and help keep goals in check and moving forward.