If Your Sales Goal Is Your Destination...

Are you on track?

Does your whole team know where you are headed?
Are you clear what key success criteria will need to be achieved to get there?

Many companies make sales goals a key part of their goal setting (as they rightly should be) and yet fail in some key (some would say obvious) areas. It is often these shortcomings that make discussions over management accounts frustrating.

Setting a sales goal can be as ‘easy’ as picking a number - looking at last year's sales and adding 15% is fairly standard way of ‘easily’ setting sales goals.

The danger here lies in lack of strategy - where will the sales actually come from? Ideally a sales plan will break down the sales goal into target areas to enable sales and marketing teams to focus. This can be done a number of ways - focusing on which products to sell, which regions will be targeted, which client groups are best to focus on, which routes to market will be best to invest time in etc.

When more thought is given to what will be sold to whom, by when, with who using which method, then the sales figure is far more accurately compiled. 

Dangers here often lie in being too optimistic, not doing market research and choosing your figures on gut instinct. It is vitally important to look at trends - tools like SWOT & PESTEL Analysis, Porters 5 Forces, Ansoff and Boston Matrices are useful for analysing market potential in more depth.

Robustly setting the sales targets set you up well - as long as this information is communicated effectively to the team. Communication is not a just case of “telling” them. Communication is “the understanding between people.” Does your team understand the sales goals? Many companies fall foul of setting the sales target without being clear on the GP required. Communication is vital in both informing the sales team and giving regular feedback on progress - live dashboards and reports are great for this. When effort expended is acknowledged in ongoing way, then people are more likely to repeat the action.

Having the team understand sales, and measuring sales success with a great feedback loop, can create an end outcome focus at the expense of the sales process. Of all the factors that jeopardize organisations of arriving at their sales goals a lack of sales process and/or poor management of the sales process is often the lynch pin that fails.

It is so important that we will discuss this in more depth next week. Key elements include knowing the steps to your sales process, knowing the time taken in and between each step and knowing your conversion ration at each step. It is here that Key Performance Activities (KPA’s) and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are defined. 

If your sales goal is your destination point don’t just hop in your vehicle and hope. Plan the what, where, when, which, who & how.  Communicate clearly, measure and ensure you have a feedback loop - like a GPS you should know exactly where you are at any given time. Drive forward using the key factors that will produce the best returns.

Don't be left wondering “Will I arrive?”  Do the work up front and know with confidence when you will get there and what success will look like!

Here’s to your success!