Sales targets are a sales team’s most important goal - the final destination and visualization of success. Whether you benchmark revenue, units sold, or gross profit, the biggest costs of consistently missing sales targets are the same: stuttering company growth, rep burnout/turnover, and stock pileup. 

In this post we’re going to cover four ideas that can help your team make their sales target, without having to hire more reps.

Let’s dive in.

Ways you can help your reps make sales targets more often 

Set clear and achievable sales targets

When asked, your reps explain that their sales target is unreasonable, they simply can’t find a way to achieve what’s being asked of them. Their performance is clearly flagging, and you’re concerned these issues may land you with resignation letters if it isn’t solved in the long run.

Set up properly, sales targets can be a mechanism to drive rep performance. To get there, you’ll need to deconstruct the overall sales target and work with your team to set a new one which they can refer to whenever needed. 

Set up a time to get together with the team, hear their thoughts, and collectively work to create a new sales target which they mutually agree is achievable; then ensure everyone can see the target, whether on their phone, or on a whiteboard.

Put a fire under your sales reps - rep motivation

Your reps aren’t following up their leads, aren’t communicating with you, and their capacity for customer data reporting has dried up. Low rep motivation is a pervasive issue which may lead to your team slacking off and doing the bare minimum.

Sales reps are a company’s front line, whose passion for selling must be nurtured, at team and individual levels. 

Light a fire under your sales team by nurturing inter-rep competition. You could turn your sales campaign into a game, keep a physical scoreboard, and make the competition a regular part of standup team meetings. 

Alternatively, if it’s an individual rep you’re concerned for, you could try helping them understand their individual impact, or suggest sales techniques which play to their strengths.

Give reps the best direction - spot sales opportunities

Stock is beginning to pile up and your team can’t seem to shift it, despite their continued efforts. After downloading customer data from the CRM, you’ve identified a pattern of missed sales opportunities which your team could’ve capitalized on: if they had the right information.

Acting quickly on a pre-existing sales opportunity could be the final push a rep needs to reach their sales target. To give your team this capability, you’ll need to either drill down into the customer data yourself and regularly share your findings, or encourage your reps to independently work through the data.

Unfortunately, using CRM data to identify sales opportunities can be very time consuming: in a pinch, a sales performance app is far more effective.

Empower reps with real-time sales forecasts

Sales performance was at a high on the 1st, but by the 30th, your team appears to have lost their way. Without a road map to plot the course ahead, the unfocused team is unlikely to hit their sales target.

Stopping to reflect on a sales forecast can be a great way to empower your reps. Forecasts give you the ability to influence the final result before you get there, allowing you to take corrective action before it’s too late. 

At the month’s beginning, get together with your team, look at current spend vs. the sales target and plot how much additional spend is needed to get on track. To keep it simpler, you could look at using a sales performance app to give reps a live-update forecast on their phone, tied to their commissions, which can instantly show them how they’re tracking, and what they’re earning. 

To make immediate improvements, collaborating to create more achievable targets, motivating reps at team and individual levels are both practical options. However, to properly identify sales opportunities, and make best use of a real-time sales forecast, you’ll need to look at using a sales performance app.

If you’re in a critical position and need to find a solution before another sales target is missed, get in touch now.

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