- When I was first hired as a salesperson,
I can remember my sales manager saying to me very directly,
Dean, your job description is two pages long
and there are many things you need to do to be successful.
However, I'm going to narrow down the list
and make it really easy for you.
Your job is to focus on hitting the revenue number.
He said it with a smile, but he sure meant it.
It stuck with me throughout my career
because our jobs have become more complex.
The marketplace, more competitive.
And with increased ways of measuring our performance,
we should never lose track of the primary objective,
hitting our sales targets.
As a manager, along with determining
salary increases for the sales team,
I found that setting targets is one of the more
stressful things that I have to do.
Coaching, negotiating with a buyer,
and working with a sales representative to close a deal,
I love that.
However, locking in on a sales budget for each person is,
for me, one of the more stressful tasks.
Why?
We've hired good people and we're pushing them
to perform at the top of their abilities.
So we want to make sure
that targets are aggressive but fair.
Setting sales targets involves a number of steps,
depending in the company you work for.
In a number of cases you're given an overall number
from management and finance.
Hopefully, you're in a business where
it's a more collaborative process,
and you work together to agree
on a budget for the sales department.
If you're given an overall 5 to 6% increase for your team,
and if you wanted to just take the easy path,
you could just pass that along
to each salesperson and you're done.
However, as we all know, that's not the way it works.
You need to look at what accounts are growing rapidly,
those that are flat
and those that may be on a downward cycle.
Being able to explain to each individual representative
how you set their target
means you need to have all of your ducks in a row.
Being clear and communicating your
sales target strategy openly is a critical objective.
I think monitoring and tracking sales
is the fun part of being a salesperson.
Well, with the caveat, when your business is healthy.
Years ago I used to track my sales performance
with homemade tracking tools
and kept it posted on my office wall.
Some companies even still have war rooms
with the numbers posted
and filled in manually on a whiteboard or big chart.
As spreadsheets improved,
salespeople created their own charts
and graphs with multiple colors.
Today, with some terrific
customer relationship management software,
you can slice and dice results in many ways to track
and evaluate your teams.
It's also generated automatically,
so everyone can see real-time results.
Tracking and monitoring can then be
on a consistent timetable, rather than quarterly or longer.
This comes down to personal preference as a manager.
But I want salespeople
totally focused on their overall number.
This one is very straightforward,
and at a glance, they know exactly
where they are year to date.
There are other key performance indicators,
or KPIs, that are great to track.
And I like to have them on a separate dashboard.
Again, it comes down to preference.
But there's a lot of information on this report,
and your work with the individual
sales team member to review it is critical.
Revenue tracking of a sales target
is the primary performance indicator.
The KPIs for other aspects of the sales process
are important measurements, too.
However, we can never lose sight of
the individual quotas that each sales representative has.
The achievement of that number
is what drives out success or disappointment.