8 Sales Goals To Set For Your Team & How To Track Them

Are you trying to think of some new sales goals for your team but not sure where to start? Check out these tips from the founder of Engage 2 Engage and author of Energize Your Marketing Momentum, Valeh Nazemoff, including some useful frameworks for setting and tracking your team’s objectives.

The basics of setting sales goals

Sales goals are like any other — they require planning, diligence and precise execution.

“Whenever I’m working with a small business,” Nazemoff says, “for any of their project goals – it can be sales, marketing, operations – it is important to first organize the mindset. Intentional focus brings balance. Mastering balance while taking consistent action is what brings desired results.”

Nazemoff says that no matter what goals you have in mind, you should focus on what she calls the Three Es: internal efficiency, internal effectiveness, and external efficiency.

“Internal efficiency is activities that are repeatable, recurring, and ongoing. Internal effectiveness is internal activities that are new but needs improvement that impacts the overall project goals. And external effectiveness is adding new external activities to drive new business.”

“The strategy to organize goals and drive desired results for various project activities is to break them into different efficiency and effectiveness buckets to get a clear view of what is involved,” she adds.

8 Examples of sales goals for your team

If your team is looking for direction regarding sales goals, here are some avenues you might want to go down. However, these are just general pointers – each team’s unique needs and responsibilities inform what direction they might choose. Nazemoff notes that writing the goals is extremely central to a team’s success and that choosing a goal is more than just making a broad statement.

“How you write goals is important,” Nazemoff says. “It is important to first break down the project goal into sublayers: Project Goal, Milestones, Steps, and Tasks.”

“The project goal is what you want to accomplish long-term. It is about what you want, not how you achieve it. Milestones are what marks progress. Steps is like a progress bar where you need to take several actions to complete a milestone. And a task is a breakdown of the steps that need to be done now.”

1. Revenue target

This is the most common sales goal that teams often set for themselves or upper management sets for you. You can set a revenue target for the team to achieve in a specific time frame, such as a quarter or a year.

2. Sales volume

This goal involves the number of units or products your team needs to sell in a specific time frame. Working with sales volume is a good fit for teams that sell physical products.

3. Customer acquisition

Any good sales team wants to bring new customers to their business. Here, teams can set a specific number of new customers they need to bring in over a certain period of time.

4. Cross-selling or up-selling

Rather than getting new customers, sales teams can also sell more to existing customers. They can target the number of cross-sells or up-sells to achieve by the end of the quarter or year.

5. Sales cycle

Another sales goal that streamlines processes involves shortening your team’s sales cycle. Here, a team experiments with a target number of days or weeks to close a sale.

6. Conversion rate

Focusing on the percentage of leads that turn into customers is also a solid goal for sales teams. A team can either improve that number or analyze existing methods of conversion that might not fit their needs. 

7. Customer retention

This simple goal focuses on retaining existing customers. Increasing customer retention rates or doing team evaluations to assess gaps in customer care are two approaches here.

8. Average deal size

Lastly, teams can work on scaling up and increasing the size of their deals. This might involve getting new clients or selling more of a product to existing clients.

Applying the Three E Model to track sales goals

No matter what goal you decide upon, Nazemoff says, you should start by listing out all the components and breaking them down into smaller bits.

“For example, say I want to improve the customer experience. What might that include? The checkout process, the resources available to customers, follow-up emails, etcetera,” she says.

“Once you have the details of your goals, it’s time to put the Three E Model™ to use. Separate your goals into each category. Which are activities you need to maintain? Which exist, but need improvement internally? And which requires innovation and are new external activities?”

One of the biggest mistakes that teams often make while creating and tracking goals, Nazemoff says, is that resource management and timelines aren’t well thought out. That’s why teams need meticulous goal tracking tools, monitoring methods and continuous flexibility to pivot if things aren’t going their way.

“From the onset, the breakdown of the project goal, expectation, and measurements are clearly defined,” Nasemoff says. “When something is not progressing forward, you can pinpoint exactly where the issue and bottleneck is and then address it. Is it lacking resources? Is it the timing of external factors? Maybe it is perfectionism that is slowing things down/ Or could it be communication-related?”

“Goal measurement based on the measures, metrics, and KPIs you decided to use can be task-based, numerical, monetary, or customized depending on your business model,” Nazemoff adds. “Within Hive’s newest feature, Goals, you set the ultimate project goal and then you create each of the Three E’s as sub-goals. This way conversations with teams and with clients are organized and seamless.”

And lastly, constantly taking in these metrics and reviewing progress keeps a goal on track.

“When reviewing your goals, it is important to cross-check with the SMART technique to make sure that the goals you are making are achievable,” she adds. “This process will help you create a cultural habit within the business and how goals are communicated internally and externally.”

Use Hive to track your sales goals

Are you ready to start setting and tracking your sales goals? You’re in luck — Hive’s newest (and most exciting) feature is Goals. Hive Goals allows you identify set goals that correspond with your desired outcomes. With the ability to link Goals to projects themselves, you can easily visualize progress in real-time and keep everyone aligned on your project’s status in one centralized dashboard.

You can also:

• Create one, ten, twenty, or more goals for your team, so everyone understands what they’re contributing to.
• Centralize and automate your goal tracking and reporting.
• Pull data from other systems into Hive to streamline operations and reporting.
• Share your goal or goals, assign the goal to relevant teammates, track activity, and give yourselves a deadline.
• Understand how your team and organization are pacing towards an individual goal or a set of goals.
• Color-coded designations allow an easy understanding of “on-track” items.
• When it’s time to review progress, accomplishments, and achievements, easily export all relevant information.

Want to get started? Start your free trial of Hive Goals today!