Setting Your Sales Goals

“We WILL be there with you every step of the way.” 

Take the time to set the following sales goals:

• Break Down Annual Into Monthly. The first thing you should do is break your annual revenue numbers into monthly revenue numbers. This gives you a good idea of the revenue need to generate on a monthly basis. If you are targeting $120,000 for the year, the monthly amount ($12,000) is what you are managing to.
• Number of Customers and Revenue Per Customer. Think about things like having a certain number of customers have a certain average amount of revenue per customer. Take your average revenue per customer and determine how many customers you need each month. If your average customer is $1,000 and you need to generate $12,000, you need 12 customers.
• Pipeline Coverage. We discuss this in more detail in another course but the idea of a “pipeline” is simply the concept that if you want to have two customers, you likely will need ten customers in the “pipeline”. Pipeline coverage simply refers to the amount you need to have in the pipeline to have a chance of hitting your numbers. So if you need $12,000 per month, you need $60,000 of potential sales in your pipeline.
• Activity Metrics. Once you know how large you need your pipeline to be, you can set the day to day actions to drive the level and type of activity. Identifying the most influential actions and setting metrics is a highly effective way to keep your sales team on track. You can set action-based goals for your sales team at large or for individual reps (or both). These goals are typically based on a target number of actions and a specified period (day, week, month, etc.). The most common ones used are:

• • # of outreach emails sent
  • # of first contact or follow-up calls made
  • # of follow-up emails sent
  • # of meetings scheduled or conducted
  • # of proposals sent

Setting these sales goals and metrics are the first step to giving yourself the best chance to hit your sales targets.