Setting your sales goals is a fundamental step in being able to set up day to day efforts – whether it is just you or a team of people – to take actions that improve your chances of success. There is nothing more indicative of a well run – or poorly run – company than how it sets its goals and manages to these goals.

“Setting sales goals breaks annual numbers into goals that drive the activities on a daily basis.” 

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.
• 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.
• Pipeline Coverage. 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”.
• 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.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.