Employee engagement continues to be a key driving force for meeting business goals in all industries. However, even during the record-high employee engagement rates reported by Gallup in April of 2020, less than half (38%) of all employees were engaged with their work. Also, shortly after that record high, Gallup reported a record drop in engagement of 7%. This drop brought the ratio of engaged employees to slightly less than one in three (31%).
There are many factors that go into employee engagement and inspiration—from manager attitudes and behaviors to career growth opportunities, job stability, work expectations, and more. Keeping employees inspired to do their best work can be a major challenge. However, it can be well worth it! As noted in research cited by Forbes, “engaged teams have lower turnover, 21% greater profitability, 17% higher productivity and 10% higher customer ratings than disengaged employees.”
For sales teams, goal management can be a key driver for employee engagement. So, in today’s post, let’s discuss how you can use goal setting to inspire sales teams to go the extra mile and increase results.
When setting employee goals for sales team members to meet, it can be helpful to follow a few basic best practices:
While annual goals are important for the company as a whole to meet, pushing annual sales team goals into a sales rep’s face at the start of the year can be intimidating. For example, in another blog, when we told one of our sales reps that “his quota had almost doubled to $80,000 after last year doing $45,000 he had a minor panic attack.”
This is a natural enough of a reaction to being told to do nearly twice as much as before, and the big goal was a little intimidating. However, we broke that big annual goal into much smaller and more manageable daily and weekly goals like “10 opportunities opened per week” or “40 conversations per week” that provided a short-term goal to focus on. This way, instead of worrying about a massive end-of-year goal that might feel impossible to meet, all he had to worry about were smaller weekly process and outcome goals that all contributed to keeping him on track for that big end-of-year outcome goal.
An important part of the SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely) goal setting framework is that a goal must be achievable for it to motivate people to work for them. But, how can you determine what is or isn’t achievable?
One way to ensure that your sales team goals are achievable is to take a look at past performance and use that data as a benchmark for future performance. This can help you set goals that are aggressive, but realistic.
How long does it take for a sales team member to complete a successful prospect call? How long is the average failed call? When setting process goals for sales people that ask them to complete “X” actions in a day, the time it takes to complete the specified task can have a huge impact on whether that goal is or isn’t achievable.
For example, if you set a goal of “make 20 prospect calls a day,” and each call takes half an hour on average, there is no way that a sales rep will be able to meet their goal, as that’s ten hours of calls to make in an eight-hour shift.
Additionally, it’s important to leave room for some downtime between calls so the sales rep can recover mentally, take care of other tasks, and prepare for the next call. So, a goal of 12-14 calls per day might be more realistic when the average time per call is 30 minutes. This works to keep sales reps motivated so they sell more rather than give up (or try to cut corners to save some time to meet an impossible activity goal).
When setting goals for sales teams, it’s important to make sure that the reps on those teams know what their goals are at all times—as well as how they and their colleagues are tracking towards those goals. Public data dashboards can be an invaluable tool for accomplishing this.
With a public dashboard displaying each sales rep’s key performance indicators (KPIs), you can ensure everyone knows how well they’re progressing towards their goals—and even encourage some healthy competition as salespeople try to one-up each other on the “leaderboard.”
Which sales goals should you be tracking to encourage business growth? Here’s a brief look at the top three sales KPIs your team should be tracking:
For managed service providers (MSPs) that thrive on providing consistent services from month-to-month, tracking MRR is a no-brainer. Your closed MRR will tell you how well your team is selling (and how well client services is doing at retaining customers) so you can identify trends over time.
Being able to track MRR on a monthly and year-to-date basis helps you identify ebbs and flows in your sales over the course of a year—making seasonal trends clearer so you can set better goals and targets based on your company’s “busy” and “slow” periods. It can also help you determine if your company is or isn’t growing.
How many opportunities are in your company’s sales pipeline at any given time? Your sales team should never be without prospects to call or leads to follow up with.
Your current sales pipeline is a measure of how many opportunities/leads are in your sales process at any given time—which can help you estimate the number of new customers your business can expect to gain.
A closely-related statistic that may be worth tracking is sales attrition rate—the number of opportunities/leads that leave your sales process without successfully closing a deal for one reason or another. If there is a high attrition rate at a specific step of the sales process, then that could indicate an issue that needs fixing.
A successful sales process typically involves engaging in certain activities a set number of times—such as making calls, setting up demos, and using specific sales-generating strategies.
These sales process goals help to ensure that sales team members are engaging in the key activities needed to drive success and results.
However, process goals alone may not be enough. Sales reps should also be held accountable to meet outcome goals—after all, anyone can make 20 calls a day if they aren’t putting in the time and effort to make a sale.
With outcome-focused sales activity goals, like “sign X new customers” or “generate $6,000 in net new sales each month,” sales reps can be motivated to do more than just go through the motions. Being held accountable for results and process goals gives them a roadmap of what they need to achieve and how they can achieve it.
Whether you’re tracking sales goals for a whole team or for individual sales reps, BrightGauge is here to help! We make tracking metrics like closed MRR, current sales pipeline, and sales activities quick and easy.
BrightGauge’s public data dashboards let your sales reps see their numbers at a glance, letting them know which KPIs they need to focus on to meet their personal sales goals. These dashboards are also a handy tool for one-on-one meetings with employees that give managers a convenient look at an employee’s actual performance to date.
Also, if the goals you need to track change because of a new initiative, BrightGauge makes it easy to modify the information displayed in the dashboard. With numerous integrations for different data sources, BrightGauge is easy to incorporate into your business.
Are you ready to transform your sales team performance tracking? Reach out to the BrightGauge team today!