Achieving Sales Goals: How to Ensure you Reach Your Monthly Targets

As a sales professional, you enjoy being ambitious and achieving sales goals. But how do you ensure you reach those monthly targets? We’ve got a few recommendations for you that will help make attaining those ambitious goals more realistic.

Are your goals SMART?

Before you can sign off on a goal for yourself, determine if the goal is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time bound). Now, how do you determine if a goal is smart?

First, let’s look at specificity: Your goal shouldn’t be broad. Make it specific, like increase set meetings by 20 percent over last month (let’s say that brings you to 36 for the month). This brings us to measurability. You should be able to attach a hard number to your goal. Having a number to shoot for makes it easier to visualize your goal.

But how do you determine if your goal is attainable? Let’s look at your past few months. Have you been steadily increasing your set meetings? Did you almost set a few additional meetings but ran out of time? Then it sounds like this goal might be realistic. But, if you look at your past few months and notice a pattern in struggling to meet your current goal, don’t shoot for an additional 6 meetings. Either lower your goal or determine if this is something you can shoot for next month.

Whether or not your goal is relevant is determined by your business needs at the moment. If your company has a goal of setting more initial meetings, this falls right in line. But if your company is looking to re-engage with current customers, you might want to rethink this goal.

And finally, your goal needs to be time bound. Companies create monthly goals for a reason: it gives employees an allotted time to complete a task. By the end of the month, it’s reviewable. And we can track success month over month.

Set personal goals that motivate you

So you have your goal of setting an additional 6 meetings next month. That’s a great goal to share with your supervisor, but is that goal by itself motivation enough for you? Within the parameters of your monthly goals, set personal goals that drive you to be more productive.

For instance, you might value the assets your company provides. This could be white papers, webinars, and everything in between. Check your email and see how many times you shared those assets in the last month. Now set a SMART goal to increase that number. This goal is great because you’re not only seeking to better educate leads, but you’re creating an actionable, measurable goal that’s just for you.

Review your activity

Now to make sure you’re achieving your sales goals. Reviewing your activity is one great way to stay on task. Check how much time you’re spending on the phone against how many meetings you’re setting. Determine if the calls you’re spending time on are resulting in qualified meetings set.

How many calls are you making daily? How many emails? Create targets for yourself, or microtasks. Doing this allows you to break down your parent goal even further, creating daily and weekly checklists to further measure your success. By monitoring these things regularly, you’ll have a better idea of how far (or how close) you are to achieving your sales goals for the month. You’ll also gain insight into what behaviors should change.

Target the leads that went radio silent

Every company has leads who were so close to committing to a meeting but have since disappeared. It can be an easy win for you to check in with those leads to attempt to set up a meeting. Craft a great email with a subject line that will result in an open. Or pick up the phone and ask what happened. Find out when they’re ready to sit down and chat about their problem.

It’s important to strike a balance so you’re not neglecting those old leads, and you’re not ignoring those brand new ones, either.

Ask better questions

It’s important to always challenge yourself to do better. Part of that is reviewing the questions you’re asking and finding ways to improve them. Maybe your questions aren’t open ended enough, and you’re not really having a dialogue. Or maybe your questions remind the lead of alternative solutions to their problem.  Ask questions that focus on what the problem is, the importance of solving it, and how your solution is really the only right answer. However, you don’t want to come out any say that.

Don’t get stuck in a rut. By tweaking your approach and finding better ways to ask the same question, you’ll find achieving your sales goals becomes a little easier.

Clarify everything

Never take anything for granted. Always ask for clarification to make sure you’re on the same page. Miscommunications via phone and email are so common. Don’t nod your head and agree if you’re not 100 percent sure what your prospect meant. Restate their answer to confirm you get them.

If you didn’t get an affirmative on an invite you sent, reach out to make sure the time is still good. After a call, send an email about next steps so they have it in writing. These simple actions can be the difference between losing a potential lead and gaining a valuable customer.

So what are you waiting for? Set your SMART goals and take a look at how you’ve been performing. We’re wishing you the best of success. Let us know how these recommendations for achieving sales goals work out for you.