As a leader, sales goals can enhance your sales team’s behaviors and abilities. Setting and measuring goals can outline how well your company is achieving Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). When you set sales goals with your team, you provide everyone with a focus to work for and can be much more motivating than attempting to meet an unspecified target. When you exceed sales goals, the motivation will continue to grow, creating a cycle of ambition and camaraderie.
The Importance of Goal Setting in Sales
A few of the benefits of setting goals — and actually hitting them — are:
Increased High-value Target Conversions. Account-based marketing (ABM) is one tactic that has grown in popularity in recent years. ABM is a focused, individualized strategy that prioritizes a small number of high-value accounts over a large pool of potential clients. Businesses can forge deeper bonds with these key accounts and achieve better results by focusing their marketing efforts on them.
Your Team Will Be More Accountable. Holding regular team meetings to discuss goals, wins and losses can help your team be more accountable. As a result, the remainder of the team has the chance to learn how to effectively set goals and actively recognize when they complete or miss them.
Improved Focus and Efficiency. Achieving goals helps ease stress. Without goals to direct you, your team will move from one job or work to another rather than concentrating on the most crucial requirements of your company. As a result, your total production will suffer. When you set a goal, you need to also make a detailed strategy for how to get there. As a result, there may be less of a tendency to stray from the intended path, which can help you complete a task more quickly. You'll spend less time on pointless or ineffective activities and move closer to your objective more quickly.
So how do you achieve these results with your sales team? Below, we’ll discuss the top five tips for motivating your team to consistently exceed the sales goals you set.
5 Ways To Motivate Your Sales Team To Exceed Sales Goals
1. Building Trust With Your Team
One crucial role of a leader is to understand that your team’s motivation can stem directly from your leadership habits and practices. Cultivating trust with your team is one of the practices that will allow your team to succeed.
Trust is the cornerstone of motivation. It will be challenging for your staff to feel inspired and motivated by their work if they lack confidence in you and don't think you have their best interests at heart. Without trust, you won't be able to have an open and honest talk with your sales team about their issues and ambitions, which is essential if you want to inspire them again.
Being open and honest is the best way to establish trust. Just talking about trust can be a great approach to get things moving in the right direction. Empower your team by giving them as much information and instruction as you can, beginning with their initial onboarding. Employ training techniques like role-playing, shadowing your top salesmen, or interactive training tools.
2. Set SMART Goals Personally, Professionally and for the Team
You can start working on how to set and exceed sales goals as a sales manager once you've established your business strategy. Your company's sales objectives should be SMART, which is a useful tool for defining and evaluating goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound are the letters in the acronym.
Why SMART Goals Are Important
Each team members’ SMART goals are just as significant to them as they are to the group as a whole. You can quickly assess who is and is not performing to their potential by defining personalized goals for each member of your team.
Individual goals should be set because everyone has various areas for progress and abilities. Setting individual goals with your team members will also make it easier to spot strengths and weaknesses during performance assessments or monthly check-ins.
3. Understand Why There Are Issues in Sales
The most common cause for poor sales results is the sales training, whether from the program itself, the trainer, the budgeting or a lack of sales training altogether.
To eliminate this issue, it’s important to avoid a few of the following issues:
- Training your entire team with the same lessons; different salespeople will need different variations of training.
- Using an internal team member who’s either too busy or doesn’t have qualified experience.
- Lack of training reinforcement after the initial training session.
It’s also vital to communicate with your team and understand their perspectives to talk through ways you can make them perform better and motivate them on an individual scale — a trait transformational leaders exemplify in their workplace.
Related: 12 Reasons Sales Training Fails [Free Download]
4. Make the Rewards Worth the Goals
Many leaders may think incentivizing their team with financial rewards or bonuses is the only way to motivate them. This is simply not the case.
Transformational leaders find ways to motivate their team not just by learning about each salesperson’s needs, but by also learning what internally motivates them as a person. Instead of simply asking what they want as a reward, ask them what they would like to achieve. This communication can help you better understand their intrinsic motivators, enabling you to create rewards and incentives that will truly motivate them to hit goals frequently and make them feel accomplished — instead of feeling unsatisfied with their performance.
5. Create Effective Communication
Another crucial way you can motivate your team to hit and exceed your sales goals is to practice active listening. By leading with empathy, truly listen to your team and all their goals, concerns, motivations, and questions.
If you genuinely want to help, be honest and transparent with your team and always set aside time to communicate with each team member. Sometimes your team doesn’t need anything but someone to talk to, and great leaders understand that silence is sometimes better than barking orders or giving unwarranted advice.
Resources to Help You Meet (and Exceed) Sales Goals
Managing and leading a sales team has many challenges, but XINNIX®, The Academy of Excellence, is here to help you exceed sales goals while maintaining a positive work environment. From industry-leading training programs and techniques to the top sales resources available, we provide all the tools you need to transform yourself and your team into top performing leaders.
For more information on effective leadership, sales coaching and more, check out our Sales Coaching Toolkit today and take your team to new heights!
