5 Out-of-the-Box Sales Goals for Long-Term Success

Are you a business and sales leader looking to break the monotony of quota, revenue and pipeline goals? Are you looking to mix things up a little bit without changing the final flavour of the recipe?

Consistent and uniform sales performances are often the result of meticulous work in the background that works to lay the foundation for sales. If you look to fix the systems that feed the sales pipeline, you are laying the groundwork for consistent sales numbers.

In the sections that follow we take a look at 5 such sales goals that keep your sales on track and get you the numbers at the end of the day that will put a smile on your face.

Sales Goals for Consistent Long Term Success

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Before we embark on exploring unconventional sales goals, it's important to clarify that these goals are not intended to replace your numerical sales targets. The sales pipeline funnel goals we'll discuss aim to enhance your overall sales ecosystem over an extended period.

Lead Nurturing

According to startupbonsai.com, nurtured leads produce 20% more sales opportunities than otherwise. Also, it goes on to add that businesses that nurture leads generate 50% more sales at 33% lower cost.

Lead nurturing requires you to develop and reinforce relationships at every stage of the sales funnel.

One way to track how well your lead nurturing program is serving you is to track the ratio of Marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads at each stage of your sales funnel. 

CRM and Lead Accuracy

Your sales are only as good as the accuracy of data in your CRM. Good quality leads will generate near accurate sales forecasts. Inconsistent sales performance can be partly attributed to incomplete customer information. Decisions based on inaccurate and incomplete information will only lead to inaccuracies in planning and forecasting sales.

Pushing your sales teams to improve pipeline accuracy before meetings and keeping a track of this metric using accessible dashboards will help improve your sales forecasting and eventually your sales numbers in a big way.

Consistency in sales numbers

You must have incentivised the end of the month or quarterly mad rush for meeting sales numbers. While it generates a lot of buzz and excitement, it also means inconsistent sales numbers throughout the entire sales period.

Incentivizing sales performances that are consistent throughout the sales period is one solution. Keeping track of sales figures using visible and intuitive dashboards, including a comprehensive Sales Pipeline tool, that show sales quota met against the quota targets is another way to nudge this change in sales behavior.

Setting milestones on the way to meet the final quota can also prove to be a good strategy. For example, set a monthly sales milestone for a quarterly target. Incentivize such milestones to encourage wholesome participation. Eventually, the laggards in the team will attempt to catch up with the consistent ones and you will see a more uniform sales performance through the entire sales period.

To take it a bit further, this consistency strategy can be extended to pipeline metrics, social selling and nurturing sales leads.

Customer Onboarding

A badly executed customer onboarding can ruin your sales story in the long run. Customers, whether it is B2B or B2C will always talk about their experience with sales at one point or the other to some of their known contacts, often business contacts. There are many tales of sales executives going off the radar as soon as the deal is cracked.

Staying in touch post the sale and coordinating with product teams for any teething troubles during the onboarding phase will leave an indelible impression on the customer. Satisfied customers are more likely to refer your business to their business contacts. In fact, as per Social Media Today, marketing teams say business referrals are the 2nd highest source of quality leads.

Sales goals that track and reward a good number of successful customer onboarding can go a long way in improving sales numbers in the long run. Alternatively, you could make use of penalties on the value of sales for every customer churn within a reasonable period.

For example, you could penalize the sales rep anywhere between 5% to 10% of the deal value for every customer that opts out during the onboarding process.

Sales folks will then go the extra mile to ensure a successful onboarding process. It even becomes easier for the sales rep to request referrals. This measure will not only ensure good sales but also generate good referrals and improve your sales numbers in the long run.

Social Selling

Social media today has become one of the meatier channels for sales teams. As per a study available on LinkedIn, 50% of revenue across 14 major industries comes from social selling. Community participation on Social sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook is a related aspect of social selling. The reason social selling is becoming increasingly successful is that it acts as a water hole. Prospects come up to this water hole for solutions. 

Engagement with such prospects can be a good criterion to track and incentivize. An active sales goal for engagement on social media like the number of connections or posts will help drive this behavior across the sales team. Incentivizing sales reps based on the number of opportunities generated through these social media channels and community engagements can be a game-changer.

Conclusion

The measures and metrics that we discussed above are not quick return gimmicks. They will take consistent and long term engagement but will give you the results in the long run. An incentive compensation model that caters to all these aspects will be a desirable asset to have. 

Kennect offers you two independent tech solutions that work together seamlessly to let you easily define and drive your own sales incentive model. A model that works for you in the short term and brings in significant and positive changes in the long run.

Request a demo to know how they can together upend the performance of your sales team.