Knowing your sales reps’ individual goals help as a guide to set overall department goals
In a performance-based environment, sales goal-setting is important to be successful. As a sales manager you are in charge of defining those goals to lead your team in the right direction. Goal setting is critical to your success; therefore, it is something that has to be revisited.
Sales management is unique because your goals and the goals of each member of your team must align. If this does not happen, everyone in the sales department will go in different directions and it will ultimately lead to disorganisation.
Overall sales goal-setting depends on personal goal-setting too
In order to define personal goals for each sales team member, you should know each member’s desired annual income, personal goals and expectations, area of expertise, abilities, territory and work pace.
Ask your team member about their personal commitments, what are their lifetime and leisure time goals, their career and educational goals, their health and fitness goals and their community involvement goals for the next months, for the next 2 to 4 years and for the long term? Don’t forget to ask the most important question, their annual income goal to achieve all their personal goals.
All these answers will lead you to determine what your sales team needs to accomplish in order for you to earn the company’s goal income and to define a general sales goal-setting strategy. You can determine what daily activities your team needs to complete in order for your team to achieve the department’s goals.
Fulfilling the company’s goals is much easier when the sales manager knows what each sales rep needs to do every single day in order to contribute to the overall success of the team. Setting daily activities for your reps is much easier than setting them on an annual target, which makes sales goals-setting much easier!
Achieving your goals by working with your team will help the sales department get to where you want to go faster, but only if you setup great sales goals that helps each member reach where they want to go.
Sources
The Complete Guide to Sales Force Incentive Compensation: How to Design and Implement Plans that Work. Authors: Andris A. Zoltners, Sally E. Lorimer and Prabhakant Sinha. 2006: New York, NY. Amacom Editiorial.