How to Get Your Sales Team to Hit Target

Sales can be a very driven and competitive environment but every member of the team can experience dips in mood, confidence, or prospects, which can put targets in jeopardy. Looking at ways to help boost morale and productivity among your salespeople can have a massive impact on these figures and push them to do their very best.

So how do you make sure your salespeople hit target?

Collate team figures

You may not be Wall Street, but having one place where you can see real-time data on your team can help you see a clear picture of what's going on, who may need more support, and who is excelling. You can do this with a TV in the room or having a dashboard on the intranet, whichever works best for your team dynamic.

Set activity goals

If you create team targets that are set around activities rather than performance, you're much more likely to motivate your team. Track things like calls made, emails sent, notes logged and meetings booked to get a good idea of who is doing what in your department. You can do this with most CRMs and it's fairly simple to integrate.

Use this data to identify best practice

Salespeople are more likely to be motivated if they have a set activity volume they need to achieve to get the level of commission they ideally want. Data-driven KPIs are much more effective.  It's a fairly simple calculation to work out, just look at how many calls, emails, meetings and deals it would take to get X amount, based on their commission rates, funnel conversion rates and average deal size.

Balance team and individual goals

Both can work to motivate salespeople and it's important to make sure you don't get stuck on one or the other. Broadly speaking, team goals should be keyed into overall business targets and values, while individual ones can focus on performance and activity levels.

Follow up

Setting people goals and targets will only motivate them for so long if you don't follow up on the results as well. This can be in the form of a weekly meeting or even an email roundup, but it's important you review your goals to see how your team is performing and identify any trends that are working particularly well. Doing this will also give you an opportunity to celebrate the smaller victories as well as the big ones.

Lead by example

As a team leader, you need to embody best practice. Think about what is most important to you and make sure you are walking the walk. Whether it's punctuality, being a team player or a particular business goal, you should ensure you are leading by example for your salespeople.