If you’re a sales leader, your days revolve around numbers. Take the lead numbers, the demo numbers, the meeting numbers, the deal numbers or the hundreds of other numbers that you could break down each day, week, month, quarter or year, for example. But which should you focus on right now? And what should they be?
We created a free one-page Quarterly Sales Goals Template to help you find out. Use it for assistance in:
- Setting quarterly sales goals
- Getting a gut check on whether the goals you’ve already set make sense
- Housing your quarterly goals in one place
Then, once you have your numbers down, consider these three tips to help you determine which deserve your focus:
1. Ask yourself: Which of the activities that each of these numbers supports will be most impactful in this particular quarter? For example, in Q1, you’ll probably want to focus on numbers that measure top-of-the-funnel activities, such as prospecting and booking demos; on the other hand, in Q4 it’ll likely be opposite, with more emphasis around those activities that will turn opportunities into deals.
2. Regardless of the quarter, at the end of each month, get your team to focus on closing deals. If you wait until the end of a quarter to play catch-up, you’ll be setting up you and your team for additional anxiety.
3. During the first month of each quarter, concentrate on your top-of-the funnel activities. Reasoning here falls along the lines of that for tip #2. Even if you’re in Q4, when closing deals seems to become more important than ever so you can hit annual numbers, you can’t forget to set yourself up for success in Q1.
Then, of course, if you need to know how to motivate your sales team to hit those numbers you’re focusing on, you should learn more about sales gamification. But that’s another post.
