10 Tips to Help You Reach Your Sales Goals in 2024

As a sales professional, you will always have goals that are set out for you to achieve. However, with industries, economics, and competition constantly changing, it’s not as easy as it sounds to achieve these goals. Whether you are looking to generate more leads, increase your revenue, or even improve your current customer relations, here are 10 tips to help you reach your sales goals and stay organized along the way. 

1. Understand Why You Need Sales Goals

Time and time again I have seen companies not setting goals, or not setting S.M.A.R.T. goals, which we will talk about later. Setting goals allows you and your sales team to stay on the same page, track how you are doing, and be constantly improving. Without setting sales goals, it can be extremely difficult to track how you are doing. And, if you realize that you are falling behind this quarter, it may be too late to make changes to marketing or sales in order to meet your quarterly expectations. Setting goals can also decrease employee stress, as they will know what they should be doing.

2. Understand Your Sales Funnel

In order to set sales goals, you’ll need to have a thorough understanding of your sales funnel. This may seem very basic, but you’d be surprised how many sales people forget the basics over the years. Or, they were never truly taught about your specific sales funnel when they started with the company. Below is a basic example of a sales funnel. As you can see, the top of the funnel is wide, and it narrows down the further it goes. At the top, in the awareness stage, this is where you are initially generating leads. By guiding your leads down your sales funnel, through remarketing, demos, emails, and other communications, you can push the lead down the funnel to the point of conversion. If you are interested in diving deeper into the concept of a sales funnel and how to understand your unique funnel, take a look at this article.

3. Keep Goals S.M.A.R.T.

You have probably heard of the acronym S.M.A.R.T. goals. But, if you are not properly implementing this concept, it can be easy to fall behind. Here is what the S.M.A.R.T. acronym stands for.

S – Specific

The first step in setting sales goals is keeping them specific. This can help you understand exactly what you need to accomplish in order to meet your sales goals. This essentially means, instead of saying your goal is to increase sales, say that you are going to increase your sales by X% in the next 3 months. Being specific can help you see exactly where you need to improve.

M – Measurable

Next up, you want to ensure your goals are measurable. If they’re not, how will you know if you’ve achieved them? Instead of saying that you want to book more demos, you’ll want to say that you want to book 10 more demos this month than you had last month. Attaching a number to your goal will make it more tangible and help you track it. And, if you don’t meet your goal, you can see where you went wrong.

A – Attainable

As we move into a recession, setting attainable sales goals is even more important. If you say that you want 100 more deals in January 2024 than you had in January 2022, this may not be possible due to economics, competition, or other factors. Instead, look at your month over month and year over year growth stats, and try to set a more attainable goal. Setting goals that are not attainable can be extremely discouraging to your sales team, as they will continuously think that they are not good enough. And, companies that do this often have high employee turnover.

R – Relevant

Next up, you’ll want to ensure that your goals are relevant to your company. For example, growing your website traffic may sound like a worthy goal, but will doing so actually drive business revenue? Or should you instead focus on improving conversion rates on your email campaigns or sales calls? Relevance will depend on each company, and what is going on in your company at that time. 

T – Time-Bound

Finally, we have time-bound. This is often one of the most difficult aspects of setting goals. It’s very easy to miss your goal, and keep pushing the deadline further back. On the other hand, not having a set time frame will cause your efforts to get re-prioritized and make it even harder for your team to stay on track. So, setting realistic and timebound goals is essential in order to meet the goals. Here are a few examples of goals:

• Increase my email open rate by 5% this quarter by testing out new subject lines
• Close 3 more deals this month by adding an additional follow up email in my email sequence
• Generate 10% more leads this quarter by investing in a new lead generation software

4. Use Organizational Software

One of the best ways that you can stay on top of your sales goals is to use organizational software. Software can help you know exactly what needs to be done next, encourage communication among sales and marketing, and ensure you are on the right track to meet your goals. Here are a few of my favorite software to keep you organized.

Trello

Trello is a project management software that lets you manage, track progress, and organize tasks based on priority. You can add different columns based on how the progress is going, like “Backlog”, “In Progress”, “Under Review”, and “Complete”. This can help you see where others are on their tasks and what they still need to work on. Trello can also encourage your team to collaborate on certain tasks. In a lot of companies, marketing and web development teams use project management software, while sales typically do not. This is a great opportunity to ensure all of your teams are on the same page across the board.

Slack

If your company is strictly using email to communicate, you’re missing out. An instant messaging platform like Slack can help your team communicate quickly, easily, and more efficiently. Slack integrates with a ton of other software, including CRMs and lead generation platforms, so you can quickly send important messages to your team. In addition, it can help your team build better relationships, especially if some of them work remotely. The Slack app can be installed on your computer or your phone, so you can stay in touch on the go.

Zapier

If you are using multiple software at the same time, you have probably run into some annoying problems along the way. One of the most common problems I see is companies manually inputting data, like contact information, into your CRM software. If these companies do not natively integrate, Zapier can be the connection point. Setting up integrations via Zapier is extremely straightforward. Zapier even offers pre-built integrations for their most commonly used integrations. While this may seem difficult to initially set up, once it is set up, you will save a ton of time and reduce errors that come along with manual data transfer.

5. Know How and What to Prioritize

One of the biggest challenges that salespeople face when trying to achieve sales goals is knowing how and what to prioritize. To help combat this, you should set both short term and long term goals. Then, you see what tasks need to be completed today, and what can wait until next week. In addition, it’s important to encourage communication between sales managers and their employees in case they are finding it difficult to manage their workload.

6. Personalize Your Client Experiences

One of the best ways to reach your sales goals is to personalize your client’s experience. Whether you are personalizing your demos, emails, or even your website. Yes, that’s right, I said personalizing your website. This is not a new concept for B2C companies, but has just been introduced to B2B companies with the help of Visitor Queue. Visitor Queue is a B2B lead generation and website personalization software that can help you generate leads and encourage them convert. Our recently launched website personalization feature can help you show a custom version of your website to your visitors based on their firmographic information. As an example, if you cater to a wide variety of industries, you can show each company relevant case studies, use cases, videos, testimonials, and more. Personalizing your website can increase your conversion rate by up to 20%. Start your 14-day free trial of Visitor Queue today and increase your revenue today.

7. Stay Agile

While you want to try to achieve your sales goals in a timely manner, it’s not always possible to do so. Unforeseeable events always seem to happen at the worst time, and it may prohibit your sales goals. And, there may be nothing that you can do to prevent these things from happening. Sometimes, all you can do is manage the issue, and do your best to work around it. Try not to get too discouraged and overwhelm yourself and your team if this happens. You can try to rework your current sales goals, or make new goals. The ability to stay agile in sales is essential, and is a great skill to have.

8. Track Your Metrics

Tracking and managing your sales metric should be a vital part of your job. How else can you efficiently know how your company is performing? The types of metrics that you track will depend on the goals that you set for yourself. It’s a good idea to track your specific metrics in a Google Sheet, so you can easily refer to your numbers and share it with others on your team. A few of the most common sales metrics include:

• Acquisition Cost = (total cost of sales and marketing) / (# of customers acquired)
• Win Rate = (total # of won opportunities) / (total # of closed opportunities (won and lost))
• Average Profit Margin = (net income) / (net sales)

9. Sales Bonus Structures

If your team is struggling to meet their sales goals, and you know for a fact that they are attainable, updating or adding to their sales bonus structure may motivate them to try harder. Including an enticing sales structure can encourage them to try harder and come up with new ideas on how they are going to reach their goals. Bonuses do not always have to be in the form of money. You can offer them an extra day off or a gift card to their favorite restaurant. In addition, public recognition in front of their peers can make them feel even better about their job well done, and can also motivate their peers.

10. Ask for Feedback

Whether you are a sales manager or salesperson, feedback can help you grow. Continuously asking for feedback can help you reach your goals and make your job a little easier. As an example, if you are short of your monthly quota, you can talk to another salesperson who is meeting theirs, and compare sales tactics. This can help you get ideas on how you can generate more qualified leads and convert them into paying customers. Setting up regular meetings with your colleagues may seem simple, but it can truly make the difference.

Closing Statement

We all know that setting and reaching your sales goals is easier said than done. But, with practice and setting tangible goals, you can be one step closer. It can take a lot of time and energy to optimize your sales pipeline, but it will be well worth it in the long run. If you have any questions about Visitor Queue’s lead generation and website personalization software, do not hesitate to contact us.