5 Steps To Building A Winning Sales Target Strategy

Last updated on August 13th, 2024 at 01:31 pm

Here’s what we are going to discuss today:

How to determine what is a realistic annual sales target for your business?
How to set daily, weekly, and monthly cold outreach goals designed to help you meet your sales target?
How to make sure that you stay on track throughout the entire year?

Want to build a winning sales target strategy?

Follow these five steps…

Table of Contents:

Step #1: Streamline Your Sales Process

Okay, so before we get into sales target strategy, we want to encourage you to streamline your sales process. Why?

Because if you haven’t made a conscious effort to optimize it, it’s almost certain that your sales process is full of inefficiencies that are eating up your time.

And that’s time that could be spent on cold outreach, discovery calls, and product demos instead!

So how can you streamline your sales process to free up time for activities that directly contribute to meeting your sales target?

Set Up a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

You need a way to keep track of what’s going on in your sales pipeline. This is where customer relationship management (CRM) software comes in.

A decent CRM solution should:

Give you an overview of your entire sales pipeline.
Serve as a centralized database where you can keep all relevant information and easily access it when needed.
Automatically send you reminders for scheduled calls so that you won’t forget them or mix up timezones.
Automatically prioritize incoming leads based on your lead scoring system and assign them to the members of your sales team.
Help you automate various repetitive tasks such as follow-up emails, sending over contracts, etc.

There are countless CRM apps out there so you should be able to find one that can meet your company’s needs at a reasonable price.

We recommend looking up the most popular CRM solutions for businesses that are the same size as yours, researching their pros and cons, and then signing up for the free trials of the most promising apps.

Use these free trials to check out their user interfaces, functionality, and available integrations. Then choose the CRM solution that makes the most sense for your business.

Automate Your Workflow With Native Integrations + Zapier Integrations

You can automate your workflow by using various integrations to connect the apps that you use.

For example:

You can integrate your email marketing software with your CMR software so that every new email subscriber would be added to your sales pipeline, given a lead score, and assigned to a member of your sales team so that they could reach out to that potential customer immediately.

It’s best to use native integrations for this but if they aren’t available you can use Zapier instead. Automating your workflow like that can save you loads of time!

Establish Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and Create a Checklist for Each Procedure

You are probably wasting quite a bit of time dealing with various mishaps that can be easily prevented by following standard operating procedures.

Consider creating checklists that you can go through before doing recurring tasks so that you wouldn’t need to take longer than necessary to complete them or worse, mess something up and have to redo the task entirely!

Say, if you are about to do a virtual product demo, you want to check your Internet connection, microphone, camera, software, etc. to make sure that everything is in order before you start the call. It makes sense to create a checklist for that, right?

Also, it’s worth noting that having SOPs will not only help you to stay organized but also make it much easier for you to train new salespeople!

Step #2: Analyze Your Sales Pipeline Data

Okay, now that you have streamlined your sales process, it’s time to analyze your sales pipeline data.

Cold Outreach Numbers

Start by taking a closer look at your cold outreach numbers:

How much cold outreach are you doing on an average day?
How long does cold outreach take on an average day?

Say, maybe you send 100 cold emails per day on average and that typically takes you around four hours.

If you haven’t been tracking these two metrics, you should start doing so because this is important!

Conversion Rates

Next, you want to take a closer look at the conversion rates across your sales pipeline.

Here’s a typical sales pipeline structure:

Cold outreach
Discovery call
Product demo

Of course, this varies from business to business, some companies have simpler pipelines while others have more complex ones.

What’s important is that you track the conversion rates at each stage of your sales pipeline.

Say, if your pipeline looks like the one described above, then you should track:

Cold outreach to discovery call conversion rate
Discovery call to product demo conversion rate
Product demo to sale conversion rate

Also, if you are offering any downsells, upsells, and cross-sells, you should track the conversion rates of these additional offers as well.

Historical Sales Patterns

Finally, you also want to look at the historical sales patterns, especially how they unfold over time:

Monthly, quarterly, and annual averages
Seasonal variations in sales
Year-on-year growth

Make sure to exclude one-off events, whether positive or negative, from this data.

You want to pay attention to patterns that are likely to continue for the foreseeable future, not to random spikes or dips in sales.

But What if You Don’t Have Enough Data Yet?

If you are just starting out, you probably don’t have enough data yet.

In that case, you should focus on creating an offer, putting it in front of your target audience, and validating that there’s a demand for it.

Then, start iterating your offer based on market feedback until you find a product-market fit. Once you find it, you’ll know it. How?

Because your business will start rapidly gaining momentum that wasn’t there before. It’s impossible to miss!

Until you reach this “escape velocity”, there’s not much point in setting sales targets because your business is too unstable.

You should embrace that instability instead of trying to stabilize your company prematurely because doing the latter might limit your company’s growth potential.

So be mentally prepared to pivot as many times as it takes until you create an offer that truly resonates with your dream customers!

Step #3: Set a Realistic Annual Sales Target

Once you have analyzed your data, it’s time to set your annual sales target. But you need to make sure that it’s realistic. What do we mean by that?

Let’s say that:

You are currently sending out 50 cold emails per day which takes you 2 hours.
You do that five days a week, which works out to 250 emails and 10 hours per week in total.
That works out to around 1,000 cold emails and around 40 hours per month in total.
Out of each 100 emails that you send, you get 10 discovery calls and 1 sale (we are using a basic sales pipeline of cold outreach -> discovery call -> sale pipeline for simplicity purposes).
So if you send 1,000 cold emails each month, you get 10 sales per month, 100 sales per year.

If we assume that conversion rates will stay the same, which is a reasonable assumption if you have an established business, then increasing the number of cold emails that you send should lead to a corresponding increase in sales.

Say, if you double the number of emails that you send, you will likely double the number of sales that you make as well.

But you need to keep in mind that going from 50 to 100 cold emails per day will also mean going from 2 hours of cold outreach to 4 hours of cold outreach a day. Do you have an additional 10 hours per week to invest in cold outreach?

Moreover, if you double the number of emails that you send, you will probably also need to spend twice as much time as you do now on discovery calls. Do you have that time?

Finally, you also need to account for the extra customer support workload, as it’s likely to double as well.

Look at your data and play with the math to see how much you can realistically increase your cold outreach efforts and then create an annual sales target based on that.

Once you have your annual sales target, break it down into quarterly sales targets. Just make sure to take seasonal sales patterns into account if your business is subject to them.

These quarterly sales targets will serve as benchmarks by which you will measure your progress toward your annual sales target!

Step #4: Set Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Cold Outreach Goals

Your annual sales target can help provide a sense of direction.

However, it would be unwise to evaluate your performance based on whether or not you meet it. Why?

Because the reality is that you don’t have control over how many sales you make during any given time period.

There are simply way too many factors that are completely out of your hands: market trends, new technologies, innovative competitors, geopolitical events, pandemics, you name it.

That’s why it makes much more sense to evaluate your performance based on something that is completely within your control: cold outreach.

So set daily, weekly, and monthly cold outreach goals designed to help you eventually meet your annual sales target.

Then focus on achieving those cold outreach goals no matter what!

Step #5: Review Your Cold Outreach Progress Every Day, Week, and Month to Stay on Track

Once you have your cold outreach goals, you want to review your progress on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. We recommend setting aside time for that and putting it on your calendar.

Otherwise, if you don’t schedule it, you might find that you never get around to it because there’s always something else that you need to do!

The reason why these progress reviews are so important is because they will help you stay on track throughout the year.

Say, you fail to achieve your daily cold outreach goal for several days in a row, daily reviews will help you spot this problem immediately and you will be able to course-correct ASAP.

Then, when it’s time for a quarterly review, ask yourself:

Did you achieve your cold outreach goals?
Did you meet your quarterly sales target?

If the answer to both questions is yes, then it’s probably safe to say that your initial assumptions still hold and you should continue doing what you’ve been doing so far.

Meanwhile, if you achieved your cold outreach goals, but didn’t meet your quarterly sales target, it may be time to reassess those assumptions.

Figure out why achieving your cold outreach goals didn’t result in the expected number of sales, then modify your strategy as needed.

Learn How to Automate Lead Generation and Take Your Sales to the Next Level!

Cold outreach can be a great way to generate leads but it’s also extremely time-consuming.

Moreover, when you email or call someone out of the blue, you set up an unfavorable dynamic right from the get-go.

After all, unsolicited communication typically makes the recipients annoyed, especially when it’s coming from a complete stranger who wants to sell them something. Not a great start!

Needless to say, it’s much better to get potential customers to come to you instead of chasing after them. But how can you do that?

That’s what our 5 Day Lead Challenge is all about. It’s a super practical, hands-on online workshop where you will:

Learn the key principles of lead generation.
Create your lead magnet that you can then use to attract potential customers.
Build a simple lead generation funnel called the squeeze page funnel. It’s incredibly versatile and can work for any business.
Set up an automated email sequence designed to help you convert leads into customers.
Launch your funnel using a completely free social media marketing strategy.

Our co-founder Russell Brunson and his special guests will walk you through everything step-by-step.

All he asks is that you commit to showing up every day, watching the main lesson, and completing the homework assignment.

If you can follow through with that, then in just five days you will have a fully functional lead generation funnel!

So what are you waiting for?

Join Our 5 Day Lead Challenge Today

P.S. This challenge is completely FREE!