In general, goal setting is a very important topic. In all areas of life, goals can help push an individual, family, team, or any other type of group towards what they want to achieve. Without a goal, there are many unanswered questions. How do you know when to stop? How do you know when to be happy? Have you reached a level to consider successful? These questions and so many more are answered through the help of goals. Sales enablement goals should be included in this same mindset.
Why Goal Setting is Important
Specifically to sales, goals are important for helping gauge success. If your sales team did $5 million in revenue in Q3, this might seem like a great success. But what if executives were expecting $8 million? What if they only expected $4 million? There’s no way to know if the $5 million your team generated was good. However, if a certain revenue were set beforehand, you’d have better insight into the team’s true success or failure.
If the goal had been $8 million, then your team would know they have to sit down and reevaluate their efforts. Changing strategies, making personnel changes, whatever you think it would take to make up that extra $3 million. However, if $4 million was the goal, your team would know it came in well over the goal and you should replicate your strategies again for Q4. Or you could possibly share this success with other teams and implement your winning strategies across the company.
Sales Enablement Goals Examples
While every team is going to have different goals, here are some that could help you in your sales enablement efforts:
Increase Win Rates
This one may seem obvious, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important to track closely. By keeping this a goal every month, quarter, or year, you can ensure that your team will be constantly trying to better its sales enablement efforts. Win rates won’t increase unless steps are taken to sell better. How can you become a better seller you might ask? Well, by increasing your efficiency, having better training, living in a single platform and so many other ways that are affected by sales enablement.
Increase Upselling Revenue
Sales enablement doesn't stop when the pen meets paper. To truly have a great sales process, you must continue your relationship with your customers after the initial deal has been made. From here, it’s all about answering questions, fixing issues and most importantly, upselling. Upselling is a great opportunity and shouldn't go overlooked. By being able to upsell to current clients and get them a bigger deal (or potentially cross sell too), your sales team’s efforts will go through the roof. Don’t ignore this area of opportunity as sales enablement can help you get there.
Reduce Customer Churn
From day one of college, or even high school business classes, we’re taught it’s cheaper to retain a customer than get a new one. It was true then and it’s true now. By making one of your goals to reduce customer churn, this can become a reality for your team. Making your sellers go out every quarter or year and constantly replace old customers is draining both mentally and potentially financially. While retaining 100% of your customers is always going to be an extremely difficult feat, you should always be monitoring your current situation.
Reduce Sales Cycle Length
Reducing the sales life cycle length can pay massive dividends. By using sales enablement to track the health of the sales cycle as well as how long it takes each seller on average to complete it, you can get a good understanding of where efficiency improvements can be made. Increasing efficiency can play a huge role in improving revenue. By knowing which of your sellers aren’t performing as quickly or efficiently as they should can help nip bad practices in the bud before they become a big issue.
Below is an example of Salesvue's Time to First Touch report. A report like this can help show which sellers are making connections quickly, which helps move the sales process along.
Reduce Onboarding Time
A commonly forgotten area of sales enablement is onboarding. Creating a great onboarding process is essential to the team. Yes, you want new sellers to feel at home and excited to start for your company. But this is also a key moment to equip them with what they need to succeed right out of the gate. Using the best sales enablement strategy to create a flawless onboarding process can help reduce the time it takes new sellers to start making more money for your business.
Check out this blog post from Sales Enablement PRO to see how these goals and more like them tie to increasing revenue
Tips for Choosing and Managing Goals
While using goals might seem like the obvious choice now, there are some things to remember while choosing the right goals for your team. At Salesvue, we believe in using the SMART method. This is a way to set goals, based on certain criteria. SMART goals are ones that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. Here’s an example of a SMART goal based around quarterly revenue:
To start, you must pick a specific revenue goal, so you know when you’ve achieved this number. Let’s use $1,000,000. Next, you have to make sure this number is measurable, which it is by looking at the size of each deal you win. After this, you must make sure this $1,000,000 is attainable.
Do you have the proper resources to achieve this? Has your biggest quarter ever only been $200,000 in sales? Because this $1 million might not be attainable if that’s the case. You must also make sure this goal is relevant, which revenue is to a sales team. Finally, by setting this goal for the upcoming quarter, you make it timely.
Making your goal, “We wish to achieve $1,000,000 in revenue this upcoming quarter,” is far better than “We hope to make a lot of money soon.” Wouldn’t you agree? Using SMART goals help you maintain focus, while also holding you accountable for making any changes necessary if it looks like you’re going to come up short.
Measuring Progress and Success
As mentioned in the use of SMART goals, you have to make sure your goals are measurable. Measuring your progress towards these goals is crucial. Without keeping track, how will you know if you’re going to reach them? This is where sales enablement and sales engagement platforms may come in handy. Through using the tools, data and analytics available through them, your team can help measure your progress.
Important things to make sure your tech stack has includes solutions that allow you to look into the health of your cadences, time to first touch reports and conversion rates by different sources. Check out Salesvue’s analytics strategy to learn more about some of these important metrics.
Having the Right Strategy and Technology
There are certain tools to help you in these efforts. Solutions such as sales enablement platforms and sales engagement platforms can help you achieve your goals as well as set attainable ones. These types of platforms will help not only with your selling efforts, but will also give you insight into how well these efforts are going. By utilizing cadences, reporting, onboarding training and so much more available through these tools, your team will surely be set up for success.
Summary
As mentioned at the very beginning of this blog, setting goals is a part of life. It doesn’t matter if you’re a high schooler wanting to get an A on their math test or a knitting ground wanting to meet the first Friday of every month for an entire year. Goals help push up towards greatness. Your selling efforts should be no different. Setting sales enablement goals can help your team reach new highs and take the next steps towards becoming the most efficient and effective sales team on the planet.
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