How to reach your sales targets - written by a member of our sales team

I have been running sales teams for many many years, but never came across a better description on how you should think about your own sales target...this is an email written by a member of our sales team...enjoy. Very motivational....

Since I know you all have Sales Teams (whether reporting to you or not) it might be good reading.

This is the mail....

Hi beloved team,

All of us have quite some sales to make in 2017 to reach our target. As all of you also might be interested in getting a nice bonus, I would like to share my personal strategy with you:

-     First, I tried to find out how much I have to sell every day to reach the target: I divided my annual target into 200 days. We have more working days than that, but I subtracted my holidays and some more days, just in case that I get sick or that I have days where I do not sell anything. This way, I have a “safety net”. Even though I get sick or other unexpected things happen, I can still reach my target.

- I note down my average target for each day and in case I do not reach it, I add the missing amount to the target of the next day. If I do not reach my weekly target, I add the missing amount to next week etc. to make sure that I always reach the average I need.

-     Then, I thought about how I would like to structure my day to get the highest possible revenue. So I asked myself how many calls I would like to do each day to increase the chance to sell. And I also tried to figure out when is the best time to follow up in my focus countries and when I can do other things (f.ex. read Outlook mails, reply to CRM mails and tickets etc.).

-     The third step was, that I structured my week: I planned when I would like to do certain follow up tasks (f.ex. I would like to qualify leads, work on hotlists and warm up older opportunities on Monday, follow up on New licenses and Trials on Tuesday, take care of Abandoned update purchases on Wednesday, follow up on update quotes/upgrade quotes and channel limits on Thursday and call all the customers I made appointments with, on Friday) and how I would like to prioritize them .

-     Fourth, I also made a plan for throughout the year: Whenever there is a bank holiday or general holiday time in my focus countries, I would like to ask my manager to assign opportunities to me from other countries. Additionally, I would like to follow up on customers who did not purchase during a campaign one week after the campaign, and on customers who had a feature request that was implemented etc.

 I hope that I could give you some inspirational thoughts for your own strategy. If you come up with more ideas on how we can make sure to reach our targets, feel free to share them with us J

 Have a nice evening everyone!

 Cheers, 

Corinna