If a company wants to prosper, its sales need to generate good results and meet expectations. But it is practically impossible to find any professional in this area who has never had difficulties in reaching their sales goals.
Applying agile methodology in companies is a matter of continuous improvement. After all, which manager would not want knowledge to be disseminated by all employees.
Within this idea, there are agile methods. Act with assertiveness, make knowledge available to everyone, and give visibility to people.
The goals you set to act as a kind of direction for your salespeople. The more realistic and grounded they are, the more effective your actions in achieving them will be.
In this article, you will find out how you can increase and hit sales goals using Agile methods for your company.
What are sales goals?
Many people mistakenly understand goals to be synonymous with targets. It’s natural since they’re two very similar concepts. However, targets are nothing more than the steps necessary to reach a greater goal.
In other words, when we refer to our goals, we are talking about measurable, time-limited milestones that are part of developing a project.
In the context of sales, therefore, they detail the results that need to be achieved to succeed in a broader purpose.
How to set sales goals?
Whenever we address strategic issues, we reinforce the idea that there is no universal approach. Therefore, there is no point in implementing sales goals that have been successful in other markets or contexts.
You need to know how to define the most relevant ones for your company.
Analyze your market
Your goals must be realistic and clear. Otherwise, they can overwhelm the sales team, creating fear that is hostile to the organizational climate and therefore the rate of productivity.
When analyzing the market, you have more grounding to decide which goals are achievable and which would generate nothing but frustration.
This need to observe the company’s external environment became even more evident, marked by the period of social isolation.
Aware of fluctuations in the economic scenario, companies from all segments changed their goals drastically, including changing their priorities.
Assess your team’s capacity
It’s no use just looking outside, it’s necessary to focus on internal factors. After all, it’s no use setting theoretically achievable goals if, in practice, your team still doesn’t have the necessary skills.
When that’s the case, you have two options. The first is to reduce the parameters to suit the reality of the business, even if this possibly reduces results.
The other way is to invest in improving your workforce. This can be done through training programs or by hiring new professionals, outsourced or not.
For more robust companies, it is crucial to monitor and assess the individual growth of each sector. So you can identify those who are ready for bolder challenges.
Be aware of the sales index
If you already know the importance of working with data, it should be easy to access information regarding your sales indexes. Knowing them in depth is critical to setting your goals.
Based on this data you can, for example, calculate your average ticket in a given period of the previous year. The account is simple: just divide the revenue generated by the total number of sales in the period.
Thus, you have a guide to ensure that your sales goals are realistic, based on data.
Naturally, when doing this calculation, you need to consider some variables, such as the growth of the sector, the variation in the economic situation of the persona, among others.
Use technology to your advantage
As always, technology is an important ally. Today, several tools help not only in the development of sales goals but also in their management and subsequent evaluation.
It is very common and efficient, for example, to use spreadsheets for sales teams. These tools organize all the actions that must be taken to achieve a goal and, to improve, allow the manager to monitor its development.
You can also find out the conversion rate of your different product pages, as well as the number of users who leave your portal without taking a single action.
Follow the company’s strategies
It’s impossible to find organizations that don’t go through any kind of changes. Therefore, there is no way to achieve sales goals following the same unchanging pattern when selling.
Employees must follow the company’s strategies, adjusting to its changes. There are more and more novelties, techniques, and tools to improve results in this area.
Be aware of your results
It is essential that sellers have their own metrics and mechanisms for self-assessing their activities. However, it is essential that managers are able not only to analyze and evaluate the performance of their team but also to know how to keep it informed.
Thus, it is necessary to seek to maintain constant feedback from sellers. Employees not only need to see their activities from another angle, but they also need to feel motivated.
Therefore, managers must create a good dialogue with their sales teams, as well as know-how to point out mistakes fairly and create ways to reward good performance.
Agile sales methods: how to apply?
By now you should have an idea of how to apply an agile transformation to your sales team.
Each company has its business. If a company has a long lead time to deliver a product, it is important to add value to the customer even while waiting.
Maintaining an active relationship is also important for your company. Send an email, deliver nice content.
Within this idea, it is essential to have a CRM with automatic actions.
Integration: team + customer + project
Within agile methods, an important action when we talk about sales is integration. We have already discussed how important it is to share knowledge and best practices for all areas.
However, one more step can be taken. More than collaborators converging with each other for the good of the company and processes, why not include the customer in this?
So, if the software is being developed for the client, they integrate it into the project, listening to their requests and feedback can be valuable for the entire team.
In this way, with the customer immersed, there is greater transparency in the entire process. He keeps track of what’s going on, what’s being developed, and how it’s happening.
By doing this with some frequency, you will be able to gather more and more insights to replicate in the solution your company sells.
What are the benefits of having well-defined goals?
Sales goals, when well defined, serve as a guide for all your company’s actions, including marketing. After all, the integration of different departments has everything to align their strategies and optimize their results.
So the fact is, success in achieving your goals depends on how successful you are in achieving your goals. This, in turn, has a direct bearing on how you define them.
Although they involve actions in the short term, well-defined goals also affect the long term, and not just on achieving the objective. It is that, if the approach is successful in a period, it can serve as a reliable basis for decision-making in the future.
Therefore, the process of efficiently setting your goals can positively affect your company as a whole, although certainly, the commercial sector benefits most.
When they know what they need to do, salespeople gain injections of energy and confidence that result in even better performances.
Sales goals are key elements in achieving your goals. They need to be realistic and clear to provide the most productive work environment for your different teams.
To find the indicators that best fit your strategy, carry out studies on the internal and external factors of your business.
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