Business Search

Setting Sales Targets - Q&A

With Martin Driver

Q: I have just been given the job of running a small sales team within our company. We provide financial services to our customers, which are not totally unique, but we have some advantages. As well as running the sales team who also deliver the service, I have been asked to increase sales, but I am an Accountant ! Could you help me with how to set appropriate targets to achieve the increase in sales ?

A: We often come across this situation, for whatever reason, someone is asked to take on a sales manager role, which is not their core discipline; however this does not mean you...

...will not be successful.

I have listed below some basic steps in setting sales targets :

- Establish the exact sales figures required.

- Divide your sales target by the average value of your sales, which will then give you the total amount of sales needed.

- Once you have the total sales needed you can then divide this by the number of salespeople in your team, which will give you the sales target for each individual salesperson.

Once you have established the sales target for each salesperson the next step is to look at the activity levels required by each individual to achieve these figures.

Now, the next step is to look at your existing activity data such as telephone calls, canvas calls, customer contact or appointment records you can start to get the equations from these i.e. how many appointments did a salesperson make and what sales where generated by this and their value. How many customer contacts were needed to actually raise these appointments.

And finally what marketing and prospecting activity was needed in order to generate this activity i.e. email campaigns, flyers, brochures, telesales etc etc.

So in summary what you need to do is find out sales needed, level of appointments to achieve the sales, activity to produce the appointments.

As you can appreciate this is a huge topic in its own tight however I hope this is of help and good luck !