As we round out the first half of the year, it’s a great time to assess H1 performance and put sales action plans in place to hit your year-end sales targets.
Has your sales team veered off track since you set your initial goals? Assess the current situation and update your plans to give the team renewed motivation and a roadmap for how to achieve sales targets.
Follow this four-step action plan for sales target achievement.
Step 1: Analyze Past Results
Analyze trends in your year-to-date results to pinpoint challenge areas and determine next steps for improvement. This will also reveal what’s working well.
Ideally, your team conducts post-sale analyses and also regularly documents their findings. But many teams overlook this step in their eagerness to move on to the next business opportunity.
Looking at results is an extremely effective way to set your sales strategy moving forward. Make it a point to learn from your losses and identify activities that have been successful.
It’s also important to analyze your sales funnel by stage. This allows you to look back and see where your salespeople are losing opportunities. Is it in the early stages or in the late stages? Knowing the answer will show you where to focus on skills training and coaching.
Step 2: Identify Challenge Areas
Based on the information you gathered in Step 1, determine where skill gaps exist. For example, if conversion rates are low in the early stages, your team likely needs support with pre-call planning, qualifying prospects, questioning, or establishing trust early on.
And if conversion rates are low in the later stages of the sales funnel, you may need to focus on skills such as building customer value, managing objections, gaining commitment, and negotiating price.
Metrics aren’t the only way to identify obstacles that stand in the way of maximum output for your team. One of the most effective methods is simply to ask them.
Ask each salesperson what challenges they’re facing with prospects and customers and get their input on the sales training, tools, and resources that would help them improve their performance. Soliciting feedback will also make your sellers more receptive to future training or coaching.
Step 3: Set Sales Plans and Actions to Achieve Sales Goals
Once you’ve identified seller challenge areas and skill gaps, you need to decide the best ways to support your team to reach the sales goals you’ve set for them. You need to identify the real issues and focus on development areas that will get you closest to achieving your sales target.
For example, your sellers may say they don’t have enough qualified leads. The real issue may be they don’t know the characteristics of a qualified opportunity and can’t prioritize which deals to pursue and which to move on from.
Or your team may consistently face price pressure. They may need sales skills training to help them prove value and negotiate with prospects and customers.
Whatever strategy your unique situation calls for, work with each salesperson individually to create a detailed business development plan. Work backward from the goal to identify activities that need to be accomplished on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to achieve sales targets.
Step 4: Reinforce Action Plans with Sales Coaching
It’s widely accepted that sales coaching is the activity with the greatest impact on sales effectiveness. According to The Brooks Group research, 83% of elite teams—teams that exceed their sales goals year over year—are effective at deal coaching.
Establish a regular coaching cadence with your sellers and make these meetings about development, not inspection. You can use this time to ensure they’re on track with their sales action plans, reinforce new skills they’ve learned, and look for trends in what they’re doing well and where they can improve.
You can find more information about how to hold effective coaching sessions in this blog post: Sales Coaching for Managers: 6 Best Practices.
If an aggressive sales target is causing a seller stress, make it more manageable by breaking the goal into smaller, easier chunks.
How to Achieve Your Sales Goals
When it comes to maximizing sales performance and meeting your company’s revenue goals, creating a sales action plan should be your top priority.
Find out how The Brooks Group’s team of sales effectiveness experts can help you define and achieve your sales goals. Get in touch today.
