The quantum of sales revenue generated for an is the single most significant factor towards the success of a busines organization. Therefore sales is the most important aspect for a company.

But if sales does not turn out to be as expected, your business may fail to achieve its breakeven and incur losses. Sometimes with low sales, businesses manage to achieve operational breakeven but fail to recoup their invested capital, resulting in long term losses.

Therefore, it is critical for the sales managers to set right targets for the organization as well as for their team members. And in order to generate revenue, the team actions need to be aligned and planned to fulfill the target within the planned time frame, weekly or monthly.

This article summarizes the right method and techniques to approach sales and over-achieve the expected sales target.

Setting the numbers right
When it comes to setting targets, the top management and business owners expect too much, and such unrealistic expectation lands them nowhere. The targets need to be set with inputs from the finance department, in alignment with growth forecast based revenue requirement.

Also the sales manager should set achievable targets for the executives. Although the targets must be challenging but not so challenging that the employees lose motivation to even make an attempt at achieving the target.

Breaking down the challenge
While approaching a big problem, the complexities and challenges may be overwhelming. Hence, it is always advisable to thin slice it or break it down in to pieces.
In order to successfully approach the target, you need to develop the entire sales funnel, such as:

• How much sales do you need to generate every quarter?
• How much each month? And what are your weekly figures?
• How many leads do you need to generate?
• What is the prospecting value required?

Your ability to break it down in to parts and achieve them will result in overall success.

Tracing the source
Once you breakdown your challenge, you need to brainstorm on the sources or origin. In other words, you need to strategize your sales. And this can begin by answering the following simple questions:

• Where can I look for leads? – Sources to generate leads.
• How many leads will that generate? – Quantify the potential of the source.
• Which product or variant will sell more? – Plan your product portfolio.
• What channels will work the most? – Balance your resource focus online and offline.

Review and act
Keep on reviewing the activity regularly, at the right intervals and frequency, for e.g., for monthly target, reviews must be weekly so if your team is lagging, that lag can be re-covered in the next weeks; instead of arriving at the month-end and not having time to do anything about it.

And during these reviews, the information must be free flowing both ways. Such an open dialogue between manager and executives will help resolve on-field challenges. And facilitated group discussions also enables the team members to learn from each other’s experiences.

Monitoring
What gets measured, gets done!
Hence regular (time-to-time) sales monitoring is indispensable. And the key factor is the metrics that you monitor. It is highly irrelevant to monitor and compare only the order booking against targets. All corresponding metrics such as:

• How many leads are required to achieve sales v/s how many were generated?
• How much value of proposals are required v/s how much was floated?

Measuring and monitoring these metrics help you see the bigger picture, identify your weak performance avenues and enable you to strategise accordingly.

To strategize your moves, and enable your business to reach new heights, you can always connect with our experts.