Aligning your strengths with your message and process is the key to sales—but before you can orient your internal language and methods, you have to understand and appreciate the depth of planning that goes into establishing meaningful objectives.

A sales objective is the star that guides you—without it; you could be spending hours retracing steps, discovering outcomes that do not grow the business, or, worse, doing little at all. It’s not enough to work blindly—you need to assess and develop a picture of where you want to be that best aligns with your future state while still being mindful of the limitations of where you are today.

Some limitations will be found in your sales team’s reach, but many are possible to overcome with the right technology. With the sheer amount of sales software on the market, including B2B outreach, CRM platforms, and prospecting tools, you’d think any business could now get in on highly profitable conversion and revenue growth.

However, this is not the case—it takes a third column to truly succeed: the discovery and implementation of meaningful sales objectives.

While your technology will help you employ your tactics, it will not reveal them to you from any dashboard—it takes a team approach, an understanding of your organization’s path, and consistent review to make sure objectives are not only realized but achieved.

Today’s blog will look primarily at sales objectives and why they are a necessary part of any sales team. Likewise, we will look at how a forward-thinking platform like Wingmate can bring you from plan to profit.

What Are Sales Objectives?

Sales objectives are the unique goals that are part of your company’s marketing plan. These typically include aims such as revenue targets, profit margins, the acquisition of cooperative partners, targeted demographics, and advertising specified by the marketing team. 

To be agile, you must be willing to accept new sales objectives as you discover the capacity to deliver on more or different promises and abandon objectives that are no longer achieving outcomes. Of course, this is different from abandoning a process just because it isn’t working today—a consideration we’ll touch on later.

So we’re back to sales objectives and creating them today—without a good strategy or a goal, a company will find it difficult to function in the mid-to-long term. A consistent and robust set of sales objectives will be your long-term goal that a sales staff may work toward in order to help the organization expand and sell more products.

The sales objectives you choose will be detailed through conversations that occur in sales meetings and planning, ensuring that the sales teams and members of a company’s marketing team are on the same page. Multiple sales targets can be included in sales objectives, which help to specify the goals in terms of numbers every quarter or month.

Why Are Sales Objectives Important?

Sales objectives are doubly important in organizations with a heavy amount of employee incentivization through sales and commission. When the goals of the organization and its sales team are aligned, staff know what to look for in clients and how to better foster long-term relationships. 

As a result, defining goals is essentially establishing structure for your team. For the sake of their ego, no one wants to fall short of their aspirations (and their paycheck). Setting goals is a method of laying a foundation for consistency. Give your staff something to strive for and eliminate the procrastination issue. Wingmate aligns your sales goals with the tools that allow for staff to excel simultaneously as field-service and sales professionals—can your organization say the same about their current tools?

Types Of Sales Objectives

Let’s take a brief look at different types of sales objectives and see what they can teach us about the overall sales project:

Revenue – Setting this goal gives you a granular number—the total income your organization accrues. But while it is an indispensable part of doing business and assessing results, there is much more to having a complete picture of your sales process and outcomes.

Win Rate – Not all opportunities are closed with a sale. Your win rate is established by looking at how many connections ended with a sale rather than a missed opportunity. Maximizing this sales objective is crucial, as it shows that you are not wasting time with meetings or unproductive prospecting. The more you’re winning, the more you know you’re doing something right!

Profit Margin – This number reflects how much money you are bringing in from your average endeavor. While your product, service, or subscription may cost a certain amount upfront, that does not translate to the income your organization ultimately reports—your upkeep costs, overhead, and contracts will determine how much profit you ultimately make.

CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) – The cost of acquiring a customer (either through marketing, onboarding time, or other materials spent in the pursuit of their business) should not eclipse the amount to make from their time with your company. A low customer acquisition cost indicates that your current strategy is as effective on cost as it is sales outcomes.

Churn Rate – How many customers do you lose a month? For a subscription service (or B2B) the effects of a high churn rate cannot be overstated. By looking at your sales objectives in terms of churn rates, you can get a better understanding of the types of customers who go onto create long-term profit—not simply a short month of income. In our experience, this comes with significant amounts of training time, resource sharing, and other considerations that eat up time in departments outside of sales. In fact, a high churn starts to affect the customer acquisition cost we examined earlier!

CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value) – If you offer a service with multiple tiers or subscription models, this sales objective can vary wildly depending on your relationship with customers. Make the most of your time with a customer by examining the CLTV and trying to up the number through relationship building, upselling, and support that fosters collaborative growth—not just a series of tickets.

How to Set Different Types Of Sales Objectives

The particular targets you establish for your sales staff will change depending on your firm and the business across the street. However, any institution would benefit from including some overall sales targets in their team’s expectations.

Take a look at the sales objectives above and consider which apply most to your business. Discover weak points, high-cost losses, and areas which might yield long-term profits if improved today.

You will notice that the above sales objectives don’t stop once the sale has been concluded. This connection to the long-term customer relationship is no coincidence—it is only through aligning the long-term goals of your support, service, and customer relationship teams with your sales objectives that you can discover the customers that best suit your ideal customer profile.

How to Achieve Sales Objectives

So now you have an understanding of and your very own set of sales objectives. You’re halfway there!

The capacity to create precise sales objectives and afterward manage day-to-day activities to consistently achieve those results, we think, is the link many companies miss in their sales objective and process improvement: the ability to link sales activities and sales objectives through actionable and repeatable actions. Rather than just asking for the desired outcomes, salespeople must be demonstrated how to get them—and given the tools to do so reliably.

First and foremost, sales executives must ensure that the appropriate sales procedures are in place for each of the company’s selling responsibilities. Clear sales objectives may then be established, and salespeople’s activities can be linked to meet these goals. Leaders may create a new strategic direction and assure consistent implementation in the field by using explicit sales objectives and formal (for example: documented) strategies.

Processes must still align with the results. In other words, no amount of planning will secure results when the system between planning and execution is flawed. Sales is a results-oriented profession. Remember—there is no money flowing into your company if there are no profitable outcomes.

You can figure out what the problems are by analyzing your team using the correct information and metrics dependent on their role and stage in the pipeline. Perhaps it’s not necessarily the fault of the team; it might be the result of the sales procedure you’ve implemented or an oversight that has prevented you from connecting all of the moving parts.

Track Your Progress Towards Your Objectives

You’ll need access to the correct information to create the right performance and sales goals. Relevant data will help you understand what is and isn’t working for your team. With the right information in hand, you’ll be able to develop the right kinds of objectives for your team and give them a picture of what success looks most like.

Broadly speaking of internal critical metrics, you have outbound, successful connections, and sales accomplishments. We’ll go over these briefly one by one.

Outbound – Outbound refers to the total quantity of calls, emails, and other forms of communication that your sales team engages in when attempting to connect with new clients. Of all process points, this bears the most examination—the results you find during your outbound analysis will drastically inform how you change your procedures moving forward. Are your email campaigns going directly into the trash? Consider revising the subject line or copy. Are your phone calls going ignored entirely? Perhaps there is an issue with your area code.

Successful Connections – As we alluded to above, outbound can only truly be measured by the number of successful connections made—real conversations where each party (sales and prospect) can learn about where they can do business. For email campaigns and PPC advertising, this may be measured in click-through rates. For all other funnel strategies (mail-out flyers, signs, posters), you can measure their effectiveness with landing or intake forms that support viewer feedback to questions regarding how they found your services.

Sales Accomplishments – This is the most obvious metric, and the most important when it comes to employee recognition and commissions—how many sales were made? This metric doesn’t just relate to profit, however. By observing the long-term outcome of relationships such as usership over time, vendor satisfaction, and the number of referrals, you can gain insight into how satisfied users are with your services. Remember, even as a SaaS vendor, your app rating is only a small piece of the story.

In summary, you want to be able to quantify your team’s accomplishments, and these metrics will go a long way in helping you to make accurate calls. That way, you’re not speaking in broad generalizations that may or may not be accurate; instead, you’re speaking from hard data. You may make the required modifications and reward those who are getting the greatest outcomes by knowing exactly how each member performs in lead generation, for example—a feature supported by Wingmate’s pipeline visibility tools.

Tech-Assisted Review

Of course, you could always benefit from using a CRM like Wingmate. CRM’s, including our own, are cost-effective means of bridging your present and future states.

Customer relationship management tools (CRM) are digital platforms for managing all of your company’s customer, potential customer, and vendor relationships—as well as interactions and pipeline steps related to each.

The idea behind CRMs is straightforward: improve business contacts in order to expand your company. A customer relationship management system (CRM) aids businesses in staying in touch with current and present customers, streamlining procedures, increasing profits, and creating accountability between departments.

In the context of sales objectives, a CRM is the most used sales and process measurement tool. If you want to secure the future of your business, you should look into it. A CRM offers great benefits for both the business and the customers. It is not only a fundamental tool for data analysis and goal monitoring; but CRM will make your life easier in many other situations.

Want to reward employees for behavior and wins? With Wingmate, it’s easy—you can track pipeline progress and contributions for all employees at-a-glance and reward based on the sales objectives and performance metrics you have already laid out. This simple step goes a long way in aligning your sales objectives with your team and their contributions to the company mission.

Analyze Your Sales Process And Adjust It If Necessary

When going through the review process, have an open mind and be honest about whether or not your unique techniques are ones that work for your company.

This step is where consultation is a fantastic option—bringing in a set of eyes that can appreciate efforts, struggles, and the difficulties that plague businesses in your industry. Remember that no sales situation will be perfect, much less personal when the cracks are pointed out.

Subscriptions softwares like SaaS are a great option since they do not lock users into long-standing contracts. As our customer success page shows, short-term gains can be turned into long-term wins by reviewing the affordances of your chosen software solutions within the context of comprehensive sales objectives.

As you can see, sales and sales objectives are more than shaking hands and counting profits. They involve a comprehensive understanding of your organization from outreach to customer support—monitoring and optimizing at every step of the way to ensure your customers have a fruitful journey with your service.

We want to hear from you—contact us with any questions you have or any goals you may wish to see reached with our comprehensive CRM and field-service sales application. Better yet, book a short demo with us and see firsthand how Wingmate can help you better define and reach your sales objectives in minutes.