How to Make Your Sales Quota: A Guide
For any sales team, it’s always crucial to stay within the target of sales quotas. In a manifold background of tools meant to help managers set quotas and track performance for reps, many are still at large in hitting their targets. It will be important to note that meeting sales quotas consistently goes beyond technology; rather, it requires effective strategies that keep sellers engaged, motivated, and confident.
Following are five such best practices that will help your team make their quota, even as it builds a productive-supportive sales environment:
1. Deliver Personalized Customer Experiences
Customers today expect so much more than ever. To progress customers through the buying cycle, your sales teams need personalized experiences that demonstrate an understanding of their unique needs and challenges. By adopting an on-to customer-centric approach, your team can get tremendous boosts in performance: a 22% increase in cross-sell revenue, a 38% increase in upsell revenue, and an extreme increase in the size of orders.
Now, imagine a completely different scenario: one in which the sales representative reaches out to a prospect with an entirely personalized note, having researched and learned their pain points. That first meeting follows through with a customized product demo, hearing them out, asking questions, addressing fears, and offering relevant valuable resources. This is far from the impersonal B2B sales experience and gives the customer a strong reason to move forward with a purchase.
But creating this kind of personal experience requires assessment of sales technology, stack, process, and workflow in your organization. Let your team be properly equipped with appropriate tools to engage customers on a large scale for connected personalized experiences.
2. Work Effectively by Goal Setting and Tracking
Setting goals, tracking them, and attaining them are the roots of sales productivity and success. While quotas are at that core and integral in measuring performance, they aren’t the only piece of the puzzle. Effective goal setting starts with clear objectives that complement your greater business goals, then provides actionable steps on how each sales representative will achieve these.
First, consider the performance rating of existing team members; then identify a few key company-wide initiatives you want to focus on, such as generating a specific percentage increase in annual revenue. Next, break those down into smaller, actionable targets, such as month-over-month revenue increases. Decide what specific actions each rep needs to take to contribute toward goals—be it making more calls, sending out more follow-up emails, or setting up more meetings.
Consider investing in tools that let you manage and review your team’s performance for progress tracking and accountability. Sales engagement tools can also help you in real time with what’s working and not working; adjust the training wheels accordingly to help them stay on course and remove any barriers to success.
3. Build New Pipeline Consistently
Good health in the sales funnel and closing high is achieved through consistent pipeline generation. The strong prospecting also lays the foundation for a solid sales process, enabling your team to engage the proper leads at the right time. In fact, it is estimated that 71% of buyers would like to hear from sales representatives early on in the buying process; failure to do so on time will surely let opportunities slip through.
In building a strong pipeline, your structured process should encompass exhaustive research, standardized qualification, custom outreach, detailed discovery, and confident negotiation. By implementing best practices and utilizing technology, your team will be better equipped to produce pipeline more efficiently and at scale.
Consider investing in a consistent sales methodology that offers structure for your team right through prospecting to qualification. Here at DealDeck, we leverage a battle-tested methodology that supports better discovery questions from sellers and the replication of proven strategies. If you continue to apply these best practices effectively, your team is bound to increase their opportunities to win the deal and meet quota.
4. Make Use of Time and Resources Available
Time management is still one of the biggest challenges which most sales teams face. Most reps spend less than a third of their time in real selling activities, while managers battle uphill to prioritize and organize tasks to manage their teams effectively. You do need to find ways in which you can optimize the way in which your team uses its time and resources.
All these sales technologies integrated on one single platform will reduce the need for switching between systems by a great extent, thereby increasing their efficiency. Integration enables real transparency, automatic execution of routine tasks, and early interference in deals at risk. Representatives will therefore be able to dedicate more time to high-value activities: creating customer intimacy and closing the deal. Additionally, a unified platform helps managers track performance more effectively, identify areas for improvement, and provide timely support to their reps. By streamlining workflows and enhancing collaboration, your team can work more productively and consistently meet their sales quotas.
5. Practice Active Listening
To this end, active listening will be a strong contributor to selling representatives’ reaching a close rapport with customers for better and more precise apprehension of their needs. Instead of resting on an assumption that some ideas will work for all, reps should make use of every opportunity to listen to specific objectives, constraints, and desires of each customer. Such a consultative approach not only helps build trust but also allows the reps to tailor solutions more effectively, thereby pushing the chances of a close.
Train your team to listen actively when engaging with prospects. By asking open-ended questions that let the customer bring up their concerns, reps are in a position to learn more about what truly resonates with the customer. This will give you, in turn, a greater insight into the customers’ needs, which will again result in more meaningful conversations and a higher likelihood of meeting sales quotas.
Conclusion: Consistently Hit Quotas with DealDeck
It is all about using consistent quota-busting tools, processes, and best practices. Focusing on personalized customer experiences, effective goal setting, pipeline building, efficient time management, and active listening will definitely yield better performance from your team toward attaining its sales target. DealDeck’s Sales Execution Platform provides them with the features and insights to support them in all these areas: helping them track their performance in real time, manage their pipeline, and close more consistently.
Ready to see how DealDeck can help your team meet their quotas? We invite you to request a demo and learn more about our platform.
