Sales Objectives: how to Define Them Effectively?

Every year at the same time (end or very beginning of the year), the ritual of defining sales objectives for the coming year takes place. Motivating and aligned with the company’s strategy, simple yet fair, setting sales objectives can become a real headache for managers. Here are 5 key points for effectively setting your sales team’s objectives.

Sales Objectives: What are They for?

Before going further into defining a sales objective, it’s good to remember the purpose of setting objectives.

Sales objectives primarily serve to motivate your employees. They should therefore be set with this idea in mind: how to define objectives that are a true source of motivation for my sales team?

While objectives are often linked to a salesperson’s salary, they don’t only influence their extrinsic motivation (induced by an external factor: reward, punishment…). They are also a powerful lever for activating the employee’s intrinsic (self-induced) motivation.

Here’s how sales objectives impact the 5 levers of intrinsic human motivation:

• Mastery (“I’m progressing”): a sales objective will allow the employee to self-evaluate and validate their progress over time (“I did 93% last month, I did 97% this month, I’m improving!”)
• Autonomy (“I’m in control”): once the objective is defined, the salesperson has good leeway to achieve it. They are autonomous in implementing the necessary actions to achieve their objective.
• Purpose (“What I do has meaning”): objectives are defined in coherence with the company’s strategy. They are an excellent way to share the company’s long-term strategy with the salesperson and give meaning to their actions.
• Development (“I succeed”): achieved objectives are a source of satisfaction for the salesperson. They validate steps in the salesperson’s personal development (“I’ve been hitting 110% of my targets for 3 months: next month I’ll become a key account manager.”)
• Social Interaction (“I’m connected with my peers”): team objectives, in addition to individual objectives, are an excellent way to develop team spirit and leverage the social bond among salespeople.

Setting objectives is therefore a powerful management tool if the exercise is carried out correctly. To achieve this, it’s important to keep in mind how objectives influence a salesperson’s motivation.

The Incenteev sales engagement platform was designed to effectively leverage the 5 levers of intrinsic motivation in employees.

Different Sales Objectives for Different Results

To be effective, your teams need different types of objectives.

Medium and Long-Term Sales Objectives (1 Month to 1 Year)

Medium and long-term objectives provide employees with visibility over a longer timeframe. These can include market objectives (revenue, margin, order intake…), quality objectives (customer satisfaction rate, prospect response time…), or cost objectives (travel expenses…). The indicators tracked here must be meaningful in the medium or long term.

Short-term Sales Objectives (1 Day to 1 Month)

Short-term objectives are the driving force behind sales engagement. They serve to focus teams on current operational priorities. These can include prospecting objectives for a given week, customer callback objectives, closing objectives at the end of the month… The indicators tracked here must be meaningful over a short period. They can be driven by sales challenge operations, for example.

As a manager, it’s important to skillfully juggle these two categories of objectives to effectively motivate, engage, and retain your sales force.

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Effectively Defining a Sales Objective: the SMARTIES Method

It’s common to say that a well-defined sales objective must be SMART. Here, we’ve slightly expanded the formula to make it more relevant.
To effectively define your sales objectives, think SMARTIES:

• Specific: a sales objective must serve a precise purpose. This is essential for the employee to understand and accept it.
• Measurable: a sales objective must be measurable to be tracked. If you don’t have the means to track an objective, set it aside.
• Accepted: a sales objective must be accepted by the employee to have a motivating effect.
• Realistic: if a sales objective doesn’t seem realistic to the employee, all motivating effect immediately vanishes.
• Real-time: a sales objective must be tracked over time, and with high frequency. Nothing is worse than setting objectives and not regularly tracking them over time.
• Individual: while some objectives should be the same for everyone, others should be individualized. Individualizing objectives facilitates acceptance by the salesperson and enhances the sense of fairness.
• Evolving: a sales objective must be able to evolve over time. Regardless of the duration for which the objective is defined, it must be possible to revise it regularly. An objective that doesn’t evolve quickly loses its motivating effect.
• Simple: a sales objective must be simple for the employee to understand. Overly complicated indicators obscure understanding and make engagement impossible.

Keep these 8 points in mind when setting a sales objective. They help ensure you’re not designing an overly complex system that’s incomprehensible to your sales team. Don’t hesitate to regularly evolve priorities: this month the priority is prospecting, next month the priority will be closing… It’s simpler for your sales team to focus on one objective at a time.

Getting Employees to Buy into Sales Objectives

The sales objective represents a commitment from the salesperson to the company. It is therefore fundamental that it is well understood and accepted, otherwise its effect will be null.

Here, a pedagogical approach is essential: take the time to thoroughly explain each person’s objective. Why was it defined? How was it calculated?

It’s important to involve the salesperson as early as possible in the process. Some companies even go so far as to let the salesperson set their own objectives, with manager validation, of course. If your salesperson doesn’t agree with their objective, ask them why. Adjust the objective until a consensus is reached.

If the objectives are ambitious, highlight the resources implemented by the company to help the salesperson achieve them: qualified prospecting databases, marketing campaigns, training…

From this point, we enter the sales engagement phase centered around objectives. Communication with the teams is essential. The more you communicate with them, the better they will accept the defined sales objectives. If objectives prove over time to be too ambitious and unattainable as they stand, don’t hesitate to review them or implement additional means to achieve them. This is to preserve employee buy-in for the objectives.

Don’t forget: when you believe you can achieve something, you usually do. When you start knowing you won’t succeed, the prediction usually comes true. It is therefore imperative that your sales team believes in the objectives set for them in order to achieve them.

How to Track and Manage Objectives over Time?

Once objectives are defined and accepted, we enter the most important phase of management by objectives: engagement. Indeed, setting objectives makes no sense if you don’t take the time to track them and engage with them regularly.

To effectively manage the tracking of sales objectives, let’s turn to the world of video games. The increasingly popular methods of gamification today indeed provide us with many lessons on how to effectively manage objectives. Here are 5 key lessons from video games to boost your objective management:

• Fast feedback. In a video game, every time you perform an action, you receive instant feedback: you gain points, you lose a life… Feedback that is too slow disconnects the result from the action. It’s the same with objective tracking. The faster the manager’s feedback, the better the employee can adapt their actions. Therefore, organize frequent check-ins with your team to review objective attainment together and take corrective actions if needed.
• Transparency. Video games are a statistical paradise: everything is measured, quantified, and presented to the user in real time. Implement a real-time individual dashboard system for your team. Each salesperson should be able to know at all times how they stand in relation to their objective.
• Badges. A badge indicates the achievement of a specific objective or a given task. Think of military medals, for example. Badges have no intrinsic value: what they represent in the eyes of the community is what’s important. Why not implement a badge system in your team? A badge every time objectives are met, a “consistency” badge when objectives are met 3 times in a row, a “super performer” badge when objectives are largely exceeded, etc.
• Competition. Competition pushes individuals to surpass themselves to aim for excellence. Video games are competitive par excellence, and rankings are ubiquitous. Some objectives are very well driven by competition. When you define a sales objective, think sales challenge. For example, if you want to emphasize prospecting, a competition lasting a few days to a few weeks focused on prospecting can help you better focus salespeople on their prospecting efforts.
• A community. Most game mechanics lose their meaning if there’s no community. If I have no one to measure myself against, no one to show my badges to… None of that makes sense. The concept of community is therefore important in objective management. To congratulate this or that employee in front of others, to pit one team against another, etc. Therefore, foster a sense of community within your sales team. If your salespeople are on the road and rarely see each other, set up a digital community.

Setting and tracking your sales team’s objectives is therefore not impossible, provided you follow a few simple rules.

Incenteev is an enterprise social network dedicated to sales force engagement. Our platform is here to help you manage your sales objectives: facilitate real-time indicator tracking, set up sales challenges, engage the community of salespeople spread across the field…

What about you? How do you define your sales team’s objectives? What advice do you have for other sales managers to help them define their teams’ objectives?

Other Articles You might be Interested in:

• Why you lose opportunities every day (finally targeting the right decision-makers)
• Commissions: A Barrier to Your Sales Team’s Motivation?
• 8 AI Tools to Boost your Productivity
• Gamification in business: an effective driver of motivation