The Goals You Choose Matter
Most organizations set enormous, overarching goals: “We want to double our revenue.” “Next year, we want to increase expansion revenue by 20%.”
While it’s always helpful to have a north star that teams can rally around, setting these monolithic goals can make it easy to overlook the granular steps needed to get there.
For example, a baseball team’s overarching goal is to win the World Series. In order to do that, they have to score more runs than their opponents throughout the season. But runs don’t materialize out of thin air. They come from a combination of hits, stolen bases, walks, etc. When a baseball team focuses on improving the # of hits, # of walks, and # of stolen bases, the runs naturally follow.
Much the same way, in B2B sales, if the overarching goal is to achieve a revenue target, it's important to focus on the precursor activities that lead up to that revenue - e.g. accounts touched, email engagement rate, first meetings, call talk ratio, etc.
How You Track Goals Also Matters
The good news is that almost 80% of sales managers (according to a recent Atrium survey of 400+ sales managers) agree that setting granular goals on activities is critical to successful selling.
The bad news is that most managers try to use CRMs, BI dashboards, or spreadsheets for goal tracking. And these tools aren’t very effective at tracking goals.
These tools don’t make it easy to set goals on any one of hundreds of metrics. Precursor and results metrics (e.g. new contacts touched and pipeline created). Quantity and quality metrics (e.g. emails sent and conversion rate).
They don’t identify the behavioral characteristics of your best reps so you have benchmarks you can use to set appropriate goals for your other reps (e.g. what percentage of opportunities does your best rep convert out of the discovery stage).
They aren’t proactively tracking how your reps are pacing towards their goals and alerting you when something is off.
They don’t make it easy to communicate goals throughout the org so you can hold reps accountable.
Announcing Automated Goal Tracking
We, too, believe that granular goal tracking is a critical ingredient of data-driven sales management. That’s why I’m excited to announce our new automated goal tracking functionality.
It’s available immediately to all Atrium customers as part of the Atrium Data-Driven Sales Management platform.
Atrium makes it easy to monitor goals across any of hundreds of leading indicator and outcome metrics for each rep and team that you manage.
You can see how each rep and team is performing against each of its goals.
Managers will love how Atrium tracks progress on each of these goals, projecting whether they’re on track, where they’ll land based on pacing, and highlighting goals at risk. They can use this insight to drive data-driven coaching and development of each of the reps on their team.
Because Atrium is proactive, reps and managers get specific recommendations on how to get back on track when something is off.
Because reps and managers use different tools, Atrium will alert and notify you in app, via email, or via Slack with relevant updates on goal progress!
Example Slack Notification Showing Status Against Goals
See For Yourself
Want to see how data-driven sales management can help your managers improve team performance? Sign up now - it takes less than 90 seconds to get started.
And if you’re an Atrium customer, you’ve already got access to all this goodness. Reach out to your Customer Success Manager if you would like a guided tour.
