Rock Your Quota: 4 Steps to Exceed Your Sales Goals

Have you ever decided to sign up for a gym membership, worked out for a few weeks, then suddenly fell out of the habit? If you have, what kind of goals did you set for yourself? Were they specific, or were they as broad as “getting in shape?”

With most things, omitting the smaller steps that lead to the ultimate goal makes it much easier to throw in the towel. But as a sales rep, you have specific sales goals to meet to help you grow as a professional and bring in revenue for your organization. 

Although the natural competition against your fellow reps can be a source of inspiration, the real development happens when you compete against yourself. In other words, you don’t just want to meet your quota–you want to exceed it. 

To exceed your sales goals, here are some helpful tips:

1. Set Clear Sales Goals for Each Month 

First things first: you need to know exactly what you are working toward. Sales goals relate to an overarching company objective, such as increasing revenue. A sales quota is how you get there through the volume of an activity by a certain date.

Although setting a North Star sales goal of increasing revenue by a certain amount is essential, it can be easy to overlook the steps to get there.

Consider it this way: A basketball team’s ultimate goal is to win the NBA Finals. But that goal has many steps to it, such as scoring more points than the other teams. And scoring more points than the other teams requires players to make more rebounds, make more baskets, and have a better defense. When those granular steps are accomplished, the team reaches its ultimate goal.

In having clear insights into what your sales goals and quotas are each month, you can determine what pace you should set to catapult into greatness.

2. Measure Sales Activity 

Activities are leading indicators of how you will perform against your goals. Depending on your sales motion, the activities you look at can include emails sent, calls placed, new contacts touched, new accounts touched, and more. 

Beyond measuring the number applied to your metrics, you should also measure the quality of your metrics. This includes measurements such as:

• Email engagement rate: Are people replying to the emails you send? 
• Activities per meeting: How many emails or calls are required to set up a meeting?
• Meetings-to-sales ratio: Are you creating meetings that turn into pipeline and revenue?

Sales metrics keep you accountable to your weekly, monthly, and quarterly sales goals and inform your manager’s approach to coaching you. 

Although sales coaching is still not a broadly accepted and well-implemented enablement practice, it is one of the best ways to drive continuous performance improvement. According to a sales enablement study from CSO Insights, sales teams that implemented a dynamic sales coaching approach saw an average 55.2 percent win rate—13.4 points higher than less formal approaches. 

The more formal the approach to sales coaching, the better. 

3. Learn from Your Colleagues 

Sales is a highly social and competitive activity. Although you are working toward your own goals, there is always someone you can learn from, whether they are top reps on your team or veterans in the field.

You can always learn from your colleagues through informal get-togethers, such as grabbing a coffee. But new sales tools that measure activity and performance provide another option, allowing you to listen to recordings of calls or videos of meetings in which a top rep hit it out of the park. From there, you can figure out what specifically worked so well.

According to a study from McKinsey & Company, companies in which sales managers tailor learning programs based on observed strengths are 1.3 times more likely to outperform their peers, so you should encourage your manager to implement a similar practice if they aren’t already. 

4. Learn from Yourself

As we briefly mentioned, intelligent platforms are being developed and implemented into sales operations to improve performance. For example, you can use software like Gong to listen in on your own calls and discover your talk ratio, monologue length, and patience rating so that you have areas to improve upon for the next call.  

Exceed Your Sales Goals with Atrium

Speaking of intelligent tools, Atrium is a data-driven sales management platform that is as good for management as it is for sales reps. Reps can see their performance based on each metric and on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to determine their progress toward broader sales goals.