To effectively manage your sales team, you need straightforward goals and action-oriented coaching—backed by clear, easy-to-understand metrics.
If you’re not measuring your efforts and asking your sales reps to achieve specific outcomes, you won’t get the results you want and your sales team won’t be able to perform at their best.
When you give your sales reps something to aim for, you greatly increase the chance that they’ll achieve their goals and hit their milestones.
But how do you set realistic, inspiring goals? What metrics should you be using to drive better business outcomes?
While every organization is different, one thing that is certain is that there is a direct correlation between an SDR’s activities and the opportunities they create. That means that setting activity targets like phone calls and emails is a great way to guide and coach SDRs.
The primary question at the heart of your goal setting should be: How many activities do your SDRs need to complete to hit their opp creation goals?
In this post, you’ll learn how to calculate the ratio of activities to opps created, and get a free calculator that will help you run calculations for each sales rep so you can set effective, motivating goals.
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How to Calculate the Ratio of Activities to Opps Created
In your organization, there are a number of proven sales activities you need to achieve the outcomes your team is shooting for—like phone calls and emails. To build the foundation for effective goal setting, calculate how many activities each rep is completing per opp created.
Step 1: Pull reports from your CRM
For each sales rep, pull three reports from your CRM:
Report # 1: Email activity over the past 90 days
Report # 2: Phone call activity over the past 90 days
Report # 3: Opportunities created over the past 90 days
Step 2: Calculate daily activity goals
For each rep, use the numbers you pulled in step 1 to calculate the following ratios:
Number of emails needed to create each opp:
Number of calls needed to create each opp:
Number of calls needed per day:
You can multiply daily goals by 5 (for 5 business days in a workweek) to calculate weekly activity goals, or multiply by 20 (for 20 business days in a month) for monthly activity goals.
Remember to calculate these ratios and goals on a per-rep basis, so you can measure each rep against their own progress.
If your organization relies on LinkedIn connection requests, InMails, texts, etc., you can use these ratios to set goals for those sales activities, too.
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Step 3: Evaluate and set goals
Use the metrics you calculate in step 2 to coach SDRs and let them know how many activities they need to complete daily, weekly, and monthly to achieve their goals.
During this process, ask yourself, “How is my team measuring up to their opp creation goals today?”
If the answer is “Not great,” do the initial math in step 2, and set the goals to the output levels you can expect from your team right now. At this point, you’re just working towards consistency.
If the answer is “We’re on track, almost there, or killing it,” try to increase each rep’s output by 10-20% to keep your team focused on achieving better results every week, month, and quarter.
Step 4: Identify goal resolutions
Collecting metrics and setting goals isn’t a panacea—the key to consistently improving your sales team’s performance is holding consistent one-on-one, data-driven coaching meetings with your reps.
Each rep’s individual goals and metrics for the past 90 days will guide your coaching conversations.
For example, if you set a goal for your sales rep to send out 100 emails per week, and you’re meeting with a rep who only sent out 88 emails, you can coach them on which sales activity to improve and how to improve it. Similarly, if there are 53 untouched opps and your goal is to only have 15, you’ll need to work with the rep to prioritize pipe management.
Improve Goal Setting with Data-Driven Sales Management
With data-driven sales management platforms like Atrium, reps will be able to see their performance against every activity metric on a daily, monthly, and weekly basis, so they’ll always know if they’re on track to meet their sales goals.
As an SDR manager, you’ll have every metric you need right at your fingertips with Atrium’s automated data sync—without the need for time-consuming, tedious manual data entry. You’ll also have peace of mind, knowing that any performance issues will be immediately visible, so you can have coaching conversations to correct any problems.
Sign up for Atrium for free today to start setting and tracking better SDR goals in under two minutes.
