We have developed a unique and free online marketing calculator which you can use to quickly set numerical Inbound Marketing and Sales team SMART goals. This is the first step of the process of developing a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between Sales and Marketing.
How to quickly estimate required website visits, leads and customers to achieve your revenue goals and stop having a inbound sales vs outbound sales human resources conflicts.
Before we dive into what we mean by setting goals, it is first necessary to know just what the SMART goals acronym stands for:
You will often hear this term bandied about, but I think it is best to give you my interpretation of it. I view at as a goal setting framework for defining the finish line. But not just any goal. The goal for two or more teams, in this case, Sales and Marketing. It can also incorporate goals for service and delivery teams.
Sales managers as well as marketing managers must work together to set these smart goals that will meet the top level annual revenue targets. Whether in small businesses or large enterprise, these annual revenue targets have to be set by the executive leadership team. They are the ones with an eye on the long term health of the enterprise.
While setting personal goals for individual sales team members is necessary, they must be set with the overall sales objectives in mind. That's why the sales leader must have a system that allows him to break down annual goals, into quarterly goals, monthly goals, and ultimately, individual performance goals.
While the exercise of having sales and marketing work through their leads and sales revenue goal setting is important, one of the more critical elements of success if to set sales activity level goals.
While nobody likes to be 'tracked', the truth of the matter is, sales is often a game of numbers. With a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM), you can track, at a minimum, the following sales activities:
From experience, as sure as day follows night, sales activity closely tracks with sales achieved. That's why one of the other calculations you will end making is a sales activity goal. Hitting these sales activity levels then becomes a detailed action plan.
Free Online Sales and Inbound Marketing Calculator. How to quickly estimate required website visits, leads and customers to achieve your revenue goals and stop having a inbound sales vs outbound sales conflict.
While it is often tempting to set very high stretch goals when it comes to sales activity planning, I have found that it is better to target higher quality sales interactions versus just hitting the sales activity number. Higher quality often times mean spend more time to build rapport, achieve a deeper understanding of the client's pain points and business goals, and understand the real time period they have in mind for achieving their goals. This also tends to drive down the total cost of sales for such deals.
This is one of the reasons you need a CRM system, such as Hubspot CRM, that allows you to set sales quotas based on sales targets. They are invaluable to providing real-time feedback of sales performance, to both sales managers and individual team members.
If you look at any response time log of any call center, you will almost always see room for improvement. While a modern Call Center using a CRM like Hubspot, Salesforce or InsideSales can handle most sales volumes, theoretically at least, you will still observe many missed, dropped and unanswered calls when you dig into the CRM log files.
That's why if you want to set and meet team goals, such as increase sales, you have to have a properly sized, properly staffed, call center. Without these elements in place, no matter how many leads and sales you have computed you need, you won't hit your goal.
While this author's sales experience has primarily involved large enterprise ERP and large dollar amount sales and a longer sales cycle time, much of the work is now being done using Inside Sales Teams, though there are still plenty of field sales teams out there. These types of sales are typically for smaller Average Order Values or AOVs, as the market has evolved, larger deals are increasingly being handled by inside sales teams.
While it used to take enormously complex, very expensive equipment to set up an inside sales operation, that is no longer the case. Today, with a system such as Hubspot or other cloud based CRMs, you simply turn them on. This compares favorably with the minimum of nine months implementation time for a typical call center setup project.
Because they are now so much simpler to set up, it is even more imperative to set sales targets and develop a sales strategy that can be executed successfully. This has had the happy side effect of driving down customer acquisition cost as well as, when managed well, improving customer retention.
One of the key elements you need to have in place before ramping up an inside sales based operation is, in addition to your CRM system, a digital measurement system. While Google Ads can be used to drive inbound calls, and Google Analytics provides some limited call tracking functionality, you'll typically find you need a better call analytics solution, such as that from CallRail, one of several providers.
One of the guaranteed ways to drive high a sales team churn rate is to have incomplete or erroneous measurement. After all, if you went through the trouble of setting annual revenue goals, established individual and team sales goals, and have designed and implemented the best sales system possible, the last thing you want to be debating is about conversion rates. Or who sold how much. Or who gets credit for which sale. That's why you want to set up an end-to-end sales and marketing funnel that you not can measure, but that everyone trust is correct.
While a sales manager must be laser focused on hitting weekly sales targets and achieving total revenue targets, bad measurement also drives higher lead acquisition cost across the entire marketing and sales funnel. How does it do this?
In short, having a 'trusted measurement' system is an absolute must if you want to truly build a world class sales and marketing machine. It's also key to setting goals based on sales targets everybody will buy into.
Annual revenue targets are typically set to hit business growth targets as established by the senior management team, and are a Top Down approach to setting sales goals. Ultimately, they have to evolve into personal targets for each sales rep.
In scenario for the SAP partner, we know that their past performance of annual sales was twenty million. They've now increased that target to twenty-one million, by the end-of-the-year. Roughly speaking, they've increased their monthly sales target from 1.66 to 175 million. This could be broken down further into a per day amount of about 57.5 K, but their sales revenue is likely to be spikey.
Let's explore the meaning of each part of the acronym.
In order to illustrate the concept, it's best to see an example for a small business, an SAP partner who sells an SAP add-on and currently does about twenty million a year in business, of which, about 50% of it is Net New License Revenue while the rest is services and some add-on software. One SMART goal might be, we want to sell an additional one million dollars in net new license revenue by the end of the year.
This one is SMART. We specifically want to sell Net New Licenses. We are measuring the revenue, it is achievable, given that we already sell a lot of net new license revenue and have the capacity to sell more. Given the size of the market, our marketing and sales team, as well as delivery team, see it as realistic that we can hit the target, and we have six months left to go in the year, and see this as challenging, given time frame, but doable.
When building out your marketing and sales funnel, you can use our sales and marketing calculator to quickly answer questions such as:
As you know, Hubspot's website platform (can and does if integrated properly) measures every aspect of all Sales and Marketing channels these days.
You can not only achieve your goals, using a concept called "Smart Marketing" or SMARKETING, you actually have a critical need to ensure your Sales and Marketing teams are aligned and being held accountable to each other.
Having these and other elements in place such as having a competitive product and experienced sales team will a go a long ways toward achieving Sales and Marketing Alignment.
We believe the first pre-requisite achieving your business goals is to have clear, numerical Sales Revenue Goals and Marketing Leads Goals established.
To help you set these goals, we have developed our unique online FREE Website Traffic and Leads Required Calculator. You can use to quickly establish what you will need in order to hit your marketing and sales targets.
You can also use this calculator to benchmark how well your current content plan is progressing.
Click the button to go to the calculator page, to see your results and to get your customized results summary:
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