Ask any salesperson what their goals are and the answer will likely be the same: generate more leads, be more productive and sell more.
That said, while ambition is great, setting and accomplishing effective sales goals that help boost your bottom line doesn’t just happen. It requires setting specific objectives for your sales teams and creating detailed plans to turn them into reality.
In this article, you’ll learn what sales objectives are and how to set them based on your business goals to increase sales.
You’ll also discover examples of sales objectives that empower your reps to improve productivity, morale and teamwork.
Key takeaways from sales objectives examples
Teams commonly set goals to increase revenue, spend less time on admin tasks and improve their sales skills.
To increase the chances of achieving your sales objectives, break them down into SMART goals.
Although it’s tempting to push your sales team harder, you’re more likely to succeed if you take a step back and look at the systems underlying your sales process.
Pipedrive’s CRM software makes it easy to track sales goals from one central location. Start your 14-day free trial to begin hitting sales goals today.
What are sales objectives?
Sales objectives are goals that management sets for your sales team that link to your overall business objectives.
Typically, these include:
Increasing annual sales and profit margins
Increasing customer numbers
Increasing upsells and cross-sells
Improving customer retention
Increasing conversion rates
Increasing sales rep productivity
Cutting the time sales reps spend on non-sales tasks
Enhancing sales processes
Increasing outreach to qualified leads
Cutting time wasted on unqualified leads
Any sales target that has a chance of succeeding needs to be set in steps. In other words, you should consider executing goal setting using a SMART goals mindset:
Specific: A clear explanation of the objective and its steps. For example, you could set a goal to get 100 new customers a month.
Measurable: Ensure there are metrics that you can measure to analyze the objective’s success. How many new customers do your reps need to bring in each day or /week to achieve the objective? Make sure you track these numbers using sales software.
Achievable: The objective should be realistic yet challenging. If you have four sales reps on your team, do they each have the ability and capacity to bring in 25 new customers a month?
Relevant: Make sure that the objectives align with your business goals, team goals and individual salesperson goals. Is it realistic to increase your customer base by 100, or is it more of a stretch goal (i.e., high effort, high risk and difficult to achieve)?
Time-based: Set out an accurate and clear timescale for the objective. Instead of saying you want to bring new customers on board, set an objective to bring 100 new customers on board per month. That way, your sales team knows there’s a deadline for the objective.
Breaking your goal down like this makes success much more likely.
The challenge of setting sales objectives
For most businesses, revenue goals and customer acquisition goals are always at the top of the priority list. It’s fair to assume that those are the end goals of most for-profit organizations, whether you’re a small business or an established enterprise.
While driving up revenue by selling more might be an obvious choice when setting sales objectives, it’s essential to dig deeper into which short-term changes can boost your long-term success.
Instead of focusing solely on revenue and acquisition, it’s important to set objectives to optimize your sales strategy.
Strategic plans that focus on reducing expenses or changing how you manage your customer data can yield outcomes such as improved customer satisfaction or boosted productivity and morale.
These less concrete, harder-to-measure objectives are often the glue that drives improved profitability, decreased customer acquisition costs and increased customer lifetime value.
But what does all that look like?
Let’s say your reps are reporting that they’re spending 15 hours every week dealing with customer data. They feel it’s too much, and want to optimize their time.
Instead of telling your reps to work harder, you could set a sales objective to decrease time spent on data input and then set specific metrics and targets to achieve that objective.
Think outside the box and look beyond the obvious sales objectives. As Uplead Founder Will Cannon says, although it’s important for your sales team to hit your targets and bring in enough revenue for the company, don’t push them to do this at all costs.
“At the end of the day, it’s important to do right by your customers, instead of aggressively selling them products/services simply to hit your own targets.
If you do this, you might experience a temporary increase in your sales revenue, but it’s unlikely that your customers will stick around in the long run because there’s no trust or rapport involved in your relationship.”
The most effective approach is to look beyond the obvious and dig into the individual elements of your sales strategy – because that’s where the real gains are.
4 common sales objectives examples for SMBs
Sales objections are part of everyday life for a sales team.
Let’s look at the four sales objections that are most present in small businesses and how to overcome them.
Example 1: sell more
If you want to increase your average deal size or boost cross-selling, you can set a specific sales objective to achieve it.
This might be something like focusing on a new product release with a high order value, or something broader, like tightening up your cross-selling processes within the next 12 months.
Sales objectives for selling products could include:
Increasing the size of average deals
Increasing annual up-sells
Increasing quarterly cross-sells
Let’s pick an objective out of that list and see what it looks like in a salesroom: increasing the amount of upsells your sales reps make. Narrowing that down into a goal, your sales manager might decide on 20 more upsells per rep, per year.
20 upsells a year might seem like a lot, but if you break it down, it works out to 1.6 upsells a month.
If your sales reps use a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that stores all their customer data, the first step toward meeting the objective might be to have them check it weekly to identify upsell opportunities.
If you’re using Pipedrive, each time a customer clicks on an email or visits a page on your website, their contact page will be automatically updated.
If one of your customers is consistently reaching their quota for your service each month, a sales rep can find this information and contact them about a higher-level package.
CRM software makes it easier for sales reps to follow up on opportunities like upsells so that they can meet sales objectives.
Example 2: free up your sales team’s capacity
You’ll only hit your revenue goals if your team has the ability (and the motivation) to see them through.
However, increasing your team’s capacity to sell more is also a sales objective. This can be as simple as reducing the time sales reps spend on data entry.
Other examples of sales objectives that focus on your team’s capacity are:
Using automated workflows to reduce the time spent qualifying leads and generating leads
Increasing the amount of time reps spend on sales calls
Decreasing the amount of time it takes to close a deal
Setting smart sales goals and objectives that focus on optimizing your team’s productivity frees up their time so they can focus more on selling.
One of many SMART sales goals examples is to cut the amount of time it takes reps to close deals. First, look into their sales process: how long does it usually take them to win a deal?
Let’s imagine you find that it takes your reps 15 days to close a deal after it enters their pipeline. Here’s what your sales cycle looks like in this fictitious example.
Day 1: The lead enters their pipeline
Day 2: The sales rep follows up with a LinkedIn message
Day 4: The sales rep follows up again and books a sales call
Day 6: The sales rep pitches your product on a sales call
Day 8: The sales rep follows up with another email
Day 12: The sales rep follows up again with another call to discuss pricing
Day 14: The prospect decides they’re interested in your product
Day 15: The sales rep closes the deal and hands the new customer over to the customer care team
From looking at this sales process, one thing sticks out: the rep spends a lot of time following up through emails and calls.
One change you could make is to cut the heavy lifting for the sales rep and invest in automatic email nurturing. This would take away their manual involvement in a lot of the selling process and help free up more of their time.
That way, whenever a lead clicks a link or triggers a sales signal, your rep will receive a notification to follow up with a sales call. This will save your reps significant time on every deal in their pipeline.
Example 3: increase your sales team’s competency
Your team will only hit revenue objectives if reps have the skills to do so.
This ties back to a sales rep’s capacity and how much time they’re able to spend on sales activities.
For example, if your sales reps spend an average of four hours each day making cold calls, you need to know how successful those calls are. Are they closing deals and nurturing leads effectively?
Objectives relating to sales efficiency include:
Increasing your win rate
Expanding your sales reps’ product knowledge to encourage upsells/cross-sells
Putting aside an hour each month to prioritize training on tools or apps in your tech stack
Once again, let’s take an objective and apply it to a real-life sales room. Your sales objective might be to increase your cold call output. If you break the objective down into a sales goal, you might want to increase the number of answered cold calls by 10% a month.
This monthly goal has many layers.
For example, let’s say a sales rep makes 200 cold calls a month, and 20 of them are answered.
To achieve the overall objective, your sales rep needs to make 2 more answered cold calls per month. However, to get there, they need to find 20 more leads and make 20 extra calls.
That’s a lot of time for a sales rep to find in their month.
Instead, you could achieve this sales objective by taking other steps, such as strengthening the quality of leads entering the funnel and tightening your qualifying processes.
The more qualified the lead, the more willing they are to buy and the fewer calls that reps need to make to close deals.
Here’s another efficient lead generation technique: Instead of manually hunting for leads, sales reps could use a tool like Pipedrive’s LeadBooster or Leadfeeder to capture website visitor information and fill your pipeline with higher-quality leads.
By improving the quality of your leads, you’re likely to increase their call/answered ratio. Then, you’ll be able to set a new sales objective to increase the number of cold calls that get answered each month.
Example 4: gain (and retain) customers
Winning a new customer demands marketing spend, sales time and onboarding effort. Keeping one you already have costs a fraction of that.
The customers you’ve already got are actually more valuable than you think. According to Smile.io’s analysis of over a billion shoppers, your top 10% of loyal customers spend twice as much per order as the rest of your base.
That means prioritizing customer retention, nurturing and retaining current customers and decreasing customer churn can make a massive difference to your annual revenue numbers.
Sales objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) around gaining and retaining customers could mean
Targeting customers with a more significant revenue spend
Developing a process to tackle common sales objections
Focusing more on nurturing the ones who’ve already signed up for your product
Objectives around gaining and retaining customers could include:
Developing a database of loyal customers to increase engagement and retention
Increasing time spent nurturing existing customers
Building a nurture program to increase customer spend
Let’s focus on that last objective: building a nurture program to increase customer spend. To break down that objective, your sales managers might need to look at:
Increasing training around how to nurture current customers
Increasing the amount of time reps spend contacting current customers and checking in on their product satisfaction, and decreasing the time they spend prospecting
Putting into place a system where reps spend 30 minutes each day reaching out to current customers to gauge their satisfaction
Within these interactions, a sales goal might be to follow up with two of those customers about cross-sells or product upgrades
These objectives are broad enough to encourage your sales managers to get creative on how they will achieve them, without being restricted by numbers and metrics.
That way, your sales leaders can adjust them to ensure they’re achievable without worrying about metrics.
How to set sales objectives based on your goals
Before you start, it helps to remember what sales objectives actually are: a broad plan that guides the goals and activities within them.
You can’t manage them like a to-do list – they require long-term thinking first, then shorter-term planning to make them happen.
Take upsells as an example. To improve your upsell rate, you might look at your reps’ commission packages and build in a stronger incentive, or review your sales playbooks to see where upsells could be introduced into a pitch.
Inside that objective, you’d then set specific, measurable goals: close four upsells a month, or increase upsells by 5% by year’s end.
Once you start planning, it becomes much easier to tell whether the objective is realistic or needs adjustment.
As you can see, there are lots of different sales objectives you can set for your sales team.
The only problem is that if you throw 10 new objectives at your sales team, they’re going to get overwhelmed. This is why prioritizing your sales objectives is such an important step – albeit one that is often overlooked.
Go through each sales objective on your list and determine:
How urgent is it?
Is it connected to a long-term goal, like making your overall sales culture more nurturing? Or is it bound to a specific time period, like boosting sales for the next quarter?
How important is it to your company’s overall goals?
If you don’t achieve it, will your company still be able to reach its overall goals?
What will the objective mean to your sales team, and is it vital to their overall success?
Ranking your sales objectives by overall importance will also help you implement them without overtaxing your sales reps and other team members.
Here are four tips for setting and achieving a meaningful sales objective.
Tip 1: evaluate your sales team
Listening to your sales team about what objectives they think are achievable is incredibly important.
After all, they’re going to be the ones who work on your sales goals.
Ask your team about each objective and determine if:
They believe it’s achievable and realistic
They’re confident the team is capable
They might face some challenges
They need more training and support to achieve it
Note: Your sales objectives might not be achievable with the team you’ve got in place right now. You can either try to expand your team, which costs money, or spend time nurturing your current reps to make them as productive and effective as possible.
Your senior sales managers also need to help your reps make sure every email and sales call counts.
GoSquared Sales Engineer Russell Vaughan says the importance of adding value to customer conversations was hammered into him during his time at Panasonic.
“Usually, someone’s decision about buying your product is a very small part of their day and responsibility. To be interrupted with a follow-up call that was self-serving and offered no real value was rarely more than a nuisance.
It doesn’t mean following up wasn’t important, it was critical in keeping momentum in a deal and keeping our product front of mind, but it could be done in a much more effective way.
A follow-up could start with letting a prospect know about a new award our product has won, a new feature we’d launched or even a new offer we were taking out. Anything that added a bit more value to the process.”
If your sales managers are on the ground training your reps (and they’re performing well) and you’re still not meeting your objectives on your sales goals chart, change your objectives.
The only objectives worth having are achievable ones.
Tip 2: track the progress of each objective
Revisit your sales objectives every month or quarter to make sure you’re on track and they still seem achievable.
Even if you set most sales objectives at the start of the year to create a 12-month roadmap, it’s natural that they’ll evolve over time. Tracking can start simply: a goals chart with three columns (goal, progress, actual) gives you a clear picture of where things stand.
As your team grows, a CRM like Pipedrive makes it easier to measure all the moving parts in one place and make smarter, data-driven decisions.
You can monitor your team’s sales objectives via a goal tracker. If your objective is to increase your sales reps’ productivity, your sales managers should be actively tracking:
Their sales activity output
Their won/lost deal ratios
The amount of time they spend prospecting
Tracking objectives can also help you uncover which products are selling the best. With a CRM, you can track deals by:
Product to see which products are associated most often with deals won in your account.
Time to see the performance of specific products in your account over time, based on their association with won deals.
Over time, this kind of visibility makes it much easier to tell whether an objective is still worth pursuing or whether it’s time to set a new one.
Tip 3: reward staff who are hitting their targets
Every sales team has reps who perform better than others.
It’s those high-performing reps and sales superstars who make sure that your company achieves its sales objectives, so reward them. Within each sales objective, you might want to incentivize each target or goal to motivate your star salespeople.
If a rep isn’t meeting their email or prospecting numbers, then ask ’why. Alternatively, if they’ve closed more deals than expected, celebrate it.
Either way, approach your reps with positivity and encouragement, as negativity won’t boost their confidence or overall sales performance.
Tip 4: assume that you won’t meet all your objectives
Your sales reps will sometimes fail to meet their objectives. Sales goals are supposed to be challenging!
Succeeding at sales objectives isn’t about setting them and forgetting them. It means constantly evaluating your objectives and, if your team fails, figuring out why.
Developing a plan to deal with failure enables you to integrate the lessons into your sales plan efficiently. When your team encounters failure, ask:
What barriers did we hit that stopped us from being successful?
Did we have the right sales team in place?
Did their capabilities and availability match up with what we asked of them for the objective?
Did our sales team have the right tools to achieve the objective in the first place?
Once you’ve figured out why your team failed, address any roadblocks and give it another shot. It may also help to review the tech stack you’re using for sales and ensure it’s up to scratch.
9 steps to creating the perfect sales strategy (with free template)
How to use Pipedrive to track your sales goals
Small businesses worldwide use Pipedrive to track progress toward their sales objectives.
You can customize your pipeline view to fit your unique sales process.
For example, let’s say that you have a goal to send 50 proposals per month. Adding a column to your Kanban view called “Proposals sent” makes tracking your team’s proposal output easy and intuitive.
You can even add probabilities to each stage of your pipeline to forecast how many deals you’ll close and how much revenue you’ll earn.
Pipedrive automatically forecasts revenue based on these probabilities and your expected closing dates.
Pipedrive in action: Network Financial Planning used Pipedrive to map out its entire customer journey and forecast how many leads would get to each stage of its process. As a result, it increased its number of sales activities by 50%.
Pipedrive has a Goals feature where you can set targets for revenue, calls or deals won and break them down by user, team or time period.
To create a goal or a performance benchmark, simply go to the Insights section, click “+ Create” and then select “Goal”.
You can then build custom dashboards to track the objectives most important to you in real time.
Pipedrive offers a range of features that increase the likelihood that your reps will hit their sales goals. For example:
You can have the software create automated follow-up tasks to ensure that no deal ever goes cold
The AI sales assistant suggests the highest-value deals to focus on
Reps can see when prospects open emails or click on links, helping them choose the right moment to continue the conversation
Pipedrive generates a meeting link that syncs with your calendar, which you can send to potential customers
Since Pipedrive integrates with Slack and Microsoft Teams, you can easily pull sales reports into your communication apps so that your sales objectives remain top of mind
Put another way, Pipedrive functions as an all-in-one tool that both tracks your sales goals and increases your chances of success.
Final thoughts
Sales objectives and sales metrics aren’t the same. Objectives are long-term, broad goals you want your team to achieve. Metrics allow you to build steps and strategies for your sales team to do so.
Most importantly, involve your team in setting your sales objectives. Push them to do their best, but make sure any goals you set are attainable.
Pipedrive helps you track all your sales goals in one central location and provides tons of automation to increase the odds of hitting them. See how Pipedrive can streamline your sales process with a 14-day free trial today.
