Chipping Away at Sales Quotas

Achieving sales quotas is part of the fun of being a salesperson. In addition to the financial rewards, meeting your sales goals can provide a sense of accomplishment and likely earn you the praise of your supervisor. To help you achieve your goals, here are a few tips for chipping away at your sales quotas.

1. Break down goals: Many supervisors give their staff sales quotas for the week or month. Those large numbers can be fairly intimidating, especially for people new to sales jobs. The trick is to take the goal and break it up into smaller pieces. For example, take your weekly goal and divide it by the number of days you're working. This will give you a daily target to hit, which will make the goal less imposing and more manageable.

2. Make the goal concrete: Sometimes monetary goals can be difficult to grasp. To make it easier to conceptualize sales quotas, figure out how much of the product you must sell to hit the magic number. For instance, if widgets cost $100 and your sales goal for the day is $1,000, then you would need to sell ten widgets to meet your daily quota. If your company sells a variety of products, find out how much the average sales total is and use that number to calculate a per sale goal.

3. Tie goals to actions: Specific actions are involved in making a sale. The exact activity differs somewhat between sales jobs, but typically you must make contact with prospects to sell the product. Determine how many calls (or meetings) you must conduct to sell one product or generate a dollar amount in sales. Use that number to determine how much action you must take per day to meet sales quotas, then start making those calls and knocking on doors.

4. Provide exceptional service: According to callrecordingsoftwarezone.com, improving customer service by 10 percent can result in a revenue increase of $1 billion or more. There's a good reason for this. Happy customers are your best salespeople. They will recommend your company to the people they know who are in the market for the products and services you sell. Make a habit of providing excellent customer service. Actively listen to customers' concerns, meet their needs, and answer their questions honestly. Being a great customer service agent can result in referrals and repeat business. This, in turn, can make it a lot easier to achieve sales goals.

While meeting sales quotas can be challenging, breaking the goal into bite-sized pieces and focusing on achieving them will make the task much easier to bear. Don't forget to check your progress frequently and make adjustments as necessary to stay on track.

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