Sales
Plan, manage, and control your Sales strategy.
Adopt processes to set targets and work out plans to achieve them.
Common Challenges in Sales Planning
Sales leadership and their teams struggle to establish realistic and achievable targets. These are common challenges faced by these teams across industries.
There are several reasons why sales targets and quotas are unrealistic. Quite often, executives and sales leadership face pressure to deliver on aggressive growth targets from investors, boards, or internal stakeholders. This pressure can also manifest itself into "stretch goals", a common belief that by setting ambitious goals will push their teams to work harder and achieve more than previously thought possible. The ultimate result is higher sales targets for teams without concrete paths to their achievement, which often leads to a myriad of negative consequences: demotivation and burnout, high turnover, toxic culture, and unethical behavior.
Failure to thoroughly assess and research market conditions, trends, customer profiles and initiatives, and finally the actual potential of a sales territory often leads to unrealistic goals. Overly optimistic projections without tangible opportunities or leads and demonstrated investments to develop certain markets can result in unachievable quotas.
As the market landscape changes along with internal realignment of resources (which often happens mid-year), there is a need to adjust sales targets based on current foreseeable conditions. These adjustments can be difficult to implement as there often is a need to track the various versions of sales targets along with shifts in sales territories. Too often, sales reps are operating under a lack of clarity when adjustments are implemented.
