It’s no secret that clear goal setting combined with an understanding of why those goals are set, and how they lead to business results, leads to increased employee engagement and productivity.

Leaders throughout modern organizations know this and use a variety of goal-setting and measurement tools to their advantage, including Objectives and Key Results (OKRs or MBOs), Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs), etc.

Unfortunately, the situation is typically a little different for sales teams. Yes, they all have very clear goals on how much revenue/pipeline they need to produce. But they have very little in the way of goals or targets around sales activities that will result in them getting there.

“Almost all businesses have clear sales targets for the year – and usually quarterly and monthly targets too,” notes Ian Brodie.”But what I see much less often are clear Sales Activity targets. Targets for what you are actually going to do not what you hope to achieve.”

It’s like leading troops to war, sharing a brilliant strategy with them (yearly goals), dividing them into squads, positioning them the right way but then not teaching them how to shoot properly. Not only is it demotivating, it doesn’t work.

Hence, best sales leaders know that setting clear goals not just around final output (revenue or pipeline) but around sales activity at every step of the funnel is the best way to ensure the team will produce top results.

However, with a team of 100+ salespeople, manually tracking activities at the different funnel stages becomes an impossible feat.

Salesforce is not built for this task. Your sales team doesn’t want to spend time to log activities in Salesforce. If you force them to do so, they end up wasting a ton of selling time on it, and they’re still likely not tracking all their activities. Because let’s face it—even though that data is important to sales and marketing leadership, it’s tedious to enter it by hand. And it’s not what you hired your salespeople to do!

So how do you solve this problem? A few thoughts on the technology tools you need to realistically support activity-based goals:

  • Automated activity data capture of all sales activity
  • Full visibility into the sales team’s activity, overlaid on your funnel, and all CRM objects
  • Ability to set activity-focused goals for individual sales team members that seamlessly integrates with other sales tools and gives the salesperson and her manager real-time data on activity goal attainment, bottlenecks, etc.
  • Ability to customize activity capture and output to match your unique business process, like properly tracking New Business Meetings (NBMs)

All of this needs to be contained in a robust system with minimal to none data entry, reports delivered to the manager automatically, with easy to understand next steps. Managers can set reports to generate before each one-on-one meeting with their salespeople, to provide insights to enable data-driven coaching.

Does this all sound too good to be true? With People.ai it’s not. Schedule a demo today and we’ll show you how to implement sales activity goals to motivate your sales team.