Targets: Annual, Quarterly, Monthly, Weekly, Daily?

[webgeek]

For those who are using sales targets as goals for their year ahead, just wondering what target intervals you're using, and if you're using more than one...

In our space, we work with a lot of companies with 200 or so employees, only a handful of course on the sales team, and find that in the UK B2B space, there's a lot of:
Weekly targets - based on sales meeting goals - not used for compensation, just effort measuring
Monthly targets - based on sales order revenue (last year + x%) - this is the most common
Annual targets - which once hit, allow for a certain compensation to be paid to the reps
Quarterly targets - used to offset some of the monthly variability

The average appears to be 3 targets per salesperson.

Also of interest, the fact that within a team, there can be 3+ tiers of targets, rather than all 3 getting the same exact target, based on tenure, account size they're working, pipeline development, etc.

Please share what you're using and how well you see it working (and whether or not any others are being considered).

 

[Closer]

I believe that agents should be targeted Daily,Weekly and monthly.

All should be transferred at the end of the day/week.
At the end of each day targets go over to weekly (so every day is a £0), at the end of the week it goes over to monthly (so weekly becomes £0) and at the end of the month the sales go over to LAST MONTH.
I believe this keeps the agents honest and in competition on a daily basis, it allows for catch up without constant mind negativity, you may have been last today but you can still make it up and be top this week/month.Also it creates a must do environment.

High rollers must be at the top and this should be changed monthly...again creating huge competition.I have seen dollars on the top and rubber dog poo on the bottom of many deal boards...its a bit f fun too

 

[David Reinhardt]

I suppose one of the biggest considerations is sale lead time. On higher ticket, longer lead time sales (weeks or months), daily (revenue) targeting is not going to help. On lower ticket, more immediate sales, then perhaps it does.

 

[webgeek]

Yeah, long cycle makes daily closed sales a bad plan for contests/targets.

However, daily CRM activities, like calls, appointments, meetings, could still be good daily targets.

 

[David Reinhardt]

I'm always wary of heavy focus on activity based targets as they only measure the input (i.e. setting up a meeting, making a call, etc) rather than the output (sales revenue). Activity doesn't necessarily generate output and it is easy to be busy. That said, it is also easy to not be busy !

So I guess in any instance where there is a longer lead time, there is a need to at least monitor activity but not make it the ultimate determinant of reward (whether that is bonusing, recognition, etc.).

 

[SamLH]

I work in 2 industries. One is online B2C so we focus on smaller transactions, usually we set daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly targets. The other is B2B and we only generate a few sales a month and focus on monthly, quarterly and yearly targets.