Are Your Sales and Marketing Goals Too Safe?

Setting marketing and sales goals is a tricky business. On the one hand, you want goals that encourage hard work and help your company grow over each week, month and year. On the other, set goals too high or low, and your sales and marketing staff grow increasingly frustrated, stressed or bored.

To avoid the damage caused by goals that are too ambitious, many managers err on the side of caution. But when your sales goals are too safe:

• Growth suffers. You start to lose your competitive edge.
• Your team suffers. Sales and marketing staff get complacent or bored.
• Your hiring suffers. The most internally driven candidates see you’ve created a “play it safe, take it easy” environment, and they look for an employer who offers a bigger challenge.

If you’re watching your team hit their goals – but just barely – while competitors seem to have no trouble with more ambitious growth, it’s worth evaluating whether your sales and marketing goals are too safe.

Here’s what to consider:

What do the numbers say?

Bottom-line numbers like revenue and deals closed can tell you what you’re bringing in the door, but they can’t tell you how your marketing campaigns work or how sales get closed. Look also at day-to-day metrics like sales meetings, calls made and other regular sales and marketing tasks to see where inefficiencies lie.

How do sales and marketing staff approach their own goals?

If your sales and marketing team members are hitting the company’s sales goals and nothing more, it’s time to focus on their individual goal-setting. How are their salaries, commissions or bonuses rising year after year? Do these increases match their personal-growth goals? How well do they see themselves performing in five years, and how do they expect to be compensated for that performance?

The best salespeople use their team’s goals as a starting point for their own, not an endpoint. Setting more ambitious sales goals can help raise the level of engagement in this goal-setting process.

Does your team’s culture and skill set support strong sales and marketing work?

Too-safe marketing and sales goals can erode a culture of engagement and drive over time. When goals are too easy to reach, boredom sets in, and staff find other, non-productive ways to occupy their time.

When you first increase a sales or marketing goal, you may find the team balks. They’re used to work being easy, and they may not want to change. Adding internally driven sales staff to your team can help upend this culture and create a sales and marketing force that says to each new challenge, “Bring it on!”

At SMR Group Ltd, our recruiters connect clients in the biotech, pharmaceutical and medical device industries with some of the best sales and marketing talent available. To learn more about setting goals for your sales and marketing strategies, contact us today.