Unleash the potential of your CRM system: How to achieve your B2B sales goals

Setting sales goals is the first step in your sales team’s success and helps achieve overall business objectives.

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Provide a common direction that everyone in sales can work towards, creating a roadmap that not only keeps all team members on track, but ideally keeps them motivated, focused and productive. War, environmental and energy crisis currently create many variables. This only allows for very short advance planning. In a constantly changing market, your goals must therefore be concrete, realistic and achievable as quickly as possible so that you and your team remain competitive.

The proper use of a CRM system will help you set your goals and achieve them, I provide suggestions.

How do you define your sales goals correctly?

It’s important to consider what goals make sense for your team. Not all goals are equally important. For example, if you have a high customer retention rate, you may not need to focus as much on that goal, but you do need to focus on increasing your sales volume because your existing customers aren’t buying enough. Or you look at the average order value and realize, they are actually selling enough, but your margins are too low….

It is also crucial which goals you can achieve with the available resources of budget, personnel and technology. Do your employees have too many tasks and too little time? If so, they will likely struggle to achieve your planned lead generation through personal contacts. That means the team either needs to look for lead generation tools or hire more staff – if possible.

At the beginning, therefore, a precise analysis of the current state must be carried out. Where are you right now, what’s going well, what’s not? Where do you want to go? And in what time frame, with what means do you want to achieve your vision?

Help here Dashboard & Reports in your CRM system to answer open questions. This enables you to obtain important data from external sources, analyze and evaluate it, and then define appropriate goals and determine measures to achieve them.

To formulate your goals, use the SMART-criteria, because it helps you to become concrete. Smart stands for specific, measurable, attractive, realistic and scheduled. There is a big difference if your goal is only laxly paraphrased with

“increase turnover by € 250,000“

or becomes much more tangible with this description:

“All sales team members must win at least 3 new SME customers in the Dach region by the end of the quarter and achieve sales of €250,000 per new customer. achieve. The amount of the premium payment for this is 0.5% per employee.”

This gives everyone on the team a clear target that can be measured and also compared. And with the set bonus, you create motivation for goal achievement.

What are the sales goals?

There are different ways you can measure success. To do this, you look at numbers at different points in the customer journey and evaluate them in terms of quantity or quality.

Quantitative measurements before a sale (performance)

• Number of visitors, page views & amount of time spent on your website
  The more visitors the better? Unfortunately, it is not quite that simple. If prospective customers do not find the right content, they leave your website immediately. The more pages your visitors view and the longer they view your content, the more likely it is to be well received.
• Number of downloads, webinar or newsletter signups through your website
  The rule here is: the more the better. Because the more addresses you get, the more promising leads there will be.
• Number of agreed consulting appointments
  Again, the question arises whether more is better. The probability of gaining good leads naturally increases with the number of consulting appointments. But these appointments also tie up time, which unfortunately does not always pay off. That’s why you need the next numbers to evaluate.
• Number of opportunities resulting from the consulting appointments
  Here, the rule is definitely: the more the better, because the more opportunities there are, the more deals can result.
• Forecast: Amount of sales expected from these opportunities
  The level of expectations is not always met 1:1. But trends can be identified.
• Conversion rate: Number of prospects who become customers
  A very good indicator of sales and marketing effectiveness! The more customers they won, the better your joint work was.
• Sales Cycle: Time span from lead acquisition to conversion into customers.
  It provides insight into how efficient your sales process is and whether anything needs to be improved. The longer the process takes to close, the more problematic it is for your business. Right now, the average time span in B2B for complex products or services is 6 to 12 months. Unfortunately, market conditions change just as quickly.

Quantitative measurements after a sale (performance)

• Sales volume
  This measures the number of products sold in a given period.
• Average order value
  This value measures the average price per item sold and helps you understand the value of a single sale.
• Customer acquisition costs
  The item indicates how much it costs you to attract new customers. As a rule, acquiring new customers is more time-consuming and therefore more expensive than maintaining existing customers.
• Customer retention rate
  We examine the number of purchases made by existing customers. This will help you determine if your repeat customers are loyal or just one-time buyers.
• Utilization
  The utilization rate measures how effectively personnel and machines are used. This can have an impact on your revenue goals. For example, if the utilization rate is below a certain threshold, you could increase productivity to achieve higher sales. However, if capacity utilization is too high, this could mean that bottlenecks occur as existing resources are overused. This can result in slower turnaround times and lower quality, which in turn can result in lower sales.

Qualitative measurements

Since various gradations are possible when answering questions about quality, the collection and analysis of data here is somewhat more complex and cannot be presented so easily in a dashboard.

• How satisfied are your customers with your company and your products?
  The quality of satisfaction is examined via personal customer conversations, anonymous surveys, evaluations of complaints and the ticket system or evaluation portals. The rating is based on a scale or by awarding stars.
• How is the quality of sales calls evaluated?
  Measurable via records and evaluations of customer conversations, by personal query (NPS ratings) or anonymized surveys. The evaluation takes place in points or percentages as well as the assignment of stars.
• How good are content & strategy to attract new customers?
  You can obtain results, for example, by evaluating blog articles directly on your website, by analyzing click and download rates, the playback time of videos, the scroll depth of landing pages (how far users scroll down and read), or even via likes to social media posts. Attendance figures from and feedback from webinars or lectures are also included.
• How good is the visibility of your company, how good is that of your brands?
  This is easily recognizable via website analysis (called direct traffic):
  How often the name of your company or your products/services has been typed directly into search engines shows how well known you are. Also measurable via social listening is what people say about your company or their products/services on social media.
• What does our ideal customer look like? With which industries do I make sales?
  Which contact person is receptive to our offer?
  Answers to the first two questions are shown in the dashboard. Frequent contacts with a contact person can be made visible to everyone in the CRM with the term “VIP” and thus also be marked for sending offers.

What are the advantages of setting more than one goal in sales?

How can your employees achieve the set goals with the help of a CRM system?

A customer relationship management (aka CRM system) allows your sales team to stay organized, work effectively, save time, find the right focus, and track progress toward goals.

It is important that everyone on the team is sufficiently trained to properly exploit the software’s potential. Equally important is a set of rules that standardizes the way data is stored and processed within the company, otherwise analyses will be distorted.

Functions of a CRM system that help you achieve your goals:

• Cloud CRM Solution
  Basic requirement for working with a CRM via an Internet browser. Including hosting, it facilitates the introduction of a CRM system if you are not already using one.
• Central data storage:
  CRM systems store all customer-related data and documents in a central location, making them easier to access and manage. File your written defined goals as a document for all to see.
• Collaboration tools (such as email, video call, chat)
  These ensure that everyone on the sales team can communicate with each other in real time from different locations to share ideas, assign tasks or solve problems – ultimately leading to better results. At the same time, they are valuable tools for advising prospects or customers online or presenting products to them. Absolutely critical to achieving sales goals.
• Lead generation and lead scoring
  Both are important functions for more effective collaboration between marketing and sales. Lead generation allows the marketing team to identify potential customers, while lead scoring helps the sales team prioritize. Only the leads that are most likely to become paying customers (see the ideal customer above) are processed. This makes it easier for sales to achieve goals.
• Customer Journey
  Marketing, sales and service can track all customer interactions via the central database. This makes it easier to maintain relationships and provide more personalized customer service. If you know who your customers are and what they need, you can make sure to provide them with the right offers.
• Assign tags to contacts:
  This allows you to mark customer preferences or characteristics that will help you in creating campaigns or in evaluations. For example, you can use tags to group groups together to promote your offer with email marketing, or tag attendees of specific events to invite them to other events.
• Automations:
  By automating repetitive tasks such as suggesting visits or sending reports, sales reps gain valuable time to focus on closing deals to achieve set goals.
• CRM app for mobile working
  With the mobile CRM app, you can also work on the move via mobile devices. Even offline. The next time you connect to the Internet, your drafts will be automatically saved as documents in CRM.
• Dashboards:
  Analytics provide valuable insight into business activities, allowing everyone on the team to track established sales goals in numbers or have them displayed as graphical charts. Roles & rights define who is allowed to view and edit which figures.
• Reports (customizable reports):
  Sales teams can create custom reports to keep track of your progress against goals and develop strategies for improvement as needed.