How you approach your everyday sales tasks directly influences hitting your sales quotas. You must figure out why prospects need a solution, how and when to communicate with those prospects, and what to say to nudge them through the pipeline.
All along you make sure that your actions actually put you in a position for success individually and within your team.
Start on the path of consistently hitting your sales quotas by getting to know the various types of quotas and adapting your sales process to maximize the actions that matter.
Sales quotas vs. sales goals
The team at HubSpot provides a great definition of a sales quota:
A sales quota is the financial goal that individual sellers and teams must reach by the end of a specific period, usually one month or one quarter.
So while every sales quota is technically a goal (or part of one), not every sales goal is a quota.
And even though sales quotas relate to company and team financial goals, every quota won’t translate directly to generating X amount of revenue.
Common types of sales quotas
Knowing common sales quotas helps you break down how to best hit those quotas.
First, there’s direct quotas and indirect quotas.
Direct quota
This is what each sales person is directly responsible for. As an individual contributor on a team, you get a direct quota assignment each month or quarter.
Overlay quota
Managers and leaders are responsible for overlay quotas, which are the umbrella for all direct quotas. Those who manage teams are “over” the achievement of the direct quotas.
Within direct and overlay quotas you may deal with these quota types. The most common include revenue, volume, and activity.
Revenue quota
The basis for most sales quotas is of course revenue. With revenue quotas, each sales person is responsible for bringing in a certain amount of revenue within a certain time period. The exact amounts vary based on your role and the customers you interact with.
Volume quota
Volume quotas relate to a number of conversions. This commonly equates to achievements like new customer sign-ups or selling a certain amount of product. With volume quotas, the amount of money generated isn’t the primary focus. Instead you focus on adding 50 new customers to your user base or moving 100 units of whatever it is you sell.
Activity quota
Activity quotas relate to the completion of tasks. This might be number of calls made in a month, appointments set, or meetings held. It’s usually easiest to think of activity quotas in the context of the important sales tasks that need to happen for deals to close.
Why sales quotas are important
A sales quota — for better or worse — gives a team an outline for performance and (theoretically) ensures the company continues growing.
Quotas help you begin with the end in mind. When you know exactly what to aim for, it’s easier to work backward to figure out how you’ll do it.
When set and implemented correctly, sales quotas set a clear expectation for performance, keeping you on track and actively working toward a common goal.
What keeps sales reps and teams from hitting quotas?
Hitting or not hitting sales quotas isn’t so cut and dry. Here are five of the most common reasons that reps and teams fail to hit sales quotas:
- Setting an unachievable or unrealistic quota
- Double standards in quotas
- Lack of support and enablement
- Inflexible timelines
- Commission caps (if working on commission)
Unrealistic quotas
Outlandish numbers don’t inspire confidence in anyone. Stretch goals are one thing. Unachievable goals are just frustrating. Unrealistic quotas lead team members to give up or not even try.
Double standards
Not every sales rep should have the exact same quota. But not holding team members accountable or being lax about specific quotas will only discourage high performance. There needs to be equity in setting and enforcing quotas.
Lack of support
Without proper sales enablement, sales people simply can’t succeed. Failure to train, encourage, and mentor sales reps at any level results in less-than-stellar selling.
Inflexible timelines
Just like the actual numbers can’t be unrealistic, your timeline for hitting those numbers can’t be unrealistic either. The pressure of the clock only gets you so far.
Commission caps
If reps are too limited by commission, motivation quickly wanes. There’s not much reason to sell if you’re not going to be compensated fairly for your work.
Consistently reach your sales quotas with a better sales process
The sales process that works for you and delivers results doesn’t have to the same as anyone else’s. But it does need to go through changes as you learn more about your customers, discover the best ways to connect, and drive conversions.
No matter your current sales quota and team goals, look at adding automated text messaging to your sales process to see more consistent sales success.
5 ways you can use automated text messaging to help hit your sales quotas
Talk with more of your leads
If you’re responsible for activity or volume quotas, the more leads and prospects you have conversations with, the better. Talking to more of the right people will always be a good thing for your sales goals.
By using automated text messaging in your sales process, you give yourself the best chance of talking to as many of your qualified leads as possible.
Instead of emailing new leads, you automatically start a two-way conversation by texting them. People are more likely to reply because the message is sent in a simple, convenient way that they won’t miss.
By automating your outreach and follow-up with texting, fewer leads get dropped and fall by the wayside. You stay in touch more easily because you have the option to send personalized texts on a schedule you set. All of this adds up to influencing future conversions.
Schedule meetings with more of your leads
We know how convenient it can be to make plans through texting — we do it all the time with friends or family. So why not bring that convenience to your business relationships?
Booking demos, scheduling discovery calls, and setting meetings often fall under activity quotas for sales people like SDRs.
Texting gives you a simple way to get things scheduled, especially if you’ve already been in a conversation. (And of course you will be because you also automated that initial outreach, right?)
Whether you send a calendar link at the right time in your conversation or figure it out with a quick back and forth, by simplifying the scheduling process as you communicate through texting, people are more likely to agree to meet with you. Forget about phone tag or babysitting your email inbox as you wait for a reply.
Increase accountability with leads and customers
If you have any sort of revenue quotas — which means everyone — accountability is huge for keeping people engaged and moving deals through the pipeline.
Using text messaging to send reminders and follow up after meetings is the easiest and most effective accountability tool. JobNimbus used Skipio to increase demo sit rates to nearly 90 percent.
And obviously the more people who show up to meetings, the more sales you’ll be able to close. But that’s not the only situation you should care about accountability.
If a lead said they’re not interested right now but follow up in a few months, hold them to it. Schedule a message right then so you can easily restart the conversation in the future.
Don’t lose out on opportunities simply because you’re forgetful or because it’s not the “right time” in the present.
Keep interest after meetings
Your sales cycle might typically include multiple meetings. Or you may know that your best prospects usually like a little time after seeing the product to make a decision.
You need to create post-meeting touch points to keep prospects engaged in buying. Text messages are a natural way to keep that interest.
Ask people how they felt things went. Answer questions that went unanswered in the meetings. Follow up with quick ideas or insights to show people that you’re thinking about them and their problems. Nick and Armand from 30 Minutes to President’s Club love using texts to nudge prospects through the funnel.
As we say at Skipio, the fortune is in the follow-up. Follow-up turns your prospects into customers, ensuring you hit your quotas. Failing to follow up or doing it too slowly causes people to look elsewhere to solve their problems.
Maximize on opportunities for cross-selling and upgrades
Text message follow-up isn’t just for talking with new leads and prospects. You should have regular conversations, even short ones that last 2-4 messages, with your existing customers.
Talk about their goals, their product/service usage, their ideas for making it better. Just keep those connections alive. In doing so, you position yourself to more easily talk about additional solutions that provide value to customers.
They know that you’re familiar with what they’re doing and what they hope to do, so of course they’ll be more receptive to those conversations.
While looking for opportunities to cross-sell and doing your due diligence to get to know your customers does of course help you reach quotas, people won’t think you’re doing it for that reason alone. Because you’ve been having lots of other conversations that have nothing to do with spending money.
Confidently take on your sales quotas
Month after month, quarter after quarter, you take on the responsibility of a quota. It can be overwhelming and frustrating. But at the same time it’s an opportunity to prove you can accomplish hard things.
You more confidently approach each quota when you try new strategies and create a sales process that makes for the best buying experiences.
So, add text messaging with Skipio to your sales stack and start providing even better customer experiences — all while hitting quotas more consistently.
Our business text messaging platform is designed to help sales people start conversations and easily scale their customer communication.
With Skipio you close more sales in less time with fewer resources. That’s the reality of automated text messaging built for conversational selling.
