We’re halfway through the year, and many companies are paying close attention to their sales goals for 2022. Are you currently behind on your sales goals and looking for ways to catch up? You’re in the right place.
Read on to learn strategies and solutions that will help you realign with your 2022 sales goals and keep you moving forward toward meeting your sales targets this year.
Evaluate Current Progress
One of the common mistakes businesses make with their goals is focusing on how far they have to go instead of celebrating how far they’ve come. The same happens with sales goals when businesses fixate on the end goal and nothing else.
If you find that you’re not as close to your year-end sales goal as you’d like, take time to evaluate your current process to see the wins you and your team have had. This evaluation helps you appreciate what you’ve done and accomplished so far and can help you determine your real progress toward your sales goals.
Do You Have Realistic and Specific Sales Goals?
As you evaluate your progress, take a good look at your existing goals. Are they realistic and specific so that your team can actually achieve them? Goals that are too outlandish or vague are challenging to achieve and hinder progress toward your desired sales numbers. Here are a few things to consider when determining if you have realistic sales goals.
- Business status — Are your sales goals aligned with your current business situation? If you’re a seasonal business, relying on off-season revenue aren’t realistic. Do you work based on contracts? Do you have high margins? These factors can affect your overall revenue and should be considered when determining your sales goals for the year.
- Economic influence — Has your industry been significantly impacted in some way? COVID-related shipping delays have disrupted supply and prevented businesses of all sizes from being able to fulfill orders. If you are dealing with an economic issue like this or operate in a highly competitive market, you may need to revise your sales goals to lower, more realistic levels.
- Employee feedback — Your sales employees are vital resources when it comes to deciding on sales goals for the year. They often have valuable insight into which sales approaches aren’t working, which marketing campaigns are least effective, and which regions are the least profitable or successful. Enlist their feedback when you make your yearly sales goals, as they’ll have a better idea of whether or not those goals are feasible.
Don’t be afraid to rework or redefine your current goals to make them more realistic for your company goals and needs.
Are You Targeting the Right Audience?
Sometimes a marketing campaign has all the right pieces but still misses the intended audience. If you aren’t generating leads from the customers you are trying to target, it can affect your yearly sales goals and your bottom line. Your marketing efforts should focus on the right audience, so if that isn’t currently happening, switch up your strategy to reach the right people.
Find Out What’s Going Right
While you may be behind on your sales goals for this year, you’ve still made progress up to this point. Some of your strategies are moving you in the right direction toward meeting sales targets. Find the campaigns, sales tactics, reporting systems, and lead generators that are working and find a way to improve or enhance them going forward.
Set New Goals
In evaluating your current goals, you may find that they no longer align with your sales targets for the year. In this case, don’t be afraid to set some new goals. You could try a few different goal-formulating tactics, including:
- Readjusting your target revenue.
- Decreasing the time it takes to close a sale.
- Determining a close sales rate.
You may also want to set short-term goals that play into your year-end sales goals to keep your business on the right trajectory. New goals could reinvigorate your team and inspire them to reach your new sales targets.
Search for Expanded Marketing Opportunities
If your sales goals feel wildly out of reach right now, you should look at high-impact marketing strategies that help you reach a larger audience.
Here are some examples of high-impact marketing strategies your company could try.
- Be a guest on an industry podcast, or push an ad on said podcast.
- Partner with social media influencers to create sponsored content or product campaigns.
- Write guest posts or place sponsored ads on high-authority websites.
- Produce quality YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok content that appeals to current customers and reaches a new audience.
- Develop a PR campaign that boosts brand awareness and creates positive company perception.
Remember that not every marketing opportunity has to cost a lot to produce a positive ROI. You could spend a little bit on a new Facebook ad and see double the interest in return. The goal is to find and utilize options that greatly impact your audience and sales goals.
Utilize Your Network
You don’t have to tackle your goal delay alone. You can use the network you have to reach new audiences, entice return customers, and boost your overall sales. Consider leaning on your network in the following ways:
- Brand partnerships with similar companies.
- An affiliate program with influencers, celebrities, or social media stars to promote your brand or specific products.
- A referral program that rewards your existing customers and encourages them to share your company with potential customers in exchange for free gifts, product discounts, or money off a sale.
You could also partner with an agency like Avalaunch to help you take on all these options and discover creative ways to meet your sales goals.
Look for Scalability
There are likely aspects of your marketing or PPC strategies that aren’t generating enough interest or leads. When this happens, pull your resources from those strategies and put them toward ones that work well. While you can’t scale up every successful campaign, there are a few strategies you can employ to boost your most profitable ones.
- Focus on the campaigns that bring in the most qualified leads or the ones with the highest conversion rates.
- Increase ad spend.
- Create new offers.
- Target new audiences.
Scaling up your most successful campaigns can help you attract more leads, gain more customers, increase revenue, and achieve your sales targets — all things that help you get closer to completing your sales goals.
Prepare Your Team
Did you know that 44% of sales reps stop contact after one follow-up? This lack of follow-up is typically due to inadequate internal systems that help sales reps succeed.
You may have excellent sales goals and many new leads and customers coming in. However, if your team isn’t ready to accommodate these leads, you won’t be able to convert them to customers. When your team is adequately equipped to nurture these leads, it can help you gain new customers and meet sales goals.
There are a few ways you can prepare your team to manage leads effectively.
Streamline the Marketing-to-Sales Pipeline
The marketing team should be documenting detailed information when they get new leads. This information should include which asset the lead responded to, which product or service they are interested in, and all contact information provided.
Marketers then send these details to the sales team to help them create more effective contact with the lead. Studies show that when sales and marketing are aligned and working together, they experience 38% higher sales and 36% higher customer retention. Those wins will definitely help you get back on track and closer to your sales goals.
Classify or Rank Your Leads
Ranking your leads helps your sales team know which ones to prioritize and which will most likely convert. You can group leads by category, like what information they are looking for, which service they are looking at, or how they contacted you (website, email, ads, etc.).
You could consider using a lead-ranking software that scores leads to help you identify the most important ones. Some of these software options include:
- Freshsales
- Salesforce Essentials
- HubSpot Marketing Hub
- ActiveCampaign
- Zoho CRM
These software options can help you make the most of your leads and streamline the process of finding the most lucrative ones.
Let Avalaunch Media Help
If you feel frustrated about the lack of progress with your 2022 sales goals, Avalaunch Media is here to help. We’ll work with you to create exciting, innovative marketing campaigns that increase brand awareness, reach new audiences, boost website traffic, expand social media engagement, and more to get you back on track to meet your sales goals.
Don’t like your goals and don’t know how to proceed? We can handle that, too. We help you make clear, realistic, actionable, and measurable goals that can get your business closer to your yearly sales targets.
Contact our team today and let us help you launch toward your sales goals and beyond.