Articles

Hitting your sales quota each quarter is no mean feat. It takes a lot of hard work and talent. But if you’re working flat out and yet consistently finding it hard to make quota, it’s natural to find yourself thinking: what more can I do? Well, the answer most likely is: a lot.

The truth is, ensuring you hit your sales quota is not as simple as having a great work ethic and attitude. It takes discipline, organisation and strategy.

Use these tips to help ensure you hit your sales quota.

Upgrade Your Skills and Make Time For Learning

As Henry Ford wisely put it, “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.” While you might think you’re too busy to take time to learn, to experience success in sales, as with any profession, you need to continually upgrade your skills. If you don’t, you risk your strategies becoming outdated and you’ll be ill-equipped to meet changing customer demands. Whether you are new to the sales profession or have many years under your belt, take time to learn EVERYDAY. Whether it’s reading an article on your lunch break, listening to a podcast as you drive to client meetings or making a commitment to undertake a course in professional sales training, keeping your skills up to date will go along way to ensuring you hit your sales quota.

Get Organised

In sales, it’s easy to get into the mindset that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. Effective time-management skills and a schedule designed to maximise productivity are invaluable to a sales pro. Take a hard, honest look at how you are spending your time and get organised. Efficiency experts suggest that we’re more productive when we “batch” similar tasks and activities together. So block out time in your schedule for prospecting, follow-ups, social selling and cold calls etc. For this to work, you MUST be disciplined and stick to your schedule.

Finding the right tools is another great way to get organized. Investigate the great time-saving, AI-powered tools that are now on the market which can cut down the time you need to spend on things like research, prospecting and admin.

Qualify Your Leads

Quite simply, too much time is wasted on leads that just won’t go anywhere. Again, qualifying leads takes time, but it’s time well spent. In fact, qualifying your leads is one of our favourite time-saving hacks and it will go a long way to ensuring you hit your sales quota. Look at your pipeline on a daily basis and sort the wheat from the chaff. Which leads have a real chance of closing? Which are time-wasters? Though it can feel counterproductive to turn your back on a prospect when you spend so much time trying to bring in new business, in doing so you’ll free up your time to spend where it’s most effective: cultivating your hot prospects.

At the end of the day, before you can ascertain what needs to be done to ensure you hit your sales quota, you need to take some time for self-reflection and analysis. Start today: be honest with yourself and how you are spending your time. Speak to your manager or seek out a mentor and figure out your strengths and weaknesses in sales.