Of course, these targets need to be based on facts. You need to break down your sales targets to how much you realistically expect to achieve for your major sales channels (e.g. cold calls, referrals, networking, inbound from website etc.). The mix will be different for every business - and change over time as your business grows. For many businesses, customer referrals are the best source of new customers - but for a brand new business with no history and no existing customer you will have to supplement this with other channels initially.

Each channel will then have a different sales pattern or sequence of events that lead up to a sale. For cold calling it may be an initial call to a lead to set a meeting, followed by a face-to-face meeting, then a proposal, then a sale. Historical data will allow you to see your average sales size for each channel, and your success rates at each of the sales stages and so allow you to figure out how many sales you need to hit your target, how many proposals you need to get the right number of sales, how many meetings you need to have, and how many calls you need to make to get those meetings, etc. The same applies to your other main channels.

Now these calculations will be far from perfect and actual results may vary significantly. But they do allow you to set ball-park targets for your key sales activities - and to break those down into weekly or daily targets to provide a highly visible marker of progress. They also need to be combined with quality criteria and/or targets which ensure that you're not just playing a numbers game, but instead are carrying out your activities properly. For example, asking a client for a referral doesn't count unless you've briefed them in advance, told them exactly what and who you're looking for, and earned the trust in advance to make sure you get a high quality referral. Making a cold call doesn't count unless it's to a qualified target that you've researched beforehand, etc.

Once you have established those quality criteria, and set yourself activity targets based on what will really drive your business forward; you can then us your activity targets as a daily and weekly "conscience" to make sure you are focusing your efforts in the right areas. The importance of these targets can't be overestimated. Put simply, if you are not hitting your activity targets day by day and week by week - then you are relying on luck to hit your sales targets.

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