What should you do when you’re not hitting your numbers?
If every month was a green month, then life as a sales and marketing professional would be a breeze. But sadly, that’s not how sales always works. A variety of variables can cause revenue growth to drag, such as:
- Decrease in the number of leads generated by marketing,
- Reduced number of meetings scheduled by sales development representatives,
- High churn rates
If you want to keep up with your targets month after month, you can’t rely on guesswork and intuition. You need to look at facts and figures. This is where your data is going to save you.
Hitting sales targets isn’t easy. In a situation where the sales and marketing teams aren’t able to hit their numbers, it’s time to get to the bottom of it.
#1: Audit Your Funnel
Set up a meeting to discuss with the sales and marketing teams, respectively, on what is working and isn’t working for them.
Marketing might ask questions like:
- Are we generating enough lead volume when compared to quarters where we hit our numbers?
- What number of leads that we generated got converted into opportunities?
- Are there any leads that are getting stuck at a particular stage of the funnel?
- Is there any dip in our conversion rates?
The sales team might ask questions like:
- Are we losing deals for any product reasons?
- Are AEs losing deals across the board, or is there a specific ICP/segment/market/AE that needs attention?
- How is data quality affecting deals?
#2: Communication
Each team in your business — be it sales, marketing, or customer success — collects massive amounts of data. The best way to look at all this data is to see it all in one place. By getting a comprehensive view of your data, you can quickly analyze what is going wrong, where the cracks are, and how to fix it.
For this, you need your teams to be communicating with each other on a constant basis. As cumbersome as it may be, setting up recurring weekly and monthly meetings to look at all the numbers, to address what fixes can be made, what leakages can be found early and plugged will keep you floating.
When doing this, ensure that you are all working towards the same goal—revenue. This way all your teams are aligned and nobody is pointing fingers when things go wrong.
#3: Target-Setting
Another type of analysis the sales and marketing team does to set up the targets for the year is historical analysis. This is a method used to identify what your current target numbers should be to hit a certain $ figure in revenue.
Set up a dashboard with which you can perform a historical analysis of your past performance and the targets previously set. Look into the numbers of your last 18 months, if possible, to get an idea of what your current targets should look like.
#4: Training
Once you have identified where the leakage is happening, the next step is to train your sales and marketing personnel in the areas they lack.
Training provides multiple advantages and is pivotal in ensuring your team can strive towards success. It instills confidence in your employees and also provides them with different opportunities to grow by outperforming their sales targets.
#5: Avoid Finger-Pointing
Be empathetic. Put yourself in each other’s shoes and remember that you’re both here to help the company scale and succeed, and you need to work with each other to make this happen.
Assess, don’t accuse. Instead of blaming each other when a month goes poorly, or shifting the blame on the other team in discussions with your CRO/CEO, try to sit down together to understand what went wrong, and how you can collectively avoid this in the future.
Keep each other in the loop. If you’re not on track to hit the targets in a certain month, or if you foresee that the next month might not be as good as this one, set the expectations with the other team well in advance. This helps avoid any unpleasant surprises that might cause squabbles between the teams.
Wrapping Up
The best way to solve for when you are not hitting your numbers is by staying calm, analyzing your numbers, training your teams to take action to fix the leakage, and move forward. Simple as that.
