{"id":225,"date":"2010-11-02T09:37:54","date_gmt":"2010-11-02T09:37:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/?p=225"},"modified":"2010-11-02T09:41:03","modified_gmt":"2010-11-02T09:41:03","slug":"how-to-set-sales-targets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/2010\/11\/how-to-set-sales-targets\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Set Sales Targets"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading Time: <\/span> 3<\/span> minutes : <\/span><\/span>

\"SettingHow to set sales targets<\/h3>\n

The majority of small business owners, if you ask them,\u00a0do not\u00a0set and then track their sales targets.\u00a0 It\u2019s easy to see why this is when you consider that the whole process can seem so complicated.\u00a0 The\u00a0tendancy is for many small business owners to just say “we want as many sales as possible” without actually setting out any plans or targets, by doing this\u00a0it makes it hard to focus on the end result.<\/p>\n

The good news is that it\u2019s very easy to set realistic sales targets that allow you to monitor progress each week \/ month or quarter.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0main\u00a0thing that you must know\u00a0is how many sales you should be making each month or each week, in order to meet your annual turnover and profit goals.\u00a0 By\u00a0splitting this annual figure down into monthly or weekly targets, it\u2019s far easier to keep on top of the figures.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a simple, easy to follow way to discover what your sales targets should be, in weekly or monthly segments.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. List your turnover \/ revenue targets for the next 12 months.\u00a0 You \u00a0need to know what this figure is, in order to know how many sales you should be making each year.\u00a0 I am assuming that you know this figure, if not sit down right now and think about the turnover and profits needed over the coming year (it should be in your business plan) and the pricing of your products or services<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  2. Work out what your \u201caverage\u201d sale value is.\u00a0 An easy way to do this is to\u00a0list (for example) the value of your last 20 or 30 sales, and then divide that number by the number of sales.\u00a0 This is only an approximate figure, but it will give you something to work with and is\u00a0often fairly accurate.<\/li>\n
  3. Now, list how many \u201caverage\u201d sales you would need to make over the next 12 months, in order to achieve the above\u00a0figures in step 1\u00a0 Write this number down.<\/li>\n
  4. Now, divide the number you wrote down in step 3, by 12.\u00a0 This will give you a monthly sales target.<\/li>\n
  5. If you want to work on weekly targets, (this suits some business types better than others), simply divide the annual number of sales by 52, or more realistically 48 to allow for bank holidays and other “slack” times.<\/li>\n
  6. And it follows that if you want to work on quarterly figures then you need to devide the number of annual sales by 4.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    By using sales targets if gives you a very good idea as to how your sales team (or you if you are a sole trader or are responsible for sales yourself) are doing – tracking the actual sales against the targets means that there is less chance of nasty surprises when you suddenly realise that you have not made enough sales in the month \/ quarter or year and\u00a0will mean that you can make changes to your marketing or\u00a0an extra effort before things get too bad.<\/p>\n

    Remember that as with most things in life, things will not \u201cjust get better\u201d by themselves.\u00a0 For better results, you need to be making better marketing decisions, this could be something simple as changing where you are advertising or\u00a0much more complex such as improving the SEO on your website or could even mean that you need to talk to a sales & marketing consultancy<\/a>\u00a0such as Armida who are based in East Sussex.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Reading Time: <\/span> 3<\/span> minutes : <\/span><\/span>How to set sales targets The majority of small business owners, if you ask them,\u00a0do not\u00a0set and then track their sales targets.\u00a0 It\u2019s easy to see why this is when you consider that the whole process can seem so complicated.\u00a0 The\u00a0tendancy is for many small business owners to just say “we want as many sales […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,10],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-advice","category-marketing-2","tag-sales"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}