How to Set Sales Targets People Can Actually Hit

Top down

Start from what the business needs: fixed costs, planned investment, the growth you want. That produces a revenue figure. It is a legitimate number and it carries no information whatsoever about whether it is achievable.

Bottom up

Start from capacity. How many salespeople, how many working weeks after leave and holidays, how many conversations each can genuinely hold per week, and what your conversion rates are through each stage. Multiply through. That produces a second revenue figure, and this one is grounded in arithmetic.

The gap

The two numbers will differ, often substantially. The gap is the actual planning conversation and there are only four honest responses to it: accept the lower number, hire, generate more enquiries, or improve conversion by a stated amount with a stated plan. Declaring the gap closed by assertion is a fifth option and it is the one that produces targets nobody believes.

Every number in that table is illustrative and yours will differ. The point is the chain: a revenue target that has not been walked back to a weekly enquiry number is not a plan, and a weekly enquiry number that exceeds what your marketing actually produces is a marketing problem being described as a sales target.

Seasonalise deliberately

If your business has festival, harvest, academic or budget-cycle seasonality, distribute the annual number to match it rather than dividing by twelve. Flat monthly targets in a seasonal business produce months of certain failure followed by months of easy success, and both erode the meaning of the target.

Ramp new people

Match the ramp to your sales cycle. If deals take eight weeks to close, a new joiner cannot produce revenue in month one regardless of ability. Set activity expectations for the ramp period and revenue expectations after it, and be explicit about when the ramp ends.

Separate plan from stretch

Run the business on the achievable number: hire, spend and commit against it. Set a stretch above it with its own reward. Planning the business on the stretch figure is how a good quarter that missed an ambitious target still creates a cash problem.

Put the assumptions on the same page as the number: average deal value used, conversion rates used, enquiry volume assumed. This does two things. It lets the team argue with the assumption rather than the number, which is a far more productive argument. And it makes the target falsifiable in a useful way, so that when enquiry volume comes in below the assumption, the conversation is about the assumption rather than about effort.

Decide before the period starts what a miss means, and write it down. Ambiguity here is what makes targets stressful rather than motivating, because people fill the silence with the worst interpretation available. Being explicit that a miss triggers a review of assumptions and a conversation about support, rather than an unstated consequence, changes how the whole period feels.

Then, when the period ends, do the review honestly. Compare actual enquiry volume against assumed, actual conversion against assumed, and actual capacity against assumed. In most misses at least one assumption turns out to have been wrong, and identifying which one is far more useful than a general conversation about performance. That review is also what makes the next target credible, because people can see it was built from evidence rather than from ambition.

Related reading: lead management software, what a CRM is, reporting features, sales automation, CRM for small business, and use cases.