Photo: Example of goals on a business dashboard. Graphics developed in partnership with contenting.no

Do your employees fully understand company goals and what is expected of them? Do they know how far they’ve come or what actions to take?

Writing down goals and presenting them at the yearly kick-off or next company-wide meeting is a good start, but don’t stop there. Make goals visible every day.

Communicate goals clearly and repeat them again. Over communicating is better than under communicating. Because people have so much to do and receive so many messages, it is easy to get distracted.

Even groups that start out 100% committed to reaching a goal, can lose momentum over time and come up short. Getting to the next level isn’t easy.

People need to see progress as it happens. When they reach a milestone, they need to enjoy success right then and there.

Many B2B companies are using tools like CRM systems and business intelligence software and dashboards to help them reach goals. These tools do the work of measuring progress and informing people of events as they happen. This includes:

• Knowing where you are heading
• Understanding what you need to do to get there
• Celebrating with colleagues when you arrive

The best performing organisations we work with use the following techniques to reach their goals:

Make goals visible in real-time (or near real time)

Goals are continuously measured and communicated on dashboards. This applies to ever type of quantifiable goal (as long as you have the underlying data). By using both activity targets and result targets (e.g. volume or revenue) you lead people in the right direction.

If a goal isn’t followed up, it isn’t worth having. Too many goals is overload.

Some examples include:

• Increase number of new customers
• Increase inbound requests
• Increase upselling or cross selling
• Increase sales for a specific segment or product mix
• Increase margins
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Reduce complaints
• Increase billable hours or utilization (for example services)
• Increase in specific activity (for example telephone calls out, first meeting, proposals sent etc.)

Consider whether you want goals presented at the company, group or personal level. Sales targets, for example, are often cascaded to team and individual level. Managers should see totals and a breakdown per person, category or other parameter. If sales has both an overall revenue budget and a budget per product area, both these can be measured.

Check that each goal has a time horizon. Should you reach it this week, this month or this year? Including a countdown beside the goal, for example, 15 days left, creates a sense of urgency.

Design dashboards for a good experience

Good dashboard design helps people see and understand goals without confusion. Radial buttons are an intuitive way to show percent of goal achieved. Set up drill downs so it is possible to identify issues by examining top-level results on a lower level.

A special designed leaderboard, like “Budget Busters,” is a clever way to recognize sales performance. This can be a simple list on the mangers’ dashboard or a themed dashboard that is shown on office TV monitors.

At ipvision, a provider of telephone, mobile and network solutions, the sales team sees a clear view of their month to date performance, what is left to deliver and their earnings. “In the first month, we exceeded our targets,” says Thomas Pedersen, Product Manager.

Review goal performance in weekly and monthly meetings

Weekly team meetings are the ideal place to discuss goals and what needs to be done to achieve them.

It may not be appropriate to discuss how any one person is doing, but you can show team goals and use analytic dashboards to find out where there are problems or opportunities.

When everyone already knows the status before they go into meetings, no time is wasted going through figures. The discussion will hop to next steps or actions needed.

Share on the company message board

A simple graph or barometer shared in your company chat tool or team messaging tool, can motivate people to go the extra mile. This is extra important if your teams are on the road, work from home, or are spread across the country.

Many leaders post short goal-status updates as part of their routine. 

Example of a goal-status update exported from the business analytics tool and shared to chat app.

Discuss, adjust and improve

Once goals are clearly defined and you start tracking progress, you will gain even more insight into what you need to do. There is seldom any one factor, but just increasing focus can bring about some surprising results.

What are your thoughts? What keeps you motivated?

Leave a comment or get in touch with one of our experts.

According to Aberdeen Group, organizations with strong marketing and sales alignment increase organization quote attainment at a 97% higher rate, year over year. The conclusion of their research is that organisations with alignment are ‘just plain better’.

Alignment can mean many things, but at its root, the objective is to ensure sales and marketing are working towards clear, common overall goals.

And here lies a source of friction. While both teams share common goals at the company level, their KPI ‘s are usually quite different.

Another source of friction is marketing may not be clearly able to see their contribution to sales, and vice versa. Leads are routed to salespeople, and marketing doesn’t have visibility into what happens after that.

Even in small tightly knit teams there can be misunderstandings about the handoffs and workflows between sales and marketing.  Are leads being handed off at the right time? Did sales followed up in the best way?

The more technologies and systems that are used to generate and convert prospects to customers, the more room for error. A prospect can slip through the gaps leading one team to blame the other.

What is the solution? How can you help your marketing and sales work perfectly in synch? How can everyone gain visibility into goals and work together to reach them?

There’s one specific tool we recommend. It’s called the lead management dashboard.

Let’s take a look at why it is so effective.

Why the lead management dashboard?

A lead management dashboard breaks barriers and unites the goals of two different groups. The dashboard is the glue between sales and marketing.

• It clearly shows specific targets and progress towards overall goals
• It defines the exact meeting point between the two functions on their way to a common goal
• It doesn’t leave room for misunderstanding because it contains facts about how each team is helping the other based on real data
• It is practical, easy to implement, and makes non-quantifiable initiatives like improving sales-marketing communications – quantifiable

Bond building experiences around goals

The dashboard is the hand-off where marketing says ‘Hi, this person is ready to hear from you!” and sales says “Great, I will follow up!”

For marketing, every qualified lead is automatically added to the dashboard – according to your company’s own definition of qualified. You can have one or several lead categories. The most important leads for this dashboard are are ‘hot’ leads that deserve prompt follow up by sales.

Once added to the dashboard, marketing can follow leads as they move from stage to stage. Has initial contact been done? Did it result in a sale? How much was it worth?

After working so hard to get leads, it is thrilling to see how they develop, and then celebrate the win with sales colleagues. Talk about bonding!

From the sales side, the contribution of marketing is clear. How many leads have we received? How many  were we able to close? How much effort was required? The dashboard is a great way to build team spirit.

Avoid confusion

As salespeople often have long to-do-lists and too little time, a lead management dashboard makes it easier to prioritize efforts.

When following up a hot lead is one of many tasks on the to-do-list, it may not get the attention it deserves – or it can get accidently overlooked.

Dashboards keep leads top of mind. Depending on your business, this can translate into big value.

Has marketing a monthly goal for the number of ‘hot’ leads? Add the goal to the dashboards and send sales a notification every time a hot lead comes in.

If you normally celebrate a sale, consider also celebrating a hot lead. Both functions benefits from joint responsibility that leads to joint achievement.

Real-life example

We recently created our own lead dashboard for a specific marketing activity. Every time someone filled in a request form, the form generated a support ticket in SuperOffce.

The dashboard shows tickets coming in and the total number of tickets generated versus goals. A column for status, showed where tickets are in the follow-up process and who ‘owns’ the request.

We can also track how fast leads move from phase to phase or alert someone if follow-up doesn’t happen as quickly as agreed. For example, initial contact within 3 hours after request has been submitted.

Because several systems and people are working together to attract and respond to requests, it’s reassuring to see on dashboards that every piece is working as it should. It’s also easier to fix errors if it isn’t.

Improved strategy and conversions

Once you have started using dashboards, expect healthy discussions about how leads are captured, qualified and followed up. Differences in opinion about what happens at various stages in the marketing-sales funnel, will come to light. They will also be easier to sort out because discussions are based on hard facts, rather than emotions.

When teams learn more about each other and their customers, they are better able to deliver quality buyer and customer experiences.

We’d love to hear your experience managing marketing and sales. Leave a comment.

To set up your lead dashboard, contact us.