How to prepare your sellers to hit sales targets in 2022

As a sales leader, helping your sellers hit sales targets in 2022 is top of mind right now.

B2B buying and selling experienced a tsunami of change over the last two years creating upheaval for revenue teams (Marketing, Sales, Post-sales). While this environment puts pressure on every person with revenue responsibilities, it presents unique challenges for sales leaders forced into remote selling, managing, and embracing more sales technology. Pair that with buying behavior changes, the great resignation, ramp-up time, lack of account clarity, and you have a forecasting nightmare. 

According to Forrester, 60% of sales leaders say their forecasting methods are inconsistent or qualitative. Of those leaders surveyed, 47% state they typically miss forecasts by 15-25%. Learning how to improve sales forecast accuracy and hit revenue targets is top of mind for all sales leaders, especially considering the sales talent crisis. 

How are you expected to hit sales targets (and meet revenue goals) under these conditions? The answer is simple: Prepare your sales reps.

While technology can help transform data into insights for forecasting accuracy, most B2B transactions still require a sales rep. Whether top reps or new hires, you must empower your team to guide and influence buyers through their journey if you want to hit your growth targets.

Prepare your reps to hit sales targets with buyer intent and engagement insights

Buyers prefer independent research and digital interactions to relying on a sales rep as a single source of information. As buyers conduct 80%+ of their process independently, sales reps have little visibility into activity outside direct engagements. When your sales reps finally get the ever-elusive meeting, they lack insights on buyer behavior, engagement activity, and overall account health. Without an informed sales rep, it’s impossible to help buyers buy. And if they can’t get buyers over the finish line, they won’t hit sales targets.

In our remote world, you must utilize content, technology, and intelligence to create exceptional experiences for both buyers and sellers as they engage across channels. It’s vital to prepare reps by empowering them with the insights to influence buyers at every engagement. When sales reps have valuable buyer activity insights, they can create more meaningful and impactful buying experiences that translate to deals won.

Make your sales reps Successful to overcome the Great Resignation

The consequences of high sales turnover always have implications for achieving revenue goals. The great resignation has amplified this challenge. With turnover decimating sales teams, achieving revenue targets is more difficult for sales leaders and often forces them to rely even more on top performers without overburdening them. Commit to simplifying the seller experience to reduce churn. Additionally, consider how you will level up your B and C players to experience success and hit sales targets to contribute to your number. As you know, this task requires a lot of time coaching, training, and duplicating winning methods.

Top performers are experts in time management but often lack tools and insights to improve efficiency. They understand time is money and prefer to spend their time on activities that bring them personal success, increase their win rates, and help them hit sales targets. As a sales leader, you must focus on enhancing the selling experience to guarantee reps can guide buyers, pivot conversations, influence, and ultimately win more deals. Creating a seller-focused experience can help you ensure your top sales reps continue to perform and remain happy in their successes. With a seller-focused experience, you incorporate the tools and techniques to make your top reps more productive while coaching up your middle players.

Accelerate new rep onboarding to reduce their time to production

Finding the right sales talent fit for your team, culture, and desired skillset takes even longer in the current climate. And when you hire new reps, it takes more time to onboard and prepare them to meet with buyers. That is a huge time and resource investment for you and others in the organization. But bear in mind new sales reps are usually eager to hit the ground running and start closing deals. Reducing time to productivity motivates the rep while getting you one step closer to achieving your revenue goals. 

Building an effective onboarding and ramp program requires a perfect mix of product knowledge, microlearning, coaching, value selling, and modern tools. Classroom-style training is an ineffective, one-way method with low knowledge retention rates and no reinforcement mechanisms. Accelerating onboarding extends beyond just training your new sales reps. You must also ensure they have the tools, knowledge, and insights to make an impact and continuously coach them up to meet their potential. The faster you ramp a rep to production, the quicker they experience success and contribute to your revenue goals.

Enable your sellers to hit sales targets

The current B2B environment requires buyer enablement, but don’t discard the seller’s role in the process. When given the tools and insights to be successful, you can empower your salesforce with the buyer activity insights that prepare them to guide and influence throughout the buying process. If you prioritize optimizing the selling experience, you ensure reps have impactful buyer activity insights, top performers are supported, and new reps achieve a faster time to revenue. A sales culture of success ensures your reps are the most prepared to guide the buyer, close deals, and consistently hit sales targets. 

Make 2022 the year of the sales rep!