Sales are more than just numbers, it’s about building valuable relationships with customers. But today, customers have the possibility to obtain information of every product, service, and company in the palm of their hand; from the company’s and competitors’ websites to other customers’ reviews and feedback, making the sales job quite more challenging than ever before.
Sales reps now need to have more clever strategies to rise above the competition and gain the attention of their potential customers. There are several ways to make your sales team more productive and take it to the next level, and the OKRs framework is perfect to keep your sales reps motivated and working their best.
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are a collaborative goal-setting process used to set ambitious goals that have measurable results. With OKRs, you can track the progress of your team, align them towards the same objective, and even drive engagement. OKRs continue to be a hot topic, now more than ever given the current climate of remote work. Organizations continue to look for the best way to use OKRs to improve their employees’ performance and execute their sales strategies successfully.
The OKR framework is simple once you understand how it works, and if used correctly, it will help your sales team with far more than acquiring new customers, like high output management, better communication, and alignment to achieve all of your business goals.
When considering OKRs for sales strategy, there should be a combination of both input and output goals. Input goals are tasks and activities that employees have complete control over, like the number of cold calls they make, emails sent, registering leads, etc, in sales CRM These input goals need to be translated into output results like the number of closed sales and revenue generated.
To create great and efficient sales OKRs, you need to follow one simple formula:
“We will [Objective] as measured by [Key Results]”.
Since OKRs are designed to fit the needs of any organization regardless of its size, they can help with goal setting at every company level and can be used either by teams or individually.
Your objectives should be clear, actionable, and time-bound. The common time period to achieve them is a quarter, but depending on the objective you can set a longer or shorter period. Key results are the ones that determine whether an Objective has been achieved or not. They are quantifiable, measurable, and time-bound, making it easier for the team to track progress. Contributors on the KRs should measure progress regularly, and then at the end of the OKR period that’s been set, there’s usually an OKR meeting to determine how well the team did, to assess and discuss if there should be a change in the strategy.
To start crafting your sales OKRs you can hold a meeting to make this process in collaboration with the ones that have to achieve them. Meeting with your sales team and having a brainstorming session provides a sense of ownership, engagement, and accountability. You want to empower your team to create their own challenges and motivate them into really feeling capable of achieving what they set out to.
Nothing makes things clearer than examples, so here we want to show you some sales OKRs examples that follow the formula we mentioned above and provide you with some ideas to create your own set of OKRs.
* Achieve [set $] sales from new organizations.
* [Average] time to close a deal.
* Achieve [$] from outbound sales.
* [$] expansion b2b sales within existing customers.
* [%] month-over-month growth of accounts.
* [#] training hours.
* [#] call reviews with the manager.
* Run round-table call script improvement session.
We hope this article helps you in creating the proper prompts to give your sales team a nudge in the right direction and achieve your organizational goals. Remember that Hirebook’s software helps remote and on-site teams link their day-to-day actions to strategic organizational outcomes by implementing OKRs!
Photo Credit - yanalya