Make Your Sales Goals a Company-Wide Priority

While it’s understood that every department is striving to help the company succeed, they often do this with a fractured view. R&D may not know what marketing is doing, and customer service might not be in tune with the sales department. This leads to activity and information silos which, while well-intentioned, limit an organization’s growth, as employees only have a narrow perspective on how their actions impact the rest of the company. 

To help overcome this, cross-department collaboration and shared sales goals are important. This is true even for teams that historically never measured their success against company-wide sales. The result is a more integrated sales strategy and a unified company that helps sales teams hit and exceed their sales goals. 

One of the common concerns about making sales goals a company-wide priority is the potential for additional administrative work and overhead. Sharing data, notes, and reports with other groups within the organization can prompt questions, additional requests, and, in some cases, more scrutiny. Understandably, any change might seem burdensome, but in this article, we’ll go over tips for integrating sales objectives into every department without adding extra work to everyone’s plate. It is possible for everyone to contribute to company-wide information sharing while still saving time. 

Below, we’ll help sales managers understand the impact and importance of open communications so they can become a catalyst for their own success, making it even easier to set smarter goals and facilitate more effective sales strategies and plans.

It’s easy for other groups within an organization to defer all sales responsibilities to the sales team. However, when these other departments believe what they do can influence long-term sales outcomes, and that this effort will benefit them, they’re more likely to actively find ways to facilitate sales success, even if they rarely interact with the inbound and outbound sales reps. 

In fact, when teams work in tandem toward shared sales goals, there’s an amplifying effect on their overall performance. They start to make more value-oriented decisions that lead to better sales outcomes. Employees shift away from pursuing only personal or department-specific goals, some of which may be arbitrary or benefiting just their team, and focus on activities that can improve top- and bottom-line revenue.

Five benefits of making your sales goals a company-wide priority include: 

• Reduces friction between departments. Teams can clash when their objectives are siloed since they may compete for budget or validation from organizational leadership. In some companies, departments have an adversarial relationship. Yet, when they operate under the larger umbrella mission of increasing sales, they are more willing to forgo different expense requests and are more likely to prioritize projects that other departments can endorse and rally behind. 

• Increases clarity on their organizational impact. Sales leaders can do more than just share sales goals and objective examples. They can also help other department heads understand how their current efforts affect sales goals, which makes it easier for them to appreciate the multitude of ways they can positively influence sales outcomes. 

• Improves customer experiences. Since the customer experience is multichannel, a shared appreciation for company-wide sales targets encourages every team member from the customer service rep to the IT exec and the marketing strategist to operate with sales performance in mind. That way, their actions are guided by the underlying goal of helping customers have memorable, positive experiences that in turn encourage new orders and repeat purchases. 

• Fosters unconventional thinking. When you invite non-sales employees into the sales conversation, you get different perspectives working to solve the same problem. Given their different areas of expertise and strengths, you’re likely to come out of the discussion with new and unique ideas that can be deployed with their assistance. 

• Strengthens internal leadership. The more you emphasize sales goals as a company-wide priority, the more other department heads internalize it. This leads to managers acting and thinking less about their own needs and, instead, operating with purpose in helping the overall company succeed.  

It’s important for sales managers to take the first step in communicating their goals with the team so everyone can pitch in. Consider an open policy and share your sales goal templates to help other departments better understand how you structure your sales planning. With additional tools and resources, they may have a better idea of how to weave their efforts into driving better sales performance.

It’s easy to dismiss non-sales departments as unable to directly contribute to sales performance due to their lack of expertise or access to customers. However, when you incorporate their input and share various sales goals examples, you’ll find that they become invaluable sales assets. 

Here are examples of how other corporate functions can enable the sales process.

1. To minimize leaks in the lead acquisition process, your IT department can focus on improving your website’s speed. That way, fewer prospects bounce due to slow page load times. 

2. To move more audiences into the sales funnel, your designers can rapidly develop and test new landing pages to boost conversion rates.

3. To produce new products that will sell themselves, your research and development team can innovate on best-selling product lines to further strengthen customer loyalty and prompt repeat purchases.

4. To improve user retention, your customer service reps can report on the products and service lines that are more likely to lead to attrition or returns. That way, salespeople can promote those less and instead prioritize offerings with higher customer satisfaction scores.

5. To help sales streamline the sales process, marketing can invest in providing higher-quality collateral and implementing automation tools to strategically follow up with leads and nurture them through the funnel.

Although departments like design, IT, and R&D might not normally think about sales targets, it becomes easier to exceed sales goals when they also pitch in and prioritize projects that make selling seamless.

It’s crucial to first communicate the organization’s sales goals to hold everyone accountable. It helps other teams envision smart ways in which their efforts can enable the sales process. 

Also, you should create a sales goal template that others can reference and use. Using that, employees can find strategic ways to insert themselves and make an impact. 

Of course, to make integrated efforts easier, companies should implement collaborative tools that streamline information sharing and accessibility. This minimizes the need for additional data entry since inputs from one team member will automatically sync with all your internal platforms so colleagues can access the same fully updated information in real-time. 

For additional context and knowledge transfer, sales leaders can host monthly meetings. Invite other departments to exchange strategies and tips, as well as provide context behind the shared notes and data. 

When you outline various sales goals and objectives and distribute those across the company, other directors and managers become receptive to collaborative efforts. Better yet, they see how helping their sales department also benefits them, since they can tie their efforts back to revenue generation. They can look at sales goals as a shared priority and understand that revenue facilitation increases their department’s value to the organization, too, which may help them fulfill their larger professional ambitions. 

The more sales goals are put front-and-centre for your organization, the more likely it is that you build win-win scenarios for all parties involved. Break down information and functional silos so the team can collaborate as just that: a team.