The year is almost over, and soon it’ll be time to review the year’s performance of the sales teams at your senior living communities. As you’re looking back at the year as a whole, you’ll most likely notice areas of success as well as areas of improvement for each sales person you manage. Don’t forget how important it is to praise the successes; as we talked about in our earlier blog, ”Praising Good Performance – A Little Goes a Long Way”, recognition, prestige, and attention paid to their successes fulfill an important part of their psychological esteem needs. When it comes to reviewing the areas of improvement with your teams, take advantage of the opportunity to set sales goals for the coming year.
Sales goals can be broken down into 3 areas: quantitative – measures of numbers or quantities of sales activities; qualitative – measures of the quality of the sales activities; and organizational – how effective the support of the entire organization is in supporting the sales team.
Quantitative Sales Goals
Quantitative sales goals measure the activity and performance of sales professionals. Quantitative activity goals include numbers of leads received, tours, deposits, deposits, and move-ins. Quantitative performance goals include ratios like inquiry-to-tour, tour-to-deposit, deposit-to-move-in, and others. Check out the “Key Measures of Sales Success” blog for a more thorough list of the activity and performance sales goals.
The sales management takeaway for the new year: As a sales manager, you know that there is no “simple” in sales, but there can be “straightforward”. Quantitative goals are straightforward numbers that are not always simple to implement and achieve. Whether you visualize your sales system as a pipeline or a funnel, the “simple” solution is “get more leads” at the top of the funnel or pipeline, or “make more inquiry calls” at some point along the process, but the reality is that you’ll need to do some investigating to determine if those are really the solutions to generate more move-ins, or if there are other areas where activity can be improved to get the desired end result.
Qualitative Sales Goals
Qualitative sales goals go hand-in-hand with the quantitative goals because they “read between the lines” of the activity and performance goals to look for opportunities to improve the efficiency of the sales process. For example, if your organization’s benchmark for the tour-to-deposit ratio is 33% (1 deposit for every 3 tours), and the sales professional is only averaging 25% (1 deposit for every 4 tours), what quality of the sales professional’s technique can be improved to increase the ratio?
The sales management takeaway for the new year: There may not be clearly identifiable answers with qualitative sales goals. You may need to spend some time working side by side with your sales team – like shadowing them on tours or observing their inquiry calls – before you determine the quality of their technique that has room for improvement in the new year. For example, in the tour-to-deposit example above, you may have observed that the sales professional is not asking for a deposit at the end of every tour, so the qualitative goal would be to be diligent in doing so.
Organizational Sales Goals
Unlike quantitative and qualitative goals, organizational sales goals are not necessarily intended for the sales professionals but for the senior living company or community as a whole. Is a stellar-performing sales professional receiving the support they need from a back-up team during nights, days off, or when they’re otherwise unavailable? During tours, is the community well-maintained and the staff friendly and professional to visitors? Is your website capturing leads effectively? Is marketing automation in place and working properly to handle leads? Is your web and social media presence managed well? Is your senior living CRM effective in driving the sales cycle?
The sales management takeaway for the new year: As cliché as it sounds, looking for organizational sales goal wins requires that you “think outside the box” of the immediate sales team and evaluate the support the entire organization gives them. This includes the senior living community as a whole, the company support staff and leadership, and your marketing and technology partners.
As you review the year’s sales performance, remember that it’s a prime opportunity to set goals for the new year. Breaking down sales goals into quantitative, qualitative, and organizational areas makes the task of setting goals more manageable and helps to focus on specific areas of improvement.
