Now you have all the data needed to set reasonable goals for your team next year. But reasonable doesn’t mean lowering the bar so that you can feel good about hitting similar numbers next December. It means attainable with your team and improvements you want to make.
Improvements to next year’s strategy can come in two ways: coaching and capacity.
Improving your coaching
As a sales leader goes through the data for a post-mortem, lots of questions and ideas should be coming into their head. From the data above, a team lead should be asking themselves:
- What can we do to qualify leads better so that timing and authority are less of an issue? Should SDRs be asking more questions when they reach out to make sure that the contacts can make the decisions within our ideal sales cycle?
- What can we do to keep momentum? Perhaps the sales cadence needs to be reconfigured so that AEs touch base with opportunities more frequently.
Sales leaders shouldn’t see this as only their burden. Ideas should be solicited from all around the company on how to improve each year. Successful reps such as Andrea and Joe should be coaching others and helping the team succeed going forward.
Improving your capacity
Once you have the actual number of what is achievable with your team, you can plan out your bookings goal for the next year. If you know your individual rep quota attainment, conversion rates, and deal size, you can know how many reps and how many opportunities you need to hit different goals. You can then set out your hiring framework to make sure you hit your goal.
You can start towards that goal now by making sure you have enough pipeline for any further hires you make. Though they won’t ramp up immediately, you’ll still need to make sure they have deals to work on in the middle quarters of the new year.
In this case, this company has made a good start. They have enough pipeline coverage for Q1 of 2017. Yes, they still need to get more to make sure they have opportunities throughout the year, but the reps returning in January will have plenty to work with.
Putting it all together
A post-mortem should be collaborative, constructive, and actionable. Each team member should come away from the process knowing exactly what they need to do, clear on how they can achieve their goals, and with renewed vigor in their mission.
Having the right data allows you and your team to achieve this. Instead of presuming you know what went wrong (or right) in the past year, you can ground your advances in facts for the coming year. Allow your team to learn from their failures and successes, and they will always be ready to push past the previous year’s goals and onto new achievements.