“Help! It’s performance review time, and I’m nowhere close to achieving my sales goals.” 

That is not something that sales managers like to hear. Sadly, it happens more often than we’d like. In fact, only 24.3% of sales reps exceeded their quotas in 2021.

So, why aren’t more sales teams able to achieve their sales goals? 

We all know the routine. Sales leaders start on a positive note, setting ambitious goals for their team. They dream big of hitting high sales quotas and exceeding their revenue targets. 

But then, things don’t always go according to plan. As you try to guide your sales team, you get caught up in a zillion mundane admin tasks that demand your time and attention, making it difficult to keep your eyes on the goal. Your team gets distracted, overwhelmed, or burned-out, trying to keep up with those super-zealous goals you set. And eventually, sales goals are forgotten, and your team reverts ‌to its old ways. 

Sounds familiar? 

What if we promise you can achieve those ambitious sales goals by enhancing sales rep performance with powerful data-driven insights? 

Well, it’s completely doable, provided you have the right tools and strategies on hand. 

Keep scrolling to discover the secrets to achieve your sales goals 👇. 

Whether you’re in stride to reach your annual sales goals or trying to play catch up, these tips will help you increase the efficiency of your sales team so that you and your awesome salesforce can hit the numbers every month, quarter, and year. 

8 strategies to achieve sales goals this year & every other year

1. Leverage the power of team selling 

“A team that sells together achieves goals together.” 

Sales has garnered a notorious reputation for being a cut-throat activity where sales agents compete‌ aggressively, trying to poach each other’s clients and increase their individual commissions. 

But, the truth is that sales is very much a team activity, especially in fields like SaaS. It’s tough to sell alone when dealing with highly complex SaaS products, multiple stakeholders who need to buy in, and lengthy sales cycles. 

Team selling plays a critical role in clinching deals for B2B SaaS companies. You might have to rope in a tech specialist to answer advanced client questions, or you may have to assemble a cross-functional unit with multiple sales experts working together to close a huge deal.  

Conversation intelligence to boost team selling

A few years back, team selling was challenging and unnecessarily complicated. It was extremely difficult to keep everyone on the same page, especially when dozens of client meetings, calls, and emails were exchanged. 

Conversation intelligence has revolutionized the art of team selling. It provides a reliable and accurate record of every sales call, making it super easy to bring the entire sales and marketing team up to speed on all that’s happened until now. The key players can quickly track the stats and insights on the conversation intelligence dashboard, without having to waste hours on long-winded status meetings and catch-up calls. 

And it provides the prospect with an elevated customer experience as they don’t have to go through the mind-numbing process of starting from scratch every time a new sales rep joins the sales call. ‍

2. Reduce the time taken to onboard new sales reps 

Consider this scenario: You have hired a bunch of young and motivated sales reps. You cannot wait for them to start selling and contribute to the team’s sales goals. 

Uh oh! You’ve hit a bump. You realize ‌it takes weeks (or even months) to train and onboard new hires, and you’ve got to wait for a long, long time before they finally hit their stride. 

Including conversational intelligence (CI) tools in your sales team’s onboarding process reduces the time to train new reps and primes them to close deals from day one. Conversation intelligence tools (like Wingman) can help you cut new rep onboarding time by 30% to 50%. 

CI tools provide new recruits with a comprehensive set of “battle cards” which they can refer to during sales calls. These battle cards equip new sales reps with critical insights, and actionable tips on how to handle discovery and objections and highlight unique selling points, giving them the confidence to sell on the right foot. 

It’s not just new recruits who benefit from conversation intelligence. Even experienced sales reps can refer to the insights offered by CI tools to analyze their own sales calls and rectify their mistakes, closing more deals and meeting and exceeding their sales quotas. 

3. Bridge talent gaps 

As a sales leader, you probably day-dreamed of assembling your very own Avengers-style sales team, where everyone knocks sales goals out of the park, without missing on crucial sales opportunities. 

Well, you’re now one step closer to building your dream sales team, thanks to conversational intelligence. CI tools make it easy to identify and replicate the DNA of top performers. By recording and analyzing successful sales calls, you can uncover the sales strategies, tactics, and behaviors of your most successful reps. 

CI makes it easy to identify what your star performers are doing right. You can then share these tips and tactics with underperforming reps, bridging the talent gap of your team. With the right insights on hand, your team can eliminate productivity inconsistencies and make ‘achieving sales goals’ the norm.  

4. Let your data close deals for you

Do you wish you had access to critical sales data? Wouldn’t it be great if you could know which deals are on the verge of closing, which ones require a bit more push, and which ones are costing you time and resources? 

When you have the right sales metrics in hand, closing deals becomes second nature and there’s no room for error. But the biggest problem with sales data is that it is often siloed - it resides in many disparate systems preventing sales managers from getting the complete picture. 

Conversation intelligence helps you overcome this data hurdle by providing access to all your sales data in an easy-to-use dashboard. You get access to call summaries, action items, call notes, and much more at your fingertips. This helps you to mitigate risks early in the sales process - effectively maintaining the health of your deal pipelines. 

5. Provide real-time support to your sales agents 

Your sales reps may be extremely savvy, smart, and persuasive. But, there are bound to be situations when they are thrown a curveball - a tricky or challenging question from a prospect. What sets high-performing team members apart is their ability to handle these sticky situations. 

Conversational intelligence equips your entire team with contextual clues and real-time support to navigate complicated selling challenges. With CI, your sales reps are at their persuasive best, delivering the perfect pitch and winning the trust of the prospect. The result - you have a better prepared, more confident, and highly productive sales team, who hits their goals every single time. 

6. Focus on lead qualification

46% of B2B sales reps report lead quality and quantity as their biggest sales challenge. And, did you know that a whopping 67% of deals are lost because of improper lead qualification? 

Lead qualification plays a crucial role in the sales process and identifying the right leads early on helps you avoid wasting time and resources on leads that will never convert. But, lead qualification is easier said than done. Lack of information about a prospect is one of the biggest hurdles for lead qualification. 

A conversational intelligence platform integrated with your CRM and business tech stack can help you prioritize and sort leads, saving time and effort. You can quickly know all that you need to know about a prospect - their industry, company size, purchase history, preferred pricing, past interactions, etc. - helping you close deals quickly and spending more time on leads that require nurturing. 

7. Improve rep productivity in real-time

With hundreds of sales phone calls made every single day, it’s practically impossible for sales managers to join every sales call. So, how can they monitor rep performance? 

Doing a random sampling of calls recorded using a traditional call recording software is not effective as it doesn’t give sales managers the complete picture, nor does it yield real-time results. 

This is where an AI-powered conversational intelligence software can help you. It provides you with live alerts to immediately pause if you’re spending too much time talking or neglecting to listen actively to the prospect. 

CI tools offer real-time guidance and insights that make it easy for you to course-correct mid-call and get the deal back on track, rather than waiting for your manager to review the call data and provide a post-mortem analysis of why the deal didn’t close. 

Smart conversational intelligence tools like Wingman enable you to track key moments in the call by offering live transcriptions, notes, and contextual clues. These techniques help reps stay focused on what the customer is discussing, instead of worrying about simultaneous note-taking. These tools also provide you with post-call summaries and action items, adding value to your follow-up calls with prospective clients. The result - you enjoy a visible boost in sales performance and productivity of both sales reps and managers alike. 

8. Level up skills with dynamic coaching 

A whopping 75% of sales organizations waste resources and time on random and informal coaching. With so many items to tick off on their daily checklist, it’s tough for sales managers to make sales coaching a priority. 

With conversational intelligence, you no longer have to sit in on calls to train and coach reps. You can review the “game tapes” with your team offering individualized and customized training for each agent. You can identify specific moments in the call transcription and offer accurate feedback and share examples of how to handle and resolve challenges. 

Call recordings and analysis provide you with in-depth reports of rep performance, helping you monitor and train them efficiently. 

Leverage the power of conversational intelligence to meet & exceed your sales goals

Conversation analytics revolutionizes the way sales teams achieve sales goals. There are multiple benefits of implementing an AI-powered conversation intelligence platform, like Wingman. It provides you with:

• A comprehensive call library - that records and transcribes all your customer calls, along with an easy search function to identify specific use cases
• Call summary - data-driven summary and critical highlights of every sales call, powered by artificial intelligence 
• Game tapes - To train and onboard new hires & coach experienced sales reps
• Battle cards - Live, contextual clues to empower your sales team to close deals and increase win rates
• Call scorecards - Easy way to review and score calls, and train and coach sales reps 

As a sales leader, if hitting sales goals is your top priority this year (well, who’s isn’t), it’s time for you to schedule a free demo and explore the incredible benefits of Wingman for your sales team.