15 SMART Sales Goals Every Sales Leader Needs

Many sales leaders focus on selling as much as possible.

But let’s be real—that alone doesn’t always set your team up for success. It’s too broad, vague, and fails to drive real progress. The most effective sales goals should be clear, actionable, and aligned with your bigger picture.

Setting sales goals for the upcoming month, quarter, and year is a must for any sales leader, but finding the right mix of long-term and short-term targets that will actually inspire your team is tricky. The best balance is defining goals that encourage your team to grow while staying realistic.

How can you set attainable sales goals that drive results in your industry? This article explores SMART sales goals that can transform your team’s performance, with a step-by-step guide, practical examples, and tips for ensuring success.

What Are Sales Goals?

Sales goals are clearly defined targets to help sales teams improve performance. Done right, they can correct common mistakes and poorly executed strategies and provide a pathway to lift good sales numbers even higher.

But creating different types of sales goals that actually motivate your team isn’t easy. You will not help anyone if you simply say, “We need to sell more products” or “Let’s make more money this quarter.” You must set goals that fit your current situation and give your team a roadmap for better results.

In other words, you need to follow the SMART formula.

What Are SMART Sales Goals?

SMART is a simple acronym that guides your sales goals. Sales managers and C-suite leaders typically define SMART goals, which use five criteria—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Based—to create a clear focus and path forward.

Here’s how you apply each SMART criterion:

• Specific: Set a clear plan. Don’t just aim to grow your customer base or increase your sales revenue. Define specific goals and explain how you plan to accomplish them. For example, “We’re going to increase annual revenue from our core product by 20% through a consultative sales approach.”
• Measurable: Define exactly what success looks like. If you aim to increase revenue by $1M, set up tracking in your tools to measure progress through metrics like closed deals, repeat purchases, and customer retention. This way, you can benchmark your performance and not just hoping for results.
• Achievable: Ambition is great, but keep it realistic. If last year’s revenue was $700,000, a target of $5M might demotivate your team rather than inspire them. Instead, set a stretch goal that feels within reach, like a $1M increase, so the team stays motivated and committed.
• Realistic: Goals need to fit your current situation and sales strategy. If social media hasn’t been part of your approach and your audience isn’t on Instagram, setting a goal of 100 new clients from Instagram isn’t practical. Ensure the goal fits your team’s strengths and customers’ preferences.
• Time-Based: When setting sales goals, you must define a finish line. Otherwise, you can wind up plodding on for years without much change or growth. Set quarterly or annual targets to keep everyone focused and accountable. These time-bound markers also align with fiscal periods, making it easier to measure progress consistently.

Why Do Sales Goals Matter?

Setting structured sales goals is like using Google Maps for your business growth. Your desired destination is clear, and with the SMART guidance, you can plan the best route and gauge your arrival time. According to psychologists Locke and Latham’s early goal-setting theory, specific and challenging goals lead to better task performance than vague or easy goals.

Here’s how the resulting SMART sales goals can make a massive difference for your team:

• Encourages teamwork: Clear goals give everyone a shared destination. When everyone knows what they’re working toward, collaboration improves, and individual efforts align with the overall objectives. Research shows that goal clarity and self-management can significantly improve team performance.
• Creates learning opportunities: Sales goals highlight areas for skill development, helping sales reps learn and grow as they work toward their targets. According to the American Psychological Association, engaging employees in organisational goals fosters enthusiasm and commitment, which supports personal growth and boosts job satisfaction. This creates a more motivated team and a healthier workplace.
• Triggers process improvement: Well-defined goals can reveal gaps in your current processes so that you can refine workflows. For instance, a SMART goal to “reduce lead response time by 20%” might highlight bottlenecks in communication, prompting a more streamlined handoff process between BDRs and AEs.
• Helps create accurate forecasts: Sales leaders can predict outcomes more accurately with SMART goals. This clarity helps them track progress, spot trends, and make smarter planning and budgeting decisions.. helps in budgeting and planning efforts.
• Improve customer acquisition and retention: SMART sales goals guide efforts to strengthen relationships with existing customers while attracting new ones. With clear targets, sales reps can tailor their approach to meet customer needs more effectively, resulting in a positive experience.

How to Create Sales Goals

Now that you know what makes the best sales goal, it’s time to craft some for your team. Consider areas for improvement, practicality, SMART criteria, and enablement to ensure your goals are viable and aligned with the resources available.

Identify Areas of Improvement

Start the goal-setting process by digging into sales performance to identify the real issues. Look closely at your team’s metrics and pinpoint each rep’s challenges.

Here’s how:

• Review key performance indicators (KPIs): Analyse metrics that matter most to your team, like conversion rates or average deal size.
• Assess performance gaps: Conduct a skills audit to pinpoint where top and bottom performers differ. For example, if top performers excel at closing techniques, consider hosting targeted coaching focusing on that skill or pair sales reps needing a boost in a particular skill with another team member for mentorship.
• Identify sales cycle drop-offs: Look for stages where leads tend to fall through the cracks or deals are lost. This insight can reveal critical points for improvement.
• Uncover root causes of underperformance: Look beyond the surface. Underperformance stems from factors like training needs, misaligned incentives, or process bottlenecks.

The more precise your understanding of these improvement opportunities, the better your position to set specific, actionable goals that address your team’s unique challenges.

Decide on a Reasonable Target

Now that you’ve chosen a KPI to focus on, set a target your team can realistically achieve. This step involves setting a measurable, clear objective that doesn’t stretch too far beyond current performance but also pushes your team to grow. Here’s what to consider:

• Choose a measurable metric: Decide if you’ll use a percentage increase (15%) or a specific number (10 new leads).
• Set a realistic target number: Based on past performance, determine a challenging yet achievable target (growing revenue by $20,000 or boosting conversion rates by 10%).
• Define your timeline: Outline a time frame that matches the goal’s complexity, whether one month, one quarter, or more. This gives your team a clear runway to work toward.

If the gap from current performance to the goal feels too wide, set incremental milestones to keep the sales team motivated. Smaller wins will build momentum without overwhelming the team.

Make it SMART

Now, it’s time to lock it in as a SMART goal. Try using this template to keep things simple:

Improve [KPI] by [number or percent] within [time period] by [strategy or action plan]

For example: “Boost customer retention by 10% over the next six months by implementing a personalised follow-up system and offering customer loyalty incentives.”

This goal provides a specific target, timeline, and action plan, creating a clear path to track progress.

Educate and Enable Your Sales Team

Finally, don’t forget to empower your team. Sales goals are more likely to succeed when everyone has the resources and skills to achieve them. In fact, organisations that use data-driven enablement strategies are 45% more likely to improve sales efficiency. Here’s how to make that happen:

• Equip sales with training resources: Provide learning materials, workshops, and coaching sessions focused on the skills and strategies to help them hit quotas and build relationships with prospects. A sales enablement platform can streamline this process, making resources easily accessible for your team.
• Leverage revenue enablement: Arm the entire revenue team with the right resources to support client relationships. Organisations focused on revenue enablement are at least 75% more likely to exceed performance targets such as seller revenue, cross-sell/upsell, and revenue growth.
• Celebrate wins along the way: As your team reaches milestones, even the small ones, recognise and celebrate them to keep momentum and morale high.

By setting structured goals and actively supporting your team, you create a culture where success is a repeatable process.

15 Common Sales Goals Examples

Sales teams have lots of possibilities when it comes to setting sales targets. You have to find what’s right for your team and industry. Are you looking for a bit of inspiration? Here’s a list of our favourite sales goals to kick-start brainstorming.

1. Increase Sales Revenue

Revenue goals are among the most valuable targets for measuring sales performance. Since revenue is somewhat straightforward to track and aligns with monthly, quarterly, and annual sales benchmarks, it makes sense to track this no matter what.

For a SaaS (software-as-a-service) company, revenue targets might look like this:

Increase our MRR (monthly recurring revenue) by 15% within 6 months by improving cross-selling tactics and customising our sales pitch for each buyer persona.

How to Calculate Sales Revenue

Most of the time, businesses have tools to calculate revenue KPIs and sales goals automatically. But if you find yourself doing it by hand, here’s the formula you should use:

Number of Product Sales x Unit Price of Each Product Sold = Revenue

Remember that if you sell multiple products at different price points, you will sum the total revenue for each one to get the overall sales total.

How to Achieve a Revenue Goal

Reaching a new revenue goal involves finding creative ways to improve your bottom line. You can funnel more leads into your sales cycle through cold calling and emailing or expanding your product offerings. No matter your approach, there’s a strategy out there that will work for you.

2. Close More Deals

To increase win rates, you can track the number of deals your sales team closes collectively or monitor individual targets. If you want a clear picture of your team’s success, though, it’s best to do both. Here’s what the combination of team and personal goals might look like:

As a team, close 15 deals per month by the end of Q2, using a consultative selling approach.

Individually, aim to close three deals each month by Q3.

How to Calculate Deals Closed

Deals closed is an easy KPI to calculate. Here’s a simple formula you can use:

(Number of Deals Closed ÷ Number of Leads) x 100 = Deals Closed Rate

How to Achieve a Deals Closed Goal

There isn’t just one way to increase the number of deals you close. For some businesses, the trick may be qualifying leads more thoroughly, and for others, the solution could be refining your sales pitch or strategy. With this one, it’s up to you to test and analyse your approach to determine what’s working and what isn’t.

3. Boost Booking Rate

You need to talk to people in person to turn leads into new customers. Boosting your meeting schedule can increase your conversion rate and decrease lead drop-off during the sales cycle. Here’s an example goal:

Double our team’s monthly booking rate from Q4 2024 to Q1 2025 by optimising all sales email campaigns.

How to Calculate Your Booking Rate

Keeping tabs on your booking rate takes a little more effort since you have to measure the ongoing conversion rate for individual emails your salespeople send out (not a dedicated campaign). But you need to do it if you’re going to increase the number of sales conversations your team has. Here’s how to calculate it:

(Meetings Booked ÷ Meeting Invites Sent) x 100 = Booking Rate

How to Achieve a Booking Rate Goal

Your booking rate really boils down to how well you’ve qualified leads and how well you write your invite. Both will help increase the number of meetings you schedule.

4. Boost the Number of Cold Calls

Motivating your team to make lots of cold calls is challenging — especially if sales reps are constantly getting yelled at or hung up on. Setting an incentive-based goal can help you increase your team’s number of outbound calls. For example,

Make 100 cold calls each day this week [500 total] using the contact sheets we’ve put together for potential leads, and get a $50 gift card to [restaurant] when you reach 500.

How to Calculate Cold Calls

Calculating cold calls is simple. All you need to do is figure out the average length of each cold call. Then, you can divide it by 60 minutes to get your hourly cold call rate. To calculate a reasonable number of cold calls per hour:

60 Minutes ÷ Average Call Length = Number of Calls Per Hour

Not all of your reps will max out their phone calls per hour, so you may need to do some quick counting to figure out what your sales reps are truly averaging.

How to Achieve a Cold Call Goal

To up your cold call numbers, provide reps with time, a clear script, and incentives like gift cards or bonuses to motivate them to meet or exceed the quota.

5. Increase Qualified Leads

Increasing the number of sales-qualified leads (SQLs) involves targeting prospects who show genuine buying intent. The more SQLs you have in your sales pipeline, the better reps can prioritise their time and resources. This not only improves productivity but also increases revenue.

Here’s a goal example:

Increase SQLs by 20% this quarter by refining our lead nurturing tactics.

How to Calculate SQL Rate

SQL = Number of SQLs / Total Number of Leads x 100

How to Achieve an SQL Goal

To increase SQLs, make sure your lead scoring system accurately identifies high-quality prospects. Consider how engaged a lead is, their role, company size, and how well they fit with your product. You should also focus on nurturing tactics like targeted emails or personalised content that encourages leads to take the next step.

6. Increase Average Deal Size

Closing many deals isn’t enough to keep your business afloat if all the deals are small. If small deals are holding you back, set a team goal to increase your deal size and average order value. Here’s how:

Increase the average order size to $100,000 by the end of the year by adding at least one upsell or cross-sell pitch to every customer interaction.

How to Calculate Average Deal Size

To calculate the average deal size, you need the revenue total and the number of deals closed in a specific period. (The period doesn’t matter as long as it’s the same for both values.) Once you have both numbers, you divide the revenue amount by the number of deals closed like this:

Total Revenue Generated by Deals ÷ Number of Deals Closed

For example, if you made $5,000 this quarter between 10 deals, you would divide $5,000 by 10 to get a $500 average deal size.

How to Achieve a Deal Size Goal

There are a lot of ways to increase your average deal size. You can target larger clients, capitalise on more upselling and cross-selling opportunities, or offer value-based incentives for more significant purchases by throwing in extra features or products if your customers spend over a certain amount.

7. Reduce Customer Churn

If your churn rate is higher than it should be, you should take steps to lower it. Focus on customer retention. Here’s a sample goal:

Increase our customer retention rate (i.e. decrease our churn rate) by 20% in the next two quarters by improving our hand-offs to the customer service team.

How to Calculate Customer Churn

(Customers Lost ÷ Total Customers) x 100 = Churn Rate

How to Achieve a Customer Churn Goal

Sales teams are the first line of defense in customer churn. Qualify leads thoroughly to ensure customers are the right fit for long-term retention before wasting time and resources to win them over.

8. Increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Increasing CLV can significantly impact revenue. Many factors influence your CLV, such as prospecting, qualification, upselling and cross-selling, and retention. So, if your CLV is lower than it should be, you need to figure out what’s impacting it the most and set a goal (or two) to improve. Here’s an example:

Boost our customer lifetime value to $3,000 over the next 12 months by lowering our customer acquisition cost (through better lead qualification) and aggressively pursuing cross-sell opportunities.

How to Calculate CLV

Customer’s Average Transaction Amount x Number of Transactions Per Year x Number of Years With Your Business = CLV

Remember that if you want an accurate picture of several (or many) customers, you must do the same calculation for each one — which can take a while.

How to Achieve a CLV Goal

Customer lifetime value boils down to a few simple things — the amount of money your customers spend with you every year and the amount of time they stick around. Returning customers spend 67% more than new customers, so focus on improving retention and increasing annual spend per customer to grow CLV.

9. Lower Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Acquiring a new customer can cost 5-25 times more than retaining an existing customer. The longer it takes to convert a lead into a customer, the more money you spend on ads, customer outreach campaigns, and employee time. To decrease your CAC, you need to set sales goals to streamline and optimise your sales process, like so:

Reduce CAC by 15% next month by adding more entry points to our sales funnel, which would eliminate redundancies and wasted time.

How to Calculate Customer Acquisition Cost

CAC is one of the most well-known sales KPIs for sales and marketing teams. Here’s a quick refresher on how to calculate it:

Total Cost to Acquire Customers (from certain campaign or time period) ÷ Total Number of Customers Acquired = CAC

You can also compare this number with the CLV to see if you’re earning or losing money by acquiring customers. Just make sure you consider how long they’ve been your customer.

How to Achieve a CAC Goal

Achieving a CAC goal is tricky since so many factors are involved. However, a few ways you can move closer to reaching it include:

• Using less expensive (but more skilled) methods to win customers
• Making sure your product matches your customer’s needs and situation
• Improving your sales processes

10. Shorten Time to Close

Time is money. The longer you spend trying to close a deal, the fewer opportunities you can create and capitalise on. On the flip side, the more streamlined your sales cycle is, the fewer opportunity costs you have to deal with. Here’s a goal you might set to accelerate your time to close:

Decrease time to close by 15% next quarter by vigorously weeding out unqualified leads and simplifying and personalising sales pitches for qualified leads.

How to Calculate Time to Close

Track the time from the first contact to closing a deal manually or using a sales automation tool.

How to Achieve a Time to Close Goal

To shorten the sales cycle, you only need to do one thing: persuade leads to buy from you sooner rather than later. You can qualify your leads early on, weed out the ones that aren’t a good fit for your business, and simplify your pitch to get lead commitment faster..

11. Raise Sales Email Response Rate

Sales emails are only effective if people respond. Setting a target for email responses, whether you measure the raw amount or percentage, helps you hone in on salespeople who need more coaching and find shared campaigns that need improvement. Here’s how this might look:

Increase each sales reps’ email response rate this month by pairing top performers with bottom performers for one-on-one mentoring.

How to Calculate Email Response Rate

Like many other KPIs on this list, calculating your email response rate is easy. Here’s how you go about it:

(Unique Email Responses ÷ Total Number of Emails Sent) x 100 = Email Response Rate

How to Achieve a Customer Response Rate Goal

Take a leaf from the marketing playbook: while solid email subject lines can boost open rates, getting a response requires persuasive copy and a compelling call-to-action (CTA). In fact, sending two or three messages simultaneously (double or triple-touch pattern) across multiple channels increases the probability of reply rates by as much as 14%.

12. Speed Up Response Time

You don’t want leads sitting around waiting for a response. Faster response times will help your brand image and keep customers away from competitors. So, if you notice unanswered emails, phone calls, and direct messages on social media sitting for days on end, it might be time to set a goal to speed up your response time. For example:

Respond to all warm lead communication (i.e. emails, messages, phone calls) within 3 hours of receiving it by creating a daily customer response schedule.

How to Calculate Average Response Time

To calculate your reps’ response time, you will average the time between receiving and responding to leads.

Time responding to leads / Number of responses sent (during the same timeframe)

To see exactly how fast each customer gets a response to their specific message, you’ll need to look at responses one by one.

How to Achieve a Response Time Goal

Emails and phone calls go unanswered because sales reps lack time to respond or are confused about who should respond. By clarifying roles, you have a solid chance of improving customer response time.

13. Deepen Lead Engagement

Sometimes, content is the best way to share information with your leads. But if you can’t get prospects to read or watch it, you’ve got a problem. Setting a goal to improve lead engagement can be game-changing. Here’s what that might look like:

Deepen customer engagement with our content by 30% in Q3 by training our sales professionals to select the right content and weave it into their sales conversations naturally.

How to Calculate Lead Engagement

Here again, the formula is straightforward. It looks like this:

(Content engaged ÷ Content sent) x 100 = Lead Engagement Rate

How to Achieve a Lead Engagement Goal

To increase lead engagement, you must create valuable content and sales playbooks and train reps to share it during sales conversations. If you can do that, the content will do the rest of the heavy lifting.

14. Improve Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS is one simple question — how likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague? The purpose is to gauge customer satisfaction. To improve NPS, set a goal like:

Increase our NPS by 15 points this year by refining our customer follow-up process.

How to Calculate NPS

Survey customers to determine how likely they are to recommend your company. Customers rate their likelihood on a scale of 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely). Based on their response, you can classify them into three groups:

• Promoters (score 9-10): Happy customers who’d recommend you
• Passives (score 7-8): Neutral and unlikely to spread the word
• Detractors (score 0-6): Unhappy customers who may share negative feedback

Find the percentage of promoters and detractors, then calculate the difference between the two.

How to Achieve an NPS Goal

Achieving an NPS goal requires extensive improvement of the entire customer lifecycle. Focus on strengthening customer relationships, department handoffs, and follow-up.

15. Increase Market Share

Market share is an excellent metric for gauging your competitive position. By increasing market share, you’re boosting sales and establishing a more substantial market presence, which can lead to growth over time. Here’s what a market share goal might look like:

Increase market share by 5% this year by targeting new territories

How to Calculate Market Share

(Your Sales ÷ Total Market Sales) x 100 = Market Share

How to Achieve a Market Sales Goal

To increase market share, focus on expanding into new or underserved regions, differentiate from competitors, and refine your pricing strategies to attract a larger market segment.

How to Track Your Sales Goals

Tracking your sales goals is like having a scoreboard for your team’s progress. Without it, you’re navigating in the dark. CRM systems, sales analytics, and sales management dashboards are your best friend when keeping tabs on where you stand and where you need to pivot.

Below are tools you need in your tech stack to help you stay on track:

• CRM systems: Your CRM sales software is the central hub for all things sales. Tools like Salesforce are designed to capture every interaction and associated account details. By using a CRM, you can see who’s hitting targets, track customer interactions and associated content, and set up automated follow-up reminders. With everything in one place, it’s easier to identify trends and see which sales reps need extra support.
• Sales dashboards: Dashboards are often available within the CRM and give you a clear view of all essential metrics. For example, there may be a dashboard for sales managers that shows team-wide targets, a forecasting dashboard, a rep performance dashboard that measures conversion and total revenue, win/loss ratio dashboards, and lead generation dashboards. These views simplify complex data and let you see how close (or far) you are from reaching those ambitious goals.

Using a CRM and dashboards will help you know exactly where you stand and provide the data to make informed changes along the way.

Challenges When Setting Sales Goals

Setting sales goals is required for growth but comes with its fair share of challenges. One of the biggest challenges is finding the right balance. Setting ambitious targets is tempting, but unrealistic goals can lead to burnout and frustration. Conversely, easy goals won’t push your team to grow. The trick is finding that sweet spot that stretches your team but doesn’t overwhelm them.

Another challenge is aligning with company objectives. Sales objectives need to sync with the bigger picture, whether boosting revenue, entering new markets, or improving customer retention. Translating those high-level objectives into specific, actionable sales targets can sometimes feel like putting together a puzzle without all the pieces.

Adapting to market conditions is also unpredictable but necessary. Markets change all the time, and so should your goals. A tactic that worked last quarter might not apply today if there’s an economic shift, new competition, or changes in customer demand. Staying flexible and willing to adjust goals based on these changes is key, but keeping everyone on the same page can be tough.

Motivating a diverse team presents its own set of challenges. Not every rep has the same skills, experience, or drive. Setting goals that push top performers while still encouraging newer reps is a balancing act. The challenge is to create goals that engage everyone, regardless of their level.

Finally, there’s tracking progress consistently. Without the right tools and processes, sales reps can lose sight of targets, and managers can miss early signs of trouble. Monitoring requires robust technology and a commitment to regular check-ins.

Whether setting monthly sales goals or developing a long-term sales plan, reaching your business goals is easier when you have the right tools. Highspot is designed for precisely this purpose—to help sales teams close deals faster. Imagine having all your sales resources at your fingertips, from content and collateral to sales metrics that will track the progress of sales calls and new sales opportunities.

Highspot’s analytics also give you a clear picture of where you stand, letting you adjust your sales activities to meet changing needs. Plus, its training and coaching features ensure your reps are constantly levelling up, staying sharp, and hitting individual sales targets.

Ready to reach your sales goals? Request a Highspot demo today.