Setting clear and actionable expectations for your sales team is crucial for success. This ensures that everyone works toward a common purpose, improves employee engagement, and fosters retention.
Clear expectations lead to more organized teams and better results. A structured plan helps keep your team focused, motivated, and aligned with the company’s broader business objectives.
Types of Expectations to Set for Your Sales Team
Setting expectations is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Different areas need specific guidelines to ensure clarity. Below are four key categories of expectations that should be communicated to your sales team:
- Performance Expectations
These are the core sales goals you expect your team to hit. This includes targets like closed deals, increasing average deal size, improving the buying decision process, and achieving their quarterly sales goal.
Performance expectations should be tied to measurable outcomes, such as the number of deals a salesperson closes per month, the size of those deals, and the conversion rate through the sales funnel.
By setting specific performance targets, like increasing deal size by 10%, you ensure that your team clearly understands what success looks like.
- Behavioral Expectations
Setting expectations around how your salespeople interact with customers, prospects, and internal teams is essential. This includes behaviors during discovery meetings, maintaining professionalism in calls and follow-up calls, and providing personalized communication to clients. Defining these behaviors creates a consistent and positive work environment, which contributes to building strong relationships and a reliable sales culture.
- Administrative Expectations
Administrative expectations include tasks that are not directly related to selling but are crucial for the smooth sales process. For example, updating CRM data after every customer interaction, reporting on sales activities, and staying on top of administrative duties like submitting reports or attending internal meetings. Setting expectations around these tasks ensures that sales reps remain organized, compliant, and productive, contributing to the team’s overall success and improving employee retention.
- Development Expectations
Focusing on each team member’s growth and development is essential to retaining top sales talent. Encourage your team to adopt a growth mindset by participating in training programs, attending workshops, or taking part in onboarding processes for new business and new hires. This will help your team improve their skill set and contribute to high morale and a positive work environment. Additionally, set expectations for team members to generate new ideas that can help improve the sales process and drive innovation.
5 Best Practices for Setting Expectations
Once you’ve established the key areas where expectations are needed, following best practices is essential to ensure they’re effectively communicated and understood. Here are some tips to guide you:
- Be Specific and Measurable
Avoid vague language when setting expectations. Instead of saying, “Increase sales,” be specific. For example, “Close 15 deals per month, with an average deal size of $10,000.” This specificity allows team members to measure their achievements and work toward meeting their sales goals.
- Align with Broader Business Goals
Ensure the expectations you set for your sales team align with the company’s overall objectives. For example, if your company is focused on expanding into a new business, set team-level goals that support that initiative. This ensures that each salesperson knows how their work contributes to the company’s larger vision, improving employee engagement and morale.
- Create a Performance Improvement Plan
When employees are not meeting expectations, a performance improvement plan is crucial. This allows sales managers to provide feedback and work with the salesperson to get back on track. These plans often include specific tasks and measurable goals to help employees improve their performance and contribute more effectively to the team.
- Provide Resources and Support
Ensuring your team has the resources they need to succeed is essential. Whether it’s training, mentoring, or tools like CRM systems, providing the right support enables your team to meet the sales compensation expectations. Regular feedback sessions will also allow you to adjust goals and provide insight into the hiring process or new strategies for improving teamwork.
- Monitor and Adjust Regularly
Setting expectations should not be a one-time task. Regularly review your team’s progress toward their quarterly sales goals and adjust expectations as necessary. This can be done through frequent one-on-one meetings, team reviews, and analyzing performance metrics. Providing regular feedback helps salespeople stay on the right track and maintain high morale. Also, fostering open communication allows the team to share their new ideas and daily challenges.
“The easy part of setting expectations for new sales reps is discussing quotas. Every hire wants to exceed their targets and earn big commissions. The real challenge lies in ensuring they understand the daily activities needed to achieve those goals, and that you provide the necessary tools, training, and resources to ensure the quality of their efforts leads to results.
Making 100 calls a day is great, but if the ROI isn’t there early on, you could find yourself six months in with no results and a demotivated rep past the point of course correction. Set clear expectations early on for results, activity quantity, and quality—and rigorously measure initial outputs to get reps on the right track from the start.”
— Jeff Gray, VP of Sales, Peak Sales Recruiting
Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Approaches: Pros and Cons
When setting expectations, you can choose between a top-down or bottom-up approach. Each has advantages and disadvantages, depending on your company culture and team structure.
Top-Down Approach
In the top-down approach, leadership defines the goals and expectations, which are then communicated to the sales team. This ensures alignment with the broader company strategy and objectives.
- Pros:
- Provides clear, unified direction for the team.
- Keeps the team focused on company-wide objectives, such as promoting a specific product line or focusing on new business.
- Cons:
- May limit salespeople’s creativity and ownership.
- Can lead to a disconnect between leadership’s expectations and the daily challenges of the team.
Bottom-Up Approach
In a bottom-up approach, the team sets its own expectations based on its day-to-day experiences with customers and the sales process.
- Pros:
- Increases buy-in and ownership, resulting in higher morale and commitment to achieving goals.
- It often leads to more realistic and achievable goals, as the sales team has input.
- Cons:
- This may lead to misalignment with larger business objectives.
- Requires more time and effort to consolidate and evaluate input from the entire team.
The Bottom Line
Setting clear employee expectations for your sales team is essential for ensuring performance, boosting employee engagement, and fostering a positive sales culture. Whether you choose a top-down or bottom-up approach, consistency and communication are key to ensuring your team remains aligned with the company’s goals while feeling supported.
Regularly reviewing and adjusting expectations based on progress, feedback, and market changes can ensure your team stays agile, motivated, and focused on driving new business and achieving long-term success.
For more sales tips, articles, and advice, visit our The Peak Blog.
