How Does Sales OKRs Work for Your Business?

The sales team is an essential element of your business.  It is a primary link between your customers and the company and brings in revenue. The sales team often shoulders the responsibility for the growth of the company.  Hence, it needs to have access to tools and metrics, set goals, and measure their performance.

Why Use Sales OKR?

The use of OKRs can make a sales team efficient. The Sales OKR examples galvanize all departments to work towards common goals while giving them freedom for individual creativity. When your sales team implements OKR, the entire team agrees on the objectives that need to be achieved.

Every sales team representative decides how they will work towards achieving their objectives. They also decide a set of key results for each objective. According to OKR experts, strategically designed OKRs can help build a highly-productive sales team.

To explain how sales OKRs work, we have shared a few Sales OKR examples.

Consider your head the sales team of a big brand. The objective given by your organization is to increase quarterly revenue. In that scenario, you need to set a specific objective before planning the OKR.

Objective

Consider that last year’s quarterly revenue value is $500,000. The objective could be a 15% increase in quarterly revenue that increases the earnings to $750,000.

Time Period 

The time period could be from October to December.

Key Results 

You can have more than one key result to measure the performance of your efforts.

• The Key Results One could be generating revenue of $25,000 in the first month of sales after the launch of a new product.
• The Key Results Two could be to close a recurring deal or invest effort in up-selling to  20% of the existing customer base.
• The Key Results Three could be reducing the sales cycle from 30 days to 25 days.

Lead generation is a acute step in the sales cycle. Here we understand how OKRs will affect lead generation.

Objective 

The sales team’s objective is to optimize lead generation processes to increase the number of qualified leads.

Time Period

The time period of the lead generation could be January to March.

Key Results 

In the lead generation, the sales team can have one or more key results.

• The Key Result One could reduce the fields of the signup page to optimize the demo request process.
• Key Result Two could respond to 90% of inbound product inquiries within 12 hours.
• The Key Result Three could be each sales representative’s product demos to at least 25 new leads each week.

Achieving Sales goals using OKRs

The last step is achieving sales goals by using Sales OKRs. Here we have discussed how a sales team can achieve its goals using the OKR framework.

Objective

Data plays a vital role in identifying good leads with a higher probability of closing a sale. The objective of the sales team can streamline sales reporting and analytics for better data visibility.

Time Period

The time period could be from April to July of the current year.

Key Results 

• The Key Result One could be using one software for data management and reporting.
• The Key Result Two could be migrating all data from existing systems to one centralized streamlined system. The next team is to train the sales team to use this new system.
• The Key Result Three could reduce time spent on administrative tasks and report by 30%

The Sales OKR examples explain how this methodology works at different sales stages to increase sales and achieve objectives. In this model, Key Results are different, and the sales team can get more success by achieving all three key results. Also, the key results are not directly depe

Now take a look at different kinds of indent on each other.  Sales OKR examples that explain the concept more beautifully.

It is a company-level OKR, and the objective of the company is to increase the profitability of the quarter by 42%.

Here the key results are

• Key Result One – achieving a compound annual growth rate of 20% every quarter.
• Key Result Two – Increase the customer base by 35% every quarter.
• Key Result Three – The company should cover the country region by 55% by the 4^th quarter.

In this method, the sales team achieves all three key results. The team should achieve the Key Results Three and Two that will automatically help achieve the Key Result One. Though the Key Results appear independent at first glance, they are interconnected.

To sum up, the objective and the sales team’s Key Results can be different from companies. You need to think about different sales process elements while deciding key results and determining metrics to measure success.