When it comes to defining sales performance goals, you might wonder what time period to set them at. Every company has different time-frames they like to set goals for, whether it is daily, weekly, monthly or yearly targets.

There are advantages for all of these time-frames, but what is the right way? Here are some thoughts on each of those time periods :

1. Daily targets

Daily targets are probably the most demanding on the morale of a sales team. People who make daily targets can feel motivated to come into work the next day to meet the next target. However, those that don’t make their target for two or three days can quickly become disengaged and this can really affect their performance.

Also, if your company has a high-ticket product/service or a long sales process, daily targets are hard to manage.

2. Weekly targets

These are great for places where prospects are calling into the company on a regular basis and there is a small sales process that can be completed in one phone call. Weekly targets are very motivating and at the end of the week, people can go home feeling satisfied that they’ve had a good week.

Weekly targets can also be great if you’ve got seasonal selling periods. You can define sales performance goals based on the expectations of the market and the call volumes that are coming in.

3. Monthly targets

Monthly targets are the norm for many businesses. It helps with commission calculations as all the sales earned in the month can be calculated in one goal. Monthly targets are less work to manage as you don’t need to recalculate targets every week.

Monthly targets are the perfect solution if you’re looking at a long or complicated sales process. It is also a great solution if you’re working with high-ticket products like cars.

4. Annual targets

Annual targets aren’t used a lot in sales, though some businesses with very-high value products might use it where they are expected to sell only a handful of products a year. 

Annual targets can struggle to motivate sales staff in the long term and so should be used only if monthly targets are going to be too hard to achieve. In addition, it might be best to split annual targets into quarterly targets.