OKRs hold a key role in goal setting, as they offer a simple way to define and monitor your team’s progress towards the revenue goals.
The business world is constantly dynamic, so it’s vital to outline clear objectives that describe achievable goals in a qualitative way. The goals should guide your sales team in understanding what to achieve and within what timeframe. Key results are quantifiable, so they become the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and metrics that show progress toward the goals you set with your team.
Whether your aim is to boost revenue or gain a larger market share, adopting OKRs ensures each team member’s efforts remain in line with the revenue goals. Let’s understand OKRs more deeply as we discuss how you can use them to maintain this alignment.
What are OKRs (Objective Key Results)?
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a goal-setting framework that helps organizations align their teams and focus efforts on achieving measurable outcomes. The “Objective” is a clear, aspirational statement that defines what the organization or team wants to achieve, while the “Key Results” are specific, quantifiable milestones used to track progress toward that objective. This methodology ensures transparency and alignment across teams, as everyone understands the broader goals and how their contributions fit into the bigger picture. By encouraging focus and accountability, OKRs enable businesses to prioritize what matters most and adapt quickly to changing circumstances.
Understanding OKRs and Their Components
As a goal-setting framework, OKRs help to ensure alignment between departments or teams and the revenue goals. This approach keeps your sales team focused on key aspects that bear actual fruits. It ensures customer service, marketing, and sales teams work together to boost revenue growth.
OKRs consist of two main components:
Objectives
Objectives are achievable, measurable, and specific goals your team or department needs to attain. You can work with your team to set objectives for everyone to work on within a certain timeframe.
These objectives differ for every business or company, as they depend on your team’s strengths and skillset and the overall strategies or plans.
As Eric Schmidt states in his book, “How Google Works”, achieving all your goals means you are not aggressive enough. Objectives should be achievable but challenging to encourage your team to work harder. They also need to be relevant to the revenue goals, and attaining each one should reflect tangible progress.
You need to frame your objectives in a way that allows your team to apply different methods to attain the main goal while providing a reference point for every person.
Some examples of high-level objectives that can help you make progress include:
- Increasing recurring revenue
- Enhancing customer satisfaction
- Increasing the number of served customers
What’s important to note is that you must identify objectives that resonate with your business and have specific context. Having objectives that aim too high without specifying the steps to get there will not help your team figure out how to achieve them. Frame your objectives in simple terms, such as what your team should achieve in the coming quarter to make progress toward the long-term revenue goals, instead of saying something vague like “be profitable.” Doing so allows your team to focus all energy on the smaller steps that reflect real progress and realign all efforts.
Key Results
Key results provide a definite way to quantify and track your team’s progress towards certain objectives. It’s important to involve your sales team when setting OKRs since it’s how you’ll determine whether they achieve the main objective or revenue goal.
Key results should be very specific and have a number attached where possible, such as the number of new customers or the number of total sales. There are two types of key results: value-based and activity-based. Your choice will depend on:
- Whether you want to measure the outcomes or the efforts
- Whether your OKRs lean more towards the objectives or the activities that get you there
Value-based Key Results
These key results focus on the value your team delivers to your business and customers. They look at the outcomes of fruitful activities and have an X/Y structure.
For instance, a value-based key result can be to lower or increase a certain metric from X to Y. You start from X heading to Y, so the information is more measurable than using percentages. Like when you say you want to increase the conversion rate from organic website traffic by 40%, compared to saying you need to increase the rate from 200 customers to 300.
Activity-based Key Results
Activity-based key results focus on a strategy’s milestones or deliverables or the initiatives and activities involved. They begin with a verb, such as implementing, launching, planning, releasing, delivering, or testing.
For instance, your key result can be crafting an effective sales campaign or organizing a more detailed training program for your team.
Challenges in Sales Account Planning
Sales account planning is an elaborate process that requires you to examine the details of your accounts. These details cover various aspects, such as your sales strategies, market share, key decision makers, and business size.
Such a plan can help you increase retention rates, boost the lifetime customer value, or meet the changing customer demands. It takes the focus away from selling to customers and allows you to concentrate on partnering with your customers and nurturing fruitful relationships.
While sales account planning can empower your sales team to achieve exceptional results, you may come across challenges along the way, such as:
Changing customer behaviors
As the world embraces new technologies, customers’ buying behavior evolves at the same pace. More people now educate themselves before buying a product or engaging a member of your sales team. Customers prefer to do some research first by checking customer reviews and ratings, asking loved ones for advice, and comparing different vendors.
The best way to stay on top of this challenge is to ensure your sales team remains flexible and can easily adapt to changes. Such flexibility and adaptability require careful planning and proactive adoption of OKRs.
Understanding what your customers need while monitoring OKRs to see how changes affect the overall progress will equip your team with valuable insights to boost revenue and help them achieve new success levels.
Knowing the customers’ strategy
One of the most prominent challenges in account planning is understanding how customers measure and define success and their online strategy. Ideally, your team should know what your customers consider valuable and adjust their efforts accordingly.
When your team and customers are on the same page, both sides are willing to work together to recognize gaps and identify value for everyone’s benefit. Most business people agree that fostering strong customer relationships and building value is what sets them up for success in a competitive market.
Ultimately, the key to successful account planning is understanding what customers define as value, market pressures, and revenue goals. Combining OKRs with this approach makes it easy for your sales team to access key information, including:
- How to coordinate the team while remaining goal-oriented
- A deep understanding of your customer’s needs for better service
- Where to find new opportunities and track the steps your team will take to exploit them
- How to align personal efforts and initiatives with the revenue goals
Aligning Sales Objectives with Revenue Goals Using OKRs
OKRs elaborate on your business’s success criteria by helping you determine whether or not your team attained success. Value-based OKRs enable you to foster a results-focused culture instead of your team focusing on daily tasks without measuring success.
The best way to ensure success is to make sure your sales team’s objectives go hand in hand with your revenue goals. This way, every effort contributes to the profitability and growth of your business.
Know Your Business Goals
Identify what your key objectives are, such as exploring new markets, getting a bigger market share, or boosting revenue. Once you understand what to achieve, it’s easier for your team to align their sales tactics with these objectives.
Determine the Sales KPIs and Metrics
Clearly, understanding the business goals simplifies the process of identifying the sales OKRs and metrics that matter to you, such as conversion rates, sales revenue, and customer lifetime value.
Align Sales Activities and Processes
Aligning these two aspects with the revenue goals involves outlining the necessary resources, performance targets, and sales processes. Incorporating OKRs helps to link each aspect with the revenue goals, creating a more efficient and focused sales team.
Revegy helps sales teams align their objectives with broader revenue goals by providing a platform that centralizes account insights, helping teams create OKRs that directly support business objectives. With Revegy, teams can view and manage accounts in detail, from understanding customer pain points to identifying opportunities to create value. This capability allows sales organizations to set OKRs that are not only achievable but also closely tied to the growth metrics that matter most.
How OKRs Drive Focused Account Planning
OKRs offer the most effective and practical way to ensure account planning efforts remain on point. They help streamline the complex planning process by:
- Allowing real-time visibility to enable real-time progress tracking
- Centralizing and aligning the account planning process
- Encouraging collaboration across different teams or departments
- Prioritizing objectives so your team deals with the most impactful areas first
- Enhancing flexibility, agility, and adaptability in uncertain or changing market conditions
Using Revegy’s platform for strategic account planning, teams can develop OKRs that drive targeted activities and uncover strategic priorities within each account. Revegy’s data-driven insights help sales teams pinpoint key stakeholders, understand account complexity, and align initiatives with customer needs. This level of focused planning enables the team to set and pursue OKRs that translate into measurable impact, allowing for deeper and more meaningful customer relationships that propel revenue.
Tracking and Measuring Success: OKRs as a Continuous Process
There’s no better way to recognize progress than monitoring and measuring OKRs. Regular tracking allows you to pivot and adjust where necessary to optimize sales OKRs and their impact on the revenue goals.
This continuous process relies on two main aspects: feedback and data-driven insights.
Feedback
Feedback from key stakeholders, customers, and your sales team is vital to optimizing and adjusting your strategy. Ensure you seek feedback and encourage open conversations with your team to understand what works well and where to change for better results.
Data-driven Insights
Data-driven insights play a key role in ensuring business success. Collecting and analyzing data from various sources like customer feedback channels, sales analytics tools, and CRMs makes it easier to recognize improvement areas, trends, and patterns you can exploit to achieve your revenue goals.
Sales Team Success with OKRs
Although sales-specific OKRs can be a source of inspiration for your team, involving everyone in the implementation and design process will be more beneficial to your business. It becomes easy to:
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Recognize opportunities for performance improvement
With the right reporting, tracking and analytics tools, you’ll have access to performance data that will help you identify opportunities. For instance, if your team has a pattern of neglecting a certain weak point, assigning an OKR to that area can help you address the issue.
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Make OKRs collaborative
Involving your sales team in the OKR process increases their chances of embracing the idea. Clarify what you wish to achieve, how it impacts the revenue goals, and how each team member can gain from the positive results.
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Monitor OKRs and learn from the progress.
Have regular check-ins with members of your sales team to discuss OKR progress. Celebrate milestones no matter how small to encourage good performance and keep the morale high.
Best Practices for Implementing OKRs in Sales Teams
When implementing OKRs in sales, leveraging a tool like Revegy can make all the difference. Revegy simplifies account planning by aligning OKRs with account-specific strategies, making it easier to foster a collaborative approach to sales and revenue generation. Encouraging teams to use Revegy’s visual planning and analytics features can lead to more precise OKR-setting, fostering alignment with corporate goals and ensuring that each team member contributes effectively to account-based revenue objectives.
- Nurture a deeper sense of commitment and ownership by involving your sales team in the OKR-defining process.
- Guide your team to aim high but remain grounded in what they have the capacity to achieve by balancing achievable and ambitious revenue goals and OKRs
- Integrate OKRs into your CRM to simplify performance management and tracking.
- Offer coaching and regular feedback to enhance the OKR success
Conclusion
Incorporating OKRs into account planning can become a guiding light that drives your business toward adaptability, resilience, and long-term success. Setting measurable and clear goals and monitoring key results with the right OKR software can elevate your business to new levels. An advanced all-in-one productivity tool comes with customizable features that empower you to manage, monitor, and achieve your revenue goals more efficiently. It becomes easy to remain on top of your sales objectives, collaborate with other teams, and optimize your business processes.
About the Author
Nisha Joseph, Content Manager, Profit.co
In her current role, she leads the content marketing team with experience in various fields, such as science, education, law, and management. She is a well-rounded individual with diverse interests and skills.
Profit.co headquartered in Plano, TX, USA, is an enterprise strategy execution platform that helps businesses align strategic objectives with measurable goals. Profit.co’s strategy execution platform is integrated with OKR Software, Performance Management Software, Project & Portfolio Management, Task Management, and Employee Engagement modules. Seamlessly integrated with 80+ tools, Profit.co aggregates data to give clear KPI insights and highlight the impact of team initiatives, regardless of the diverse tools your organization employs. Learn more at Profit.co or connect on LinkedIn and Facebook.
