Achievable goals: 5 tips to define them for retail employees

On behalf of Deputy

Heather Sandlin Wednesday, 10 August 2022, 13:12Last Updated: Wednesday, 10 August 2022, 13:12

4 minutes read

Effective goal setting for retail employees is the foundation of driving sales and self-discipline.

As a business owner, you already have a pretty good idea of your business’s goals. The next step is to convey this to your employees in order to scale your company.

Achievable retail goals for your team

All objectives aren’t built equal. That’s why every retail concern should make and achieve the following four kinds of retail goals.

Annual goals
Team goals
Individual goals
Waterfall goals

Annual goals

Annual sales targets are established with the intention of meeting them in the next year. Typically, these goals specify a retail business’s overall sales revenue target for the fiscal year.

This allows your entire organization to agree on objectives and priorities for collaboration. In setting up your annual goals, they shouldn’t be “set in stone”. During the course of a year, there can be a lot of changes in the market, and it is important to adjust your goals and process to this. Several annual meetings – without overdoing them – should be included into your annual goal strategy. That way you can keep employees updated on the changes and help adjusting to them.

To work on achieving bigger, annual targets, it is useful to set shorter-term goals such as quarterly, monthly, weekly, and even daily sales targets. Setting smaller goals can have a positive impact on short-term focus, and reduces the chances of being swamped or overwhelmed.

Team Goals

Engaging your entire team in sales goal setting can increase employee engagement while also providing insight into what your sales team can realistically manage. This will assist you in increasing the likelihood of success.

Keeping quarterly, monthly, and weekly meetings and trying to encourage all employees to take part in providing feedback and setting objectives can help you achieve this. It will also promote collaboration and a healthy level of competition.

Individual Goals

Placing specific goals for each of your sales associates helps you feel more in control and accountable. However, shorter-term objectives are usually more beneficial for establishing individual goals because they can be measured more quickly. To set realistic goals, you should aim to outperform previous performance metrics, and look at sales history.

Executives can set a few key company goals, which then become part of the employees’ individual development plans. In the process, communicate with your team and allow them to add their own goals for driving themselves forward, along with the company.

Waterfall Goals

The leaders are expected to engage in the right activities and connect with the right people in the process of achieving the set-up goals. The Waterfall concept is based on the premise that the goals and benefits cascade down through the organisation, into the community, and out to the customer or client base.

Waterfall goals enable you to achieve your objectives incrementally. Instead of establishing far larger goals, you can gradually increase them week by week or month by month.

If you aim to maximize the number of online chats with clients and prospects, don’t try to go from 3 to 15 in one week. You could begin by increasing your goal to 7 the following week, 10 the next week, and then 15 later on. Take it one step at a time.

Setting unrealistic goals and failing to meet them can frustrate both you and your team. The waterfall planning strategy also guarantees that quality does not suffer as output increases, thereby preventing burnout.

Five Tips To Successfully Define Goals For Retail Employees

Here are a few ways you can make sure your retail employees are on the same page, understand their objectives, and stay motivated to achieve them:

Set clear KPIs – Setting key performance indicators (KPIs) or target metrics against which to measure performance will assist you in defining steps and strategies to achieve your sales goals
Offer support – Be a transparent and compassionate manager to your employees
Educate your staff – Be sure to use the FAB formula to explain the features, advantages, and benefits of the products you sell, and to educate your sales staff on product details
Use a reward system – This could be in the form of flexible scheduling to motivate your staff. You can also do this by providing positive feedback to them to ensure their success in the future
Track and analyse – Monitoring retail goal performance on a regular basis is critical to meeting your targets. Gather analytics and reports to track progress in the short and long term

Conclusion

Setting achievable goals and helping your retail employees define them holds numerous benefits for your business. These range from better retention to a boost in engagement. This makes it all the more crucial that you offer teams all the possible guidance on how to make their time with your retail business more enjoyable and productive.

To help you achieve these goals you can build a retail employee scheduling strategy that empowers your retail employees with the right data and makes the entire sales process more efficient.

By Rob Press

Rob is a content marketing manager at Deputy, a robust scheduling software that can be used to manage your workforce in a wide variety of different industries. Aside from helping businesses reach operational efficiency, he keeps up to date with the latest trends in SaaS, B2B, and technology in general.