Using this sales goal template, College City Design-Build’s salespeople build their own year by projecting reachable targets and charting progress. The individual sales plan takes into consideration the salesperson’s capacity, ambition, and desire for income, so the template drives results, says Bjorn Freudenthal, the Lakeville, Minn., company’s vice president of marketing and sales.

Each salesperson is given the same template with a different number of bids, leads, and project types. The template is divided up by month, quarter, and by number of projects and type of project.

Although goals are set at the beginning of every year, Freudenthal meets with each salesperson every two weeks to review leads, bids, and jobs sold and to review sales goals and year-to-date results.

Freudenthal, who developed the template with a local supplier, Charlie Bradburn, the sales manager at Automated Building Components’ millworks division, says it allows salespeople to be more strategic about their performance, which “leads to company buy-in ... . We have people who [see] themselves as owners and manage this form as an owner would ... a P&L.”

Click here to download the spreadsheet.

—Stacey Freed, senior editor, REMODELING. http://www.remodelingmag.com


Small Bites

The budgeted sales for this individual are $1.3 million. For the first quarter, $325,000 is his sales goal. As of January he had reached $215,000, but he still had February and March to hit the $325,000 mark. He was just 33.8% behind his quarterly goal.

Sales Strategy

Some salespeople lean toward certain types of projects and have an easier time selling those. “But if you say that you want to sell more kitchens,” Freudenthal asks his sales team, “What actions are you taking to do so? Taking workshops, going after prospects, striking up relationships with showroom reps?” This is a way for salespeople to look at their own sales more strategically.

Goal-Oriented

Freudenthal and each sales rep review the document to see if the salesperson is on track and if activity goals and volumes are on target. “If we’re not,” Freudenthal says, “we ask why and [look at] what obstacles are in the way and how can we get to the desired results.”

Make Your Margins

This is your company’s average closed margin, which you put in. After the contract is executed and the project is built, that closing margin is tracked, and that’s the number on the sales template for a particular salesperson. The goal is to have the closing margin be the same as (or better than) the pre-construction margin.

Which Path?

“D/B” is for those design/ build jobs that follow College City Design-Build’s 12-step system. (Small jobs have a lead designer and don’t follow the D/B process.) These numbers are used for tracking.

Suggested Follow-Up

These cover goals and objectives and how best to attain them.