DO YOU HAVE A SALES TARGET—OR ARE YOU JUST HOPING TO SELL?

There’s a question I like to ask when I talk to a small business owner about sales: “What’s your sales target for this month?”

The answer is often something like, “I want to sell more,” “I’d like to hit $10,000,” or simply, “Let’s see how the month goes.” And I completely understand those answers. When you’re busy serving customers, placing orders, handling the books, and solving the problems that come up every day, sitting down to forecast your sales doesn’t always feel like a priority.

But there’s an important difference between having a sales target and simply hoping you’ll sell. A target shouldn’t just be a number you write down at the beginning of the month. It should help you understand what you need to achieve and, most importantly, what you need to do to get there.

A sales target starts with a number

Imagine you run a small business in Philadelphia and decide that you want to sell $10,000 this month. So far, so good.

Now comes the question that really matters: How are you going to reach those $10,000?

Let’s say your average sale is $250. That means you need approximately 40 sales to reach your target.

$10,000 ÷ $250 = 40 sales

We’ve just turned an abstract number into something we can work with. But we can take it one step further.

If you normally close one out of every four sales opportunities, you’ll need around 100 opportunities to generate those 40 sales.

And that changes the conversation.

We’re no longer just saying, “I want to sell $10,000.” We’re talking about 40 sales and approximately 100 opportunities.

The next question becomes much more useful: How many opportunities do you have right now?

If you have 70 active conversations with potential customers, you know you’re not starting from zero. If you only have 15, you know you need to create many more opportunities during the month.

That’s what makes a sales target useful: the number starts telling you what you need to do.

Not every sales target is equally useful

It’s also worth asking where your target comes from.

If you normally sell $8,000 a month and decide that you want to sell $20,000 this month, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to grow. The problem comes when the number isn’t connected to any change in the business.

Will you have more customers? Will your average sale increase? Will you introduce a new service? Do you have more sales opportunities than you did last month?

If the answer to all of those questions is “no,” then maybe $20,000 is more of a wish than a sales target.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t aim higher. It means you should understand what needs to change for the higher number to become realistic.

When I set a sales target, I like to be able to explain where the money is expected to come from. We don’t need to predict everything perfectly. We need a reasonable assumption that we can check as the month progresses.

One simple calculation can change how you work

Let’s look at another example.

Imagine your sales target is $12,000 and your average sale is $300. You need approximately 40 sales.

But you know that some customers buy more than once during the month and others spend more than $300. So those 40 sales aren’t a rule you have to follow exactly. They’re a reference point that helps you understand the size of your target.

Now look at your current situation.

Maybe you already have $4,000 in confirmed work because you have regular customers and several jobs booked. That means you’re not really starting from zero. You need to generate another $8,000.

That way of looking at the numbers can completely change how you organize your week.

Instead of saying, “I need to sell more,” you can say: “I need to create enough opportunities to cover the $8,000 I still need.”

That is much easier to turn into specific actions.

What do you do with that number?

This is where a sales target stops being a forecast and becomes a decision-making tool.

If you know you need approximately 100 opportunities and currently have 60, you need to think about where the other 40 can come from. They might come from new contacts, referrals, past customers, people who have already asked about your services, or partnerships with other local businesses.

You don’t need to do everything at once. What matters is knowing how many opportunities you need and which channels make sense for your business.

The opposite can happen too.

If you discover that you have 150 opportunities but very few sales, getting more people interested may not be the answer. You may need to look at how you present your services, how you handle proposals, or what happens after the first conversation.

That’s why a sales target can also act like a small X-ray of your business.

Worksheet: what’s behind your sales target?

You can do this exercise in five minutes. Take your sales target for this month and answer these four questions:

My sales target: $ ______

My average sale: $ ______

Approximate number of sales I need: ______

Approximate number of opportunities I need: ______

Then add one more:

How many opportunities do I have right now? ______

You don’t need a sophisticated spreadsheet. The important thing is to compare the numbers.

If you need 100 opportunities and already have 90, your situation is probably very different from someone who needs 100 and only has 20.

And now comes the question that really matters: What are you going to do this week to close that gap?

A quick roleplay

Imagine a business owner tells me:

“I want to sell $10,000 this month, but I don’t know if I’m going to get there.”

I could answer:

“What’s your average sale?”

“About $250.”

So we know we need around 40 sales.

“How many opportunities do you normally need to generate those 40 sales?”

“Around 100.”

The next question would be:

“How many do you have right now?”

If the answer is “about 60,” we now have a much more concrete conversation.

We’re not trying to guess whether the month will be good or bad. We’ve identified a gap of approximately 40 opportunities and can start thinking about how to close it.

See the difference?

Saying “I need to sell more” doesn’t tell us what to do. Saying “I need to create 40 more opportunities” gives us something we can actually work on.

Stop waiting until the end of the month

One of the biggest problems with working only with a monthly number is that we often review it when there’s very little time left to do anything about it.

We get to the 28th, look at the sales numbers, and realize we’re far from the target.

That’s too late to react.

That’s why it’s worth reviewing your sales target during the month. You don’t need to do it every day. A weekly review can be enough to ask how much you’ve sold, what opportunities you have open, and what you need to create during the next few days.

A sales target isn’t there to tell you at the end of the month whether you succeeded or failed. It’s there to help you make better decisions while you still have time to influence the result.

Your sales target should tell you what to do

For me, that’s the real difference between having a target and simply hoping to sell.

If you say, “I want to sell $10,000,” you have a number.

If you know that reaching $10,000 means approximately 40 sales, around 100 opportunities, and you currently have 60, you have information you can act on.

You can decide where to find the missing opportunities, which conversations to follow up on, which customers to contact, and how much time you need to dedicate to sales activity this week.

You don’t need to turn your business into a numbers machine. You simply need your numbers to help you make better decisions.

The next time you write down your sales target, don’t stop at the number. Ask yourself: How many sales does that represent? How many opportunities do I need? How many do I have right now?

If you can answer those three questions, you’re no longer simply hoping to sell.

You’re starting to manage your sales.

At Sales Strategy, we help small businesses and professionals turn their sales goals into practical actions that are easy to understand and follow. Because sometimes the problem isn’t that you don’t want to sell more. It’s that you don’t know what needs to happen to reach the number you’ve set.

If you have a sales target for this month and want to understand the numbers and actions behind it, message us on WhatsApp. Let’s talk?