SMART goals for sales: 10 examples, down to this week's calls

SMART is a checklist for writing a goal you can actually check. Each letter is one test, and a sales goal has to pass all five:

Achievable is the letter people bend. If you've never booked more than 5 meetings in a week, 20 is a wish, however neatly it's written.

Where SMART comes from

George T. Doran set out SMART in November 1981, in a two-page article in Management Review on how managers should write objectives. His five were specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and time-related, and assignable meant naming who does the work.

The letters still differ between guides: Forbes Advisor uses achievable and relevant for A and R, and Asana's guide uses achievable and realistic. Pick one version for the team and keep it. For a seller, relevant is the better R: a week of calls to the wrong people fails it.

Two of Doran's points still hold. He wrote that not every objective will meet all five criteria, and that putting a number on every objective isn't always realistic. He also wrote that the objective and its action plan together are what matter. For a seller, the action plan is this week's calls and meetings.

Most sales goals already have a number and a date. Where they fall down is the gap between the number and what you do day to day. A yearly revenue target is measurable, but it doesn't tell you who to call next. That's why a good goal set usually has two kinds.

Outcome goals are the results: revenue, deals signed, new clients. They're what you're paid on, but you don't fully control them. A buyer can delay, a big deal can slip into next quarter.

Activity goals are what you do: calls, meetings, proposals, referral asks. You control these completely. If you hit them week after week and the outcome still misses, you know the problem is in how the calls go, and you can work on that.

You want both. Set the outcome goal for the year, then work backwards to the activity goals for each week.

Other ways to split a sales goal

Sales goals also get split by time, by person, by skill and by client:

• By time: a year, a quarter, a month, a week or a day. The year sets the number, and the week is where you can still change the result.
• By who: your own goal or a team goal. A team number works only when each person has their own share of it and their own weekly activity.
• By skill: a conversion rate, like calls to meetings or meetings to signed deals. These sit between activity and outcome.
• By client: keeping the clients you have, through renewals and referrals. If you sell your own services, past clients are the first list to call.

Floors, targets and stretch goals

A stretch goal is the number above the plan, the one you'd be glad to hit. Keep it apart from the goal you plan your week around. If the stretch becomes the plan, every week is behind from the start, and people stop looking at the number.

Some managers set three numbers instead of one: a floor you hit even in a bad quarter, a target, and a stretch. The weekly calls get planned from the target, and if there's a bonus, it goes on the stretch.

James Clear's goal-setting guide puts a ceiling on a goal as well as a floor, and one of his examples is sales calls. That suits selling, because every call makes work for later in the week, and the meetings and follow-ups it books all need time. A rep who makes 80 calls on Monday has a Thursday full of follow-ups she can't reach. A weekly range, such as 35 to 45 calls, keeps room for them.

Sales teams use these three words loosely. Doran saw the same muddle in 1981 and told managers not to waste time arguing about the labels. A team still works better when everyone means the same thing by each word. This split works:

• An objective is the direction: grow the referral side of the business this year.
• A target is the number: 12 new clients.
• A goal is the whole SMART sentence: sign 12 new clients by 30 June, at 4 first meetings a week.

An objective can stay put all year. The goal and the target inside it change each quarter as you learn your real rates, and setting each rep's target has its own steps.

For reps:

1. Make 40 calls to new prospects every week this quarter, logged by Friday at 5pm.
2. Book 5 first meetings a week from 1 January to 31 March.
3. Sign 12 new clients by 30 June, and keep at least 36 open deals in the pipeline while doing it so the second half doesn't start from zero.
4. Improve my call-to-meeting rate from 1 in 12 to 1 in 10 by the end of March, measured over each four-week block.
5. Put a date on every follow-up before I hang up, and have zero overdue follow-ups on Friday afternoons for the whole quarter.
6. Ask for one referral in every client review meeting from February to April.

For managers:

1. Hold a 30-minute 1:1 with every rep every week this quarter, with the week's logged numbers on the table.
2. Get every rep to 4 weeks in a row of hitting their weekly call goal by 31 March.
3. Get the team to 150 first meetings this quarter, and review the running total every Monday against the pace the quarter needs.
4. Bring new reps to their first signed deal within 60 days of their start date.

Goals 1, 2, 5, 6, 7 and 8 are activity goals. Goals 3, 9 and 10 are outcome goals. Goal 4 sits in between: it measures how well the calls go, which is the skill behind the outcome.

Don't set all ten. A rep needs one outcome goal for the year and two or three weekly activity goals. More than that and nobody remembers them by February.

Start from what you're paid on and work down to the week:

1. Pick the one outcome that matters most this year: revenue, signed deals or new clients. One, not three.
2. Pull last year's numbers from your log: your average deal, how many first meetings turned into deals, and how many calls it took to book a meeting.
3. Write the outcome as one sentence with a number and a date.
4. Run it past the five letters and fix the one it fails.
5. Turn it into weekly calls and meetings with last year's rates.
6. Decide what comes off your week to make room, since new calls have to replace something or they turn into evening work that stops by March.

Here's a made-up rep, Priya, taking her goal one letter at a time:

• First try: "Have a better year." No number, no date.
• Specific: "Sign more deals than last year" names the result.
• Measurable: "Sign 40 deals" puts a number on it, against 34 signed last year.
• Achievable: 40 is 6 more than last year, and last year's calls show she has room for the extra meetings.
• Relevant: signed deals are what her yearly sales target is made of.
• Time-bound: "Sign 40 deals by 31 December, and check the running total every Friday."

Here's the part most goal-setting guides skip. You work backwards from the yearly number one step at a time, and each step uses one of your own conversion rates from last year.

If you don't know your own rates yet, use last quarter's, or a teammate's as a start, and correct them after a month. Put your goal and your rates into the sales activity calculator and it gives you each week's calls and meetings. For managers setting targets across a team, the quota calculator works from the team number down.

Rounding up matters. A plan that needs every week to go perfectly will fall behind in the first week someone is ill.

A yearly goal checked in December is a report on what already happened. Checked every Friday, it's something you can still steer.

The Friday check takes five minutes:

1. Compare this week's calls and meetings to the weekly goal.
2. Look at the running total for the year against where you should be by now.
3. If you're behind, work out what next week needs to catch up, and whether that's realistic.
4. Put the answer into next week's calendar as call blocks.

By the end of March, you'll have 13 weeks of numbers. That's enough to see whether your conversion rates match the plan. If Priya is making her 35 calls but booking 2 meetings instead of 4, the call count isn't the problem, and the call itself is where to look. If she's booking 4 meetings but they're not turning into deals, it's the meeting.

When the year goes off track, the weekly maths tells you which step to fix, and a month of wasted guessing goes away. A sales plan template is a good place to keep the numbers and your notes each week.

What to log, and where

Four numbers cover it: calls made, first meetings booked, deals signed and the running total against the year, each logged when it happens, because counts typed up from memory come out higher than the week was.

A spreadsheet with one row per week does the job if you'll open it. In ActivityTracker, a goal takes a target and a deadline and shows what you still need each month. It compares how far along the goal is with how much of the time has gone, and marks it On track, At risk or Off track. Your weekly goal fills in as you log.

You'll miss some. What you do in the week after decides whether next quarter goes the same way:

1. Write the real number next to the goal. Don't round it up or move the date.
2. Check the activity first. If the calls and meetings didn't happen, the goal wasn't the problem. The calendar was.
3. If the activity did happen, find the rate that came in under plan, calls to meetings or meetings to deals, and put the real rate into next quarter's maths.
4. Only add the shortfall to next quarter if the weekly numbers that come out still fit in a real week. If they don't, the yearly number needs a conversation with your manager.
5. Write one line on what you'd change. Read it before you set next quarter's goal.

SMART checks how a goal is written. It doesn't check whether it's the right goal, and that leaves gaps:

• A goal can pass all five letters and still be aimed wrong, like 200 calls a week to a list that never buys.
• When reps are judged on hitting the goal, achievable gets read as safe and the easy number wins. The floor, target and stretch split fixes that.
• It says nothing about how. Doran paired each objective with an action plan, and a sales goal without its weekly calls and meetings is only half of what he described.
• Ten SMART goals at once are worth less than two. They all want the same hours, and by February nobody remembers seven of them.

None of this is a reason to drop SMART. Use it to check the wording, then let the weekly maths and the Friday check do the rest.

• Setting only the revenue number. Without weekly activity goals, the first sign of trouble shows up months too late.
• Copying last year's number plus a round amount, without checking whether the activity to get there fits in the week.
• Using someone else's conversion rates forever, when they were only ever meant to get you through the first month.
• Changing the goal every time a week goes badly. Change next week's plan instead and leave the goal where it is.
• Setting goals nobody checks. A goal without a weekly check is a wish with a deadline.

• George T. Doran, There's a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management's goals and objectives (Management Review, November 1981), read 26 October 2026
• Forbes Advisor, A guide to S.M.A.R.T. goals, read 26 October 2026
• Asana, What are SMART goals? Examples and templates, read 26 October 2026
• James Clear, Goal setting: a scientific guide to setting and achieving goals, read 26 October 2026