Notes for owners · Business growth
Sales, marketing and operations goals: check that the three can all be true at once
A sales target the shop floor cannot ship, or an enquiry goal the sales team never works, is a plan that fails. Here is a one-sitting check that links the three goals.
The GullySales team · Updated 17 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
On this page
- What does it look like when the three goals disagree?
- The check, in the order that works
- For example: a school furniture maker in Saharanpur
- What do I do if I have no conversion figures?
- When capacity is the limit, and when it is not
- Keeping the three together after the sitting
- Setting all three in one sitting
Start from the back. Work out what operations can deliver, then what sales must close to fill it, then how many enquiries marketing must bring to feed sales. Set in that order, the three goals are far less likely to contradict each other.
Set in the usual order, with a sales target chosen first, they often do. The owner wants a bigger number. Marketing is told to produce leads. In the third quarter the factory finds that it cannot ship what was sold.
What does it look like when the three goals disagree?
You have probably sat in the meeting. Sales says the target is double. Marketing says it only gets leads if the budget goes up. The works manager says nothing, because nobody asked, and then asks in October why overtime is out of control.
Each goal on its own can be sensible. The trouble is that they are set in separate rooms, in different months, by people who do not use the same numbers. A fix is to set them in one sitting with one sheet of paper and one person with a pencil who is allowed to say "that does not add up".
The check, in the order that works
- Capacity first. How many orders, jobs or units can operations deliver in a year without breaking lead times? Use what the last busy season proved, not the machine's rated speed.
- Sales target second. How many of those can sales close, at what average order value, given its present conversion from enquiry to order?
- Marketing goal third. How many qualified enquiries does sales need to meet that target, at the conversion it actually achieves today?
Then read the chain forwards as a test. If marketing delivers its goal and sales converts as it does now, do you hit the order target? If you do, can operations ship it?
| Link | Question | Where the number comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Operations | Orders we can deliver on time | Last peak season, plus any machine or hire already paid for |
| Sales | Orders we aim to close | Last twelve months' closed orders and conversion |
| Marketing | Qualified enquiries needed | Sales target divided by conversion |
| Gap | Does the chain close? | Compare the three on one page |
For example: a school furniture maker in Saharanpur
Imagine a workshop in Saharanpur making desks and benches for private schools. The owner decides next year's target is 1,200 sets, up from 800. Marketing is asked to bring in enough school enquiries. Put the figures through the check, all of them illustrative.
| Row | Figure | How it was found |
|---|---|---|
| Operations | 900 sets | The carpenters' best peak, with Sundays worked |
| Sales | 160 quotations for 1,200 sets | Three of ten quoted schools order, about 25 sets each, so 48 orders |
| Marketing | 320 enquiries | Half of enquiries reach a quotation; today's flow is about 200 |
The problem shows on the first row. The 1,200 cannot ship, because 900 is the ceiling and it was reached by working Sundays. A sales target that looked like a marketing problem was a capacity problem all along.
The owner had two honest options: cut the target to 900, or add a bench of carpenters and a seasoning shed before the June rush. The owner could pay for the second (about ₹9 lakh, an invented figure), so that was the choice, and counted the new ceiling as 1,100 once the shed was ready. He then set the sales target at 1,050, leaving some slack, which means 42 orders and 140 quotations. Marketing's goal became 280 enquiries. Each of the three owners now worked from a number the shop could back. The cost was a year of slower growth than the owner had hoped for, and 1,050 was still a guess until the shed dried out.
What do I do if I have no conversion figures?
Count backwards through the last year's quotation file, or your WhatsApp threads. How many enquiries, how many quotations, how many orders. A rough count of the last fifty is better than a guess. Suppose, illustratively, that fifty enquiries gave twenty quotations and six orders. Enquiry to quotation is 20 of 50, or 40 per cent; quotation to order is 6 of 20, or 30 per cent. A target of 30 orders then needs 100 quotations and 250 enquiries. Our post on setting business goals for the year shows how to build the first set of numbers when records are thin.
If the count turns out to be unreliable, use the lower of two plausible figures. A goal built on an optimistic conversion rate is a common reason the enquiry target looks easy and the order target is missed.
When capacity is the limit, and when it is not
Capacity does not always mean machines. In a service business it means billable hours, site visits or the one senior person who does every inspection. In a trading business it may mean working capital, because stock must be paid for before it is sold.
Do not use this check as an excuse to underreach. If operations can deliver 900 and you want 900, and the market has plenty of buyers, the marketing goal is the stretch. The point of the sitting is not to shrink goals but to put the stretch in the right place.
Skip the whole exercise when you work to order with no fixed capacity, such as pure trading with a supplier who always has stock. There the binding limit is cash, and a cash plan matters more than a capacity plan.
Keeping the three together after the sitting
Put the chain on one sheet, with the three owners' names next to their rows. When any figure moves, look at the other two rows that same day. Say conversion falls, or a machine breaks down. The page on aligning sales and marketing covers the habits that keep those two sides in step. Each of the three goals touches a different stretch of the sales process, from first enquiry to repeat order.
Setting all three in one sitting
Block a half day. Bring last year's order register, the quotation file and the production record, and write the three rows before anyone argues for a number. If you would like help turning those records into a plan that the shop floor, the sales desk and the enquiry team can all work to, sales and marketing alignment is the work, and you can tell us what you need.
