There's a question I often ask the sales managers I work with: "Do you know how much your customer will buy from you next year?"
The most common answer? A shrug. "It depends. We'll see."
That's the problem. If you don't have an agreed-upon goal, you're leaving it up to the customer, and to your competitors, to decide how much space you get to occupy in their portfolio.
Three levers. One often ignored.
There are three ways to grow a business: increase the number of customers, raise the average transaction value, intensify purchase frequency.
Almost everyone chases the first. The second is worked on by those who have a structured upselling policy. The third, frequency, is the one on which true loyalty is built. And it's the one where purchasing targets make the biggest difference.
The main target: annual, personal, agreed-upon
If you have recurring customers, you should assign each of them a purchasing goal for the year. Not an internal expectation of yours. A shared goal, built together, based on historical data or on the customer's estimated potential.
The mechanism is simple: every month or every quarter, the customer receives a report on how much they've purchased and how much they still need to reach the goal. Like a navigation dashboard.
This creates two concrete effects: it keeps you alive in the customer's mind even between one visit and the next, and it builds a barrier against competitors, because abandoning you halfway through means giving up the benefit they've almost earned.
The main target is calculated on the customer's entire revenue for the year, regardless of what they buy. It's the baseline parameter from which everything else starts.
Secondary targets: when you want to push something specific
Every company has products that sell themselves and products that instead need a push. Premium lines. Seasonal novelties. Excess stock sitting in the warehouse and weighing on the books.
This is where secondary targets come in, built by product family or category.
You can tie them to the main target, those who don't reach the secondary goal don't get the reward, period, or keep them separate, with an additional incentive for those who exceed them. The choice depends on what you want to achieve: total compliance or tactical flexibility.
The seasonal target: bring orders forward, stabilize cash flow
If your business has seasonal peaks, you know all too well what it means to reach the fourth quarter with 60% of your revenue still to be made.
A seasonal target, for example on the first half of the year, incentivizes purchases in the slow months and guarantees you more predictable cash flows. It's usually linked to the annual target: those who don't reach the seasonal threshold lose access to the benefits, even if they close the year on target in December.
It's a powerful lever for shifting orders over time, not just increasing them.
Group targets: when the team wins together
There's another variant, less used but very effective in the right contexts: the collective target.
It applies to sales networks, geographic teams, groups of points of sale. The individual's revenue is added to that of their colleagues. You win together or you don't win. The result is twofold: performers push those who are slower, and a results-oriented group culture is created.
Be careful: if you only reward the best groups relative to the others, you enter the territory of prize competitions, with different legal implications. Better to know that before structuring the mechanism.
Clusters and weights: the part no one wants to tackle (but that makes the difference)
Here things get more complicated, and it's right that I say so clearly.
Not all customers have the same potential. A small neighborhood retailer and a regional chain can't have the same target or the same rewards system. If you use the same yardstick, you end up not really incentivizing anyone.
The solution is to segment customers into homogeneous clusters and assign different weights by product category. A best-selling product that sells itself? Low point value. A premium line you want to push? Higher point value. The mechanism rewards where you have an interest, not where the customer goes naturally.
It seems complicated to explain to the customer. But this is where a simulation tool changes everything: you enter the projected purchase data, the platform calculates in real time the reward you're earning. The area manager uses it during the visit to show what happens if the customer shifts even just 20% of their orders away from a competitor.
Discounts or physical rewards: it's not the same thing
Once the mechanism is built, it remains to decide how to reward those who reach the goals.
Two paths.
The first: year-end rebates, deferred discounts, pure commercial operations. It works, but over time customers start taking them for granted. They become an acquired right, not an incentive.
The second: physical rewards. A family vacation. An experience. Something the customer remembers and associates with your brand in an emotional way. It has more complex management, there are tax and bureaucratic implications to consider, but the effect on the relationship is incomparable.
The choice depends on your industry and your customers. But if I have to tell you my preference, I know which side I'm on.
The question I'll leave you with
In your customer portfolio, how many have a purchasing goal assigned for this year?
If the answer is "none" or "a few, more or less", you're leaving open a door that your competitors — even those with a worse product than yours — might have already walked through.
Assigning a target isn't an aggressive move. It's an act of respect toward the customer: you're telling them where you want to go together, and you're showing them what they gain if they get there.
Salestack's B2B Loyalty program lets you structure this kind of mechanics systematically: customer segmentation, target building, progress tracking, results analysis. No Excel spreadsheets, no chasing after scattered data.
The mechanism doesn't change. What changes is the speed with which you put it into play.
Gianluca Testa
Founder Salestack
Host of the "Business Garage" Podcast