There is a new trend in a number of multi-national company that there is no target for sales;

All of my professional trainings and education was done in USA.
From my first sales training to last drop of the coffee I learned the goal setting and the importance of it in the personal and company growth.
Nobody has yet found what are the human possibilities.
Yet, we like to set goals and cap our possibilities.
Then I learned that the complacency kills more sales than anything else.
Achieving one's goals puts him in a complacent state of mind, where his ambition and efforts are greatly hampered to do more.
Long time ago I found contradiction in those two; practice and theory.
Although I am not aware of that practice among the multinational companies, but I will not be surprised if the changed their strategy; from goals to incentive based performance.
I think a professional will perform far better than her/his meager goal, if she/he were put on the freedom train.

I haven't heard of this until now that target for sales has been abolished.
Please check it out and you will find performance measuring parameters must have changed but measurable parameters has to be there.
It is not necessary that all people in sales have to carry sales targets in terms of revenue or units of product mix.
Some people in sales at the very entry level are tasked for number of field calls made/contacts made and quality of information collected.
The purpose of such sales force is to collect suspect/prospect/customer information to build a reasonable data for the organisation for future business activities.
Performance linked incentives are also driven on some kind of variable sales targets.

It's true that sales management is redefining it's boundaries.
Companies are targeting to sell above and beyond the numbers of a marginal profitability.
Sky is the limit and companies do not want to set a target that will create a mental hindrance for their sales force.
They want to push to go beyond those target numbers.
Companies are seeing demands have increased many folds due to many reasons.
Better pay-packages, better standards of livings, new arenas to advertise (social media for one), increased population, etc are few of the those reasons.
I am of the opinion that companies should have targets defined but in more open terms, that is, a minimum target that needs to be achieved and incentives related sales numbers above that minimum target.
I would argue that it would be counter productive if the sales does not know the numbers it needs to achieve.
A target less sales team would be setting their own targets which may or may not be enough for the company.
As a human being, we needs to set targets and then explore ways to achieve or surpass them.
It gives us a sense of achievement.
Finishing line (sales target) is the crossing line that every athlete (sales professional) needs to cross everyday and go beyond.
What that target should be is where companies should scientifically and imaginatively work to define.

There are two perspective to this new policy, the interesting one is "There is no target, Sky is the limit," Here one does not know how far he sky is...
The concept is to hire entrepreneurs who define their own income and expediture and growth opportunities.
In our company we select sales people with a vision for themselves.
This is important as it shows their hunger for wealth and growth which we feel is good for our growth.
All remunerations are linked to expected profits and earnings, the candidate is asked to provide his personal goals over the next3-5 years and how he plans to achieve it.
given a perspective of the earning potential in our company we derive his pay packet to meet those goals, which also includes severance just in case things dont go the way planned.