Goal Oriented Selling

Goals 

Recently I heard a startling static on sales professionals.  An overwhelming majority of career sales people have never read a book on sales or had any training other than what their company provides for them.  I found that shocking since I assumed that most people in sales were like me, interested in getting better, making more money, and developing better communications skills.  So my Goal with this blog is to address Sales, Sales Management, and Technique through bite sized pieces of information that is easy to understand and extremely useful.   I am going to start with what I have found to be a fundamental building block of all sales: Clear Goals.

As sales professionals it is important to set clear goals.  Your goals will help you determine the direction you will need to take with your prospects or clients.  I have been astonished by the amount of sales people I have seen over the years that are given goals or quotas and they don’t bother to break those goals down to what they should be achieving daily or weekly.  They know where they want to go but they have no clear map on how to get there, how to check their progress, or how to improve. 

Goals have to be several things in order to be effective.  

Fist they have to be clear.  It is not enough to just say I want to sell more.  You will need specific numbers with a plan as to how to get to those numbers.  For example, “I want to sell more widgets” is way too vague.  In order to motivate yourself and measure your success you need to know where you are at now.  If you wish to sell ten widgets a month and currently only sell eight a clear and precise goal would be:  “I want to sell ten widgets a month.”

Second it has to be achievable and believable.  Without either of those you might as well not even set a goal.  If you are currently selling eight widgets a month to suddenly state your goal as thirty is as unrealistic as saying “I want to make a billion kagillion dollars” or “fly to the moon by flapping my arms.”   I have not only seen sales people state such preposterous goals but I have seen sales managers assign those type goals (you can’t help if your sales manager is assigning goals that are way too high). 

The argument is always, “Aim for the moon, shoot towards the stars.”  Motivation is derived by being able to accomplish what one sets out to do.  If the goals are set so high they are not achievable.  Without achievement is there is no way to celebrate victory or accomplishment which turns out to be discouraging and lowers the overall moral of the individual or team.  Unless you were born with that attitude most people want to be able to measure their improvement (I am assuming you are one of those people).

Personal Note: I worked for a company whose stated goals on a particular item were 100 a month.  This goal was achievable although not everyone hit this target most were right around where should be.  After a new area sales manager was assigned to the region he set the goal at 25 per day.  Consequently monthly numbers dropped off.

In order to measure improvement I have always like the percentage rule.  It works by assigning an increase of 1 to 10 percent.  This makes almost all goals achievable and believable the two things needed for moral and victory.  Let’s apply it to our widget example.

Last month you only sold 8 widgets. Apply the percentage rule by 10% and you only want to sell .8 more widgets this month, rounded up is 1.  Clearly 9 should be an achievable goal.  By the sixth month you should be selling 13 to 14 widgets and after a year around 20 which is more than 125% more than you were selling at the start of the year. 

Now the example is overly simplistic and but you get the point, which is easier to conceive selling just 1 more widget a month or to go from 8 widgets to 20 in a month.  Incremental improvements are much easier to achieve than massive steps.  There are those among us who can see the impossible and go after it with all their might.  The majority of us need to measure our improvement.  We need to be able to gauge where we are at.  That is why goals are so important in sales.