Get in the Habit of Setting Goals

Typical sales professionals too often let their pipelines set their agenda, doing the best they can to follow up on whatever leads fall into their laps and working hard to close whatever business they can however it comes to them. By contrast, highly successful sales professionals are outcome-driven. They define what they want to accomplish through a series of measurable goals, and they plan their customer strategies and activities to focus on achieving those outcomes. They certainly use pipeline as a guide and a resource, but they also refine and prioritize that pipeline in order to achieve the outcomes they are aiming for. For highly successful sales professionals, time and territory management is not a buzz phrase used in sales meetings, it is a focused planning tool that defines what accounts they will pursue, and when and how they will pursue them. If at any point they determine that their activities are not meeting their goals, they quickly revise, reload, and start all over again. They never waste time on activities that don’t produce immediate, measurable results.

Clarifying your goals is the first step towards achieving sales success. It generally requires some work to identify them and make them concrete. Too often, even when sales professionals take the time to set down their goals, they define them too broadly, so that they sound more like some general corporate mission statement than a practical, definable, measurable, achievable outcome.

Sales professionals often come up with goals that read like this:

• Increase size of pipeline

• Learn how to use CRM

• Start making more customer calls

These are good general concepts, as far as they go, but without concrete specifics or a time frame attached to them, they are unclear, and therefore useless. They are only vague ideas, which do NOT direct the sales professional to clear action. In order for goals to be viable, they have to meet certain criteria so that you can act on them in the real world. A goal must be able to answer the question, “What do I need to do and when do I need to do it?”

If you were told to do the following things by your sales manager, would you know what was expected?

1. Increase sales this year.
2. Add more valuable prospects to your pipeline.
3. Start making more sales calls.
    

Of course not.

Goals need to describe specific objectives, including when to start work on the goal, exactly what must be achieved, and the deadline by which it must be accomplished. For example:

• Boost closing rates by 25% by end of first quarter.
• Decrease lost accounts 15% by the end of the fourth quarter.
• Increase the number of live opportunities in my pipeline by 25% the end of the third quarter.
   

A quick way to remember what makes for an effective goal is to follow the SMART formula. If you follow the five steps in the SMART process to create a goal, you are more likely to develop a goal that is meaningful to you and more easily communicated to those around you.

The 80-20 Rule of Territory Management

The overarching goal – the goal that rules all other goals in sales – is to drive revenue. When setting goals as a sales professional, there is no goal more important than that of finding ways to focus quality time, attention and energy on the opportunities that will generate the most revenue back to you and your company. The rule here is that 20% of your customer base drives 80% of your revenues and commissions. What does that tell you about the way you should set goals and allocate your time? Above all, you must make sure you are devoting most of your time and attention to developing opportunities in that 20% that is driving the vast majority of the revenue for you and your organization. Ineffective sales professionals often make the mistake of allocating their time equally among all the opportunities, even though most of them won’t generate nearly as much income as the top 20%. This is not to say that it is okay to neglect the rest of your accounts; after all, some of them will grow into top accounts some day. But if you don’t devote an exceptional amount of service, time and attention your current top accounts, they will quickly become someone else’s top accounts. So, when setting goals and activities, make sure they are laid out in a way that is proportional to the value of the opportunities. Your goals should reflect A, B, and C priorities based on the value of the opportunity. Once you have established those priorities, you can allocate time and activities around those priorities.

Activities are simply another set of goals you create that support your top priority goals. After all, it doesn’t help to set a goal of increasing your line of business with Megatech by 20% by the end of the year if you don’t also define goals for how to accomplish that. So the next step in the goal-setting process is to map out the activities you will take with each of your accounts over a defined period of time to help you achieve your goal.

One of the best ways to do this is to map your activities to a defined cadence based on your sales cycle. Let’s say your typical sales cycle is 22 weeks (about 3 months). Your first step would be to determine what tasks need to be done each week in order to guide the opportunity along so it can close in 22 weeks. For example, for each account you need to map out things like:

• What kind of preliminary research do you need to do on this account and when should you have it completed?
• Who do you contact in the account, and when do you contact them?
• When are you going to update your CRM so that it reflects all activity in a timely fashion?
• What kind of information and materials do you send out each week?
• When do you schedule the product demo?
• What external and internal resources do you need to leverage to develop the proposal, and when do you meet with those folks?
• By when should have the proposal in front of the decision maker?
   

So, based on this cadence, if you have been developing this opportunity for eight weeks, you can look at your schedule of activities and know exactly what to work on this week. Also, if you are in week eight but you still haven’t completed activities you had mapped out for week six, that should be a red flag that either your process or your planning needs to be reviewed so you can get back on track.

The cadence model for setting goals and activities for each opportunity takes a lot of the guess work out of working with each account, because you should always know where you are, where you are headed and what it will take to get there. However, don’t forget to build time each week for prospecting calls and relationship management calls, because they can always lead to new business.

Action Items:

• How much time do you devote to the accounts that are delivering 80% of your revenue? Should you be devoting more time and activity here?
• Do you manage your pipeline through the use of a mapped out weekly cadence, or do you just kind of go with the flow?
• If you haven’t done so already, map out a defined cadence to manage goals and activities for your top five accounts. Use the SMART method to ensure that the goals and activities are actually actionable.
   

Walter Rogers is the President and CEO of Baker Communications. Baker Communications is a sales training and development company specializing in helping client companies increase their sales and management effectiveness. He can be reached at 713-627-7700.

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