Do your salespeople have goals for 2017? Whose sales goals are they, theirs or yours?
If your sales team hasn’t taken ownership of the goals you have for them, then you’re in trouble.
If they don’t have the means to tie their daily activities to those goals and measure their progress, then expect things to go off track. The inability to do either of these well is what undermines most sales teams.
The good news is that tackling those two issues is all it takes. With shared ownership of compelling and meaningful goals and the ability to measure progress on a daily basis, anything can be accomplished.
Share Vision and Goals
The fact is that, your team is expecting you to set their goals. Most sales teams keep those goals simple and financially based. However, there are only some people for whom money motivates. Face it, your goals for your company, your career and your team are more about things that can be bought with money than they are the money.
Can you connect the things you want with the things your sales team wants? Take a look at this playbook for helping your team find their mission in life. If you perform this exercise with each team member, you’ll have the ingredients you need.
Read and compare these two strategies you can take in a meeting with your sales team:
- “Bob, you’re ahead of your quota! Great job. Sam, you’re behind quota by $50,000. What can we do to close the gap?”
- “Bob! You’re ahead of your quota! That brings that down-payment on your new house 3 weeks closer! Sam, you’re family trip to Europe is going to have to be low budget.”
Which do you feel will be more motivating or compelling to your team?
There’s a complete chapter on Finding Your Mission in Life, designed to help managers lead their teams toward finding their own mission in life, 
in Inside-Out Selling.
Goal Setting and Monitoring Progress
Once you’ve identified the longer term goals, the process is simple to break those down into finer and finer detail so that each and every member of the team has specific, measurable targets and objectives on a daily basis. Everyday, the conversations can be both very practical and very motivating. “If I dial the phone 50 times today, I’m one step closer to my mission trip to South America.”
Here’s another exercise from Inside-Out Selling.
Annual Goal
Ask yourself: What would you like to be able to say about yourself, your career, your happiness in one year?
Complete this sentence: “This year has been a huge success for me because I….”
6 Month Goal
What do you need to accomplish within the first 6 months in order to accomplish your annual goal?
- What actions must be undertaken?
- Whose help will I need?
- What are the likely or possible obstacles?
- Will it require personal investment? What percentage of my time, money, and travel should I devote? Less time with family or involved in other important activities?
- How will I measure my progress?
- How can I reward myself for taking these actions?
Complete the above questions for a simple way of outlining quarterly goals, monthly goals and daily goals.
It’s an unfortunate reality that most salespeople and sales managers do a pretty terrible job of measuring their performance against these goals. It seems crazy, but in the real world, it’s tough for most businesses to wrap up the sales figures for the month, calculate commissions and get all the data about actual sales into everyone’s hands.
Measuring what actually got done on a daily basis seems like a huge information management challenge to most businesses.
Of course, that’s what a sales CRM solution is supposed to do for you.
How many calls got made? How many leads were generated? How many leads were qualified? How many proposals went out? These and a few other metrics are really all it takes to connect daily sales activities, that often seem so unimportant and mundane, to big, inspiring goals that are dear to each of us.
- Can you help your team identify these long term goals?
- Can you break your long term goals down into daily goals?
- Can you measure it all?
- Which is the most challenging to you?
Maybe that’s what’s holding your business back.