SalesMotivation.net

by Gary Jones

OK. Here we are. The beginning of another fantastic sales year. You’ve just received your yearly quota from your sales manager. Being the hard working, efficient Sales Professional that you are, you immediately pick up the phone in the quest to meet your goal.

Put the phone DOWN! Don’t make another call or go on another appointment until you have had a personal and professional goal setting workshop with yourself. This exercise is vitally important. You know where you need to be (your quota), but do you know how to get there? Have you put down in writing specific actions that will get you to your goal? Do you know how your sales goal breaks down to a monthly, weekly and even daily basis? Do you know how many calls you will have to make to get to your goals?

These are all important questions. Let’s look at them one by one:

How does my quota break down?

If your like me, when you get your annual quota, you get a little lump in your throat. If you work for any organization worth their salt, they have set some pretty high sales goals. Although these goals are high, they should be attainable. But then again, you are not Super Man! One way to make this number more palatable is to reduce it to a more manageable and realistic number. Do this first by breaking your annual quota down to a quarterly quota, then to a monthly, weekly, daily and even hourly quota. What do you have to do on an hourly basis to reach your annual sales goal? When you do this, the number loses some of it’s ferocity and becomes more manageable. It takes that huge sales goal mountain and turns it into smaller sales quota mole hills that are easier to climb.

Do you have a plan?

Now that you have taken that huge sales quota and broken it down into more manageable pieces, do you know what specific actions you are going to take to reach those goals? Of course your immediate reaction is to get on the phone and start dialing. Sometimes, though, this may not be the best coarse of action. It might be a good idea to block out a morning, or even a full day to do an account/prospect evaluation. What I mean is this; who is in your funnel? Why are they there? How “hot” are they? What will you need to do to move them towards a buying decision? Again, these are all important questions. That is why you really want to do this evaluation on a quarterly basis. Your products change, your client/prospect’s needs change, the market changes. There are any number of factors that are constantly in flux and it is in your best interest to evaluate them on a regular basis. Doing this and understanding your position in the marketplace can be the one catalysts that sets you apart from your competition and helps you smash your sales goal.

What are my next actions?

Now that you have your goal and have re-evaluated your products, clients/prospects and marketplace, you need to determine the specific actions that will get you to your sales goal. You need to know exactly how many calls will turn into how many sales. And it may not be just calls. Maybe a direct mail campaign or an email newsletter might be a better use of your time to reach out and touch those prospects that still may be good, but are not that “hot”. In today’s marketplace, you need to be creative. You need to do business in a way that will separate you from your competitors. Be a leader in this area and you will be a leader in sales closed.

Write it down!

Don’t just do this in your head. You might as well not do it! Write it down. Any person who has studied successful people in any field finds one thing in common. Those individuals have specific, WRITTEN goals. Writing your goals and next actions down makes them real. And don’t just write them down. Review them daily. Put these goals in a place that you look every day. If you work off a laptop (as most of us high speed, low drag Sales Professionals do these days) have your goals be your wall paper. Make it obvious. You should see these goals often and that should drive you in your daily activity. Trust me. If every time you boot up your computer you see “$1,000,000 in 2007!” you won’t waste a lot of time doing things that do not directly contribute to the achievement of this goal.

Conclusion

Stop and set your goals. You owe it to yourself and your organization. There is no better use of your time than to take several hours or even a full day and goal set. Get off site if you need to. Go to a coffee shop or quite place and do this. For the mechanics, I would recommend Anthony Robbins or Brian Tracy’s goal setting workshops. Click on the Nightingale-Conant ad on any of our pages to order these workshops or click The Ultimate Goals Program. Much success in 2007! Let us know if we can help. Contact me at gary@salesmotivation.net