Most companies see less than half of their sales force hit 100% of their target. The salespeople that do consistently hit their targets, are committed to following effective strategies and methodologies. If you want to be one of the few sales professionals that achieve your sales expectations, look at what you do well and build upon that, and identify what you might need to do differently.
Achieve Sales Expectations
The key to meeting this challenge is framing expectations using SMART goals because SMART goals are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Agreed upon*
- Realistic
- Target date
*When most of us learned about SMART goals, The ‘A’ stood for achievable. Ironically, achievable and realistic are synonyms with similar meanings. However, ‘agreed upon’ means the goal setter and their leader are practicing mutual determination. Instead of managers dictating goals top-down or employees developing them in isolation, the most successful teams create goals collaboratively.
Setting realistic goals is also very important. If the goal is too easy to accomplish, then it really isn’t a goal. If the goal owner is unlikely to achieve the goal, it’s a demotivator. Sharing the goal with another person and having them check in regularly, helps the goal owner be accountable and provides objective insight into the practicality of the goal. Sales teams who commit to realistic and specific expectations, measure and evaluate the progress are far more likely to achieve desired results.
An amazing study about the value of writing down goals, sharing them, developing action plans, and measuring your results was published by Gail Matthews, at Dominican University in California. Basically, if you followed all four steps in goal setting, you were 50% likelier to achieve your goals. Here is a link to the study.
Using Your Time Wisely
Once you develop the goal, you need to have a disciplined process to execute it. Because time is finite, you require strategies to maximize the time you spend with the most viable prospects. This also requires identifying activities that are wasteful, and implementing ways to minimize them, so you have more time to focus on higher ROI activities.
Learn more about how you can use your time more effectively by using a time tracker to identify the amount of time you spend most effectively and the amount of time you unintentionally waste. Click the link to get access to a simple, free time tracker.