Sales Goals

As a salesperson, goal setting is a large part of the course. If you sell professionally and you have a sales manager, he or she will assign you goals based upon company standards. In lieu of this the sales supervisor may base goals that were previously given to them when they were selling at a lower level. It is a simple fact that most everyone sets goals in order to measure results they hope to attain.

• Let’s say that you set a goal at the beginning of the month, quarter or year depending on how much time you spend selling.  You work very hard and come to the halfway point of your sales cycle only to discover that you are not on track to reach your goal. If you base your success solely on reaching your goal, you begin to panic and push twice as hard to make up for your perceived under-performance.
• You have come to the last part of the cycle only to realize that you end up barely missing your goal. How disappointed does this make you feel? Quite a bit. And more so if your livelihood depends on you sowing what you reap. You will feel even more disappointed if you earn commissions based upon sales goals. In every case, you will not feel good.
• Two lessons can be learned from this example. First, you need to set realistic expectations relating to your sales activity. For example, if historically speaking it takes 10 calls to land 1 meeting; and 3 meetings to land 1 sale, how many calls would you need to take in order to reach your goal (let’s assume the goals is 10 sales per cycle)? In this case you would need to field 300 calls. Depending on the time span of your sales cycle as well as your marketing efforts, receiving 300 calls in one cycle may never happen.
• Second, you need to set goals that are activity driven and not result based. Results can change easily due to circumstances outside of your control. Setting goals that are unreachable or that can be reached too easily, will be counterproductive. If you set goals that are realistic and productivity based, you can properly manage yourself and possibly a sales team when applicable.