Weekly Sales Tips: Setting Your Own Sales Goals

Now, the fact is that too many salespeople wait to have their goals dictated to them. And the problem is that those are usually not goals. They’re more like business plans. Today, we’re going to learn how to set your own sales goals.

Now, look, I understand the business plan is important, but that is just the starting point.

Over my many years in sales and sales leadership, I have seen way too many salespeople wait for others to dictate their level of success. They didn’t take it upon themselves to manage their own career path and determine their own success.

Please, don’t do that.

You know what’s interesting about that to me is that great salespeople are by nature control freaks. Great salespeople don’t like being out of control. And yet so many salespeople allow others to take control of their overall success, of their victories, even of setting their own goals. And if you want to do this right, you need to rethink the process of goal setting. You need to step away from the goals that people in the organization simply hand you.

Why? Because they’re not really goals. They’re quotas. Necessary to meet the business plan, not particularly helpful when it comes to planning your own life.

Here are three tips when it comes to setting your sales goals.

Set goals that are specific and trackable.

I know you’ve probably heard this before but stay with me, over and over again, when I talk to people about goal setting, I get very, very vague answers. Oh, I want to be the best salesperson on the team, or I want to be significantly more successful than I was last year.

The problem is there’s nothing specific and there’s nothing trackable in those goals. You need to set goals that will allow you to track your success on a spreadsheet. If you can’t track it on a spreadsheet; if you can’t see some sort of week by week or even day by day measurement, then your goals are not specific and they’re not trackable. That means you can’t measure whether you’re making any success, whether you’re making any progress.

Even as I think about the weight lifting that I do, every day, when I do resistance training, I’ve got a chart and I write down precisely what I did, and each time that gives me the chance to push myself a little further next time. If you can’t track it, it doesn’t count.

Set behavior goals, not just results goals.

Oftentimes when we set goals, we just think about where we want to be. We don’t think about the steps that will get us where we want to be. Now in sales, this is particularly important because a sale is not a behavior, a sale is the result of all of the right behaviors.

So don’t just think about the final number, think about the things that get you to the final number. What are the specific behaviors, whether that’s phone calls that you’re going to make, outreach, the number of times that you’re going to demonstrate, or even the number of times that you’re going to practice out loud or with a peer. 

Whatever your behavioral goals are, make sure that they’re simple enough to be able to track them. Track your behaviors, not just the results.

Plan your own sales bonus.

In other words, hold your own sales contest. Now sometimes the sales manager of the company will throw out a contest and say something like if you get to here, we’re going to give you that. Now that’s nice and all, but why wait for your manager or for your company?

Look at the business plan and then make a decision yourself. If I get to this level, I’m going to reward myself with that. If it’s a small goal for a week, you could look at it and say, I’m going to take my spouse to a nice dinner if I get this extra sale. Maybe over the course of an entire quarter, you might look at it and say, if I hit this sales goal I set here, we’re going to take a family vacation to Disney World or Disneyland. Maybe for the course of the year, if I can hit this many sales, I’m going to get this brand new car that I want.

The point is that the more tangible the end result, the easier it becomes to visualize the goal, and the more motivating it is to get you there.

It is time to take control. If you’re ready to get started on setting your own goals for 2022, I think you should check out my new course, “Launching your Personal Growth Plan“. This course gives sales professionals a way to get more than they’re currently getting out of their careers without killing themselves in the process.

It focuses on setting aggressive, but attainable growth goals, developing a plan for achieving those goals, and creating enough margin, boundaries, and accountability to see those goals through to completion without burning out.

You’ll find that course available at shop.jeffshore.com right now. Until next time, learn more, turn more