It is no secret that accountability produces results. Whether you set a quota for your sales team or have a new car you want and won’t stop working 15 hour days until you get it, that’s holding yourself accountable. Accountability is an outside driving force that can allow you to reach beyond your current disposition and realize your full potential.
One of the best ways of creating accountability is by setting goals. There are some specific guidelines when setting goals to adhere to in order to make them attainable and Peter Drucker, a guru on management, coined the acronym smart goals.
By following the SMART guidelines you will create goals for your team or yourself that will increase the likelihood of you hitting them, which is the ultimate goal, right.
S.M.A.R.T. Goals stand for:
Specific: clear and unambiguous telling exactly what is expected.
Measurable: concrete criteria for measuring progress toward the attainment of the goal.
Attainable: challenging and high reaching but ultimately can be achieved.
Relevant: is in alignment with the individual, team and goal
Time Related: a committed deadline
SMART Goals for You, the Field Sales Rep
As a sales professional your goals are probably income related. You may have a goal of earning $100,000 a year or whatever your number is. This is a great goal but I think it can be better by more clearly defining it.
You don’t want to wait until month 9 to realize that you have only earned $40,000 thus making it very difficult on yourself to hit the main goal so be more SPECIFIC.
For those that do shorter sales cycle type of sales where you get pretty much immediate feedback if your prospect is going to buy or not I suggest you break your large goal down into more specific weekly goals. $100,000 a year is about $2,000 a week so that would be a good weekly goal for income.
Goal #1 = $2,000 a week in income
If I told you to go out and make $2,000 this week would you know what to do? Where would you start? Yes, making $2,000 a week is specific and measurable but may not be clearly attainable.
So let’s set another sales goal, Goal #2, as something that you know 100% you can attain. It is something that you can control and you can make a decision to control each and every day.
Don’t have the helpless feeling of not knowing what to do to hit your goal. You want to be able to wake up each and every day and know exactly what you have to do to hit your goal.
Of course you already track all of your sales activities so you know your door to door sales metrics. Out of all the KPI’s there is one that you can certainly control each and every day and that is the attempts category.
How many sales attempts you make each day can be controlled by you. Sure it may rain or you get sick or your car breaks down or you head out to Cabo on vacation for a week but in the grand scheme of things you can control how many sales attempts you need to make.
Goal #2 = “X” number of Attempts
Your SMARTer Goals
Now that we have narrowed it down to a goals that are SMARTer its time to get started.
Goal 1: sales attempts each week
Goal 2: income earned each week
By focusing on these two areas you are going to force yourself or your team to take the necessary steps to reach your sales goals. The goal on sales attempts will provide you with input into your pipeline and the goal on income will have you focus on pushing the potential customers though the pipeline which come out the other end as sales and income.
You don’t want to focus too much on one or the other because you will either be not filling up or pipeline or not driving the pipeline.
I went ahead and created a sales goal template excel spreadsheet that breaks it down to very simple terms and that you can use for your team or yourself to keep track of your sales goals.
Free Download: Sales Goal Template Spreadsheets
Sales Goal Template for Sales Reps
Sales Goal Template for Lead Generators
There are instructions on the sales goal template spreadsheet that make it very clear what you need to do on a weekly basis for sales activities in order to hit your income goal.
I highly suggest you check out a previous blog post I wrote where I dived into how a sales rep from a fortune 500 company went from ZERO to #1 as a SPOTIO customer on a day to day basis to hit his sales income goals. There is some extremely valuable information that you’ll want to utilize along with your sales goal template.
Are you up for the SPOTIO Sales Goal Challenge?
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