Planning to Succeed at Sales By Michael Austin

Each year my company hands me down a set of commitments. Quite simply these commitments are goals that the company is asking me to obtain. Some of them are financial related (aka my quota), but most of them quite honestly are not clear goals, that are handed down by corporate head office. They are a subset of the executives goals that they are trying to get accomplished in the field. The unfortunate thing is that most of these goals are not related to what I do every day. Where most people I see, file them away not to be seen again until review time, what I do with them is take them, modify them and then make them mine.

Each year, my team and I get together and have a day of goal setting. We look at the commitments (goals) that they have set for us, and we find ways to make them real for us. Once we have made them real, we then turn around and have a discussion about how we are going to use these goals to stretch ourselves and come up with a list of “stretch goals”.

This exercise is a fun and often interesting exercise that I suggest trying if you’ve never done it before. I have a team of about 7 people that directly support me within my accounts. Each year, it is an eye opening experience to see how these people are aligned (or not aligned) to what I feel is the vision and strategy that I have set out for my territory (which I view to be my $15 Million business that I own).

Quite often we have interesting conversations that are centered around our interpretations of the priorities of the company, but most importantly we spend a lot of our time, not focused on what the company wants us to do, but rather we talk from the eye of our customers and spend time focusing on what our customers want us to do.

We actually set goals in each of the following categories:

1) Financial – Goals that are related to how we will beat quota.

2) Personal – Goals that are related to our career development, personal development or personal lives

3) Customer Satisfaction – Goals that are related to increasing how we are viewed by our customers and how we will move ourselves from a vendor to trusted advisor postion

4) Win – Goals on key solutions, products or key competitive take outs that we will focus on. Although this could fall under financial we call it out separately because we want to ensure that we focus things that may be strategic but not revenue generating

In each category we will set 2 to 3 goals. We ensure these goals are measurable (eg. We will exceed our quota by 30% this year), that they are tied to timelines (We will have two documented case studies with customer references by May 15, 2007) and that someone is directly accountable to the team for that specific goal. At the beginning of each of our sales meetings (which we have weekly either in person or via phone), we spend 5 minutes quickly reviewing how we are tracking against our goals. If we are behind we spend some time discussing a recovery strategy, and if we have met a goal we check it off our list and celebrate it.

Each one of our goals are not simple, in fact we ensure that they are stretch goals. Last year for instance we set a goal to be 140% of plan by the end of the year (in our company a great year is 120%). How did focusing on that goal every week and discussing it at all times help us out? We ended up at 131% of quota at the end of the year, and as the number 1 sales team in the country. Not bad, for having spent 1 day setting goals and 5 to 10 minutes a week reviewing and focusing on them.

I know that every sales person that I talk to tells me that they have goals. I often question how many of them make them a part of their weekly or daily routines (although I talk to the team weekly about them, I actually use Microsoft Outlook categories within tasks to track my activities by goals daily). I believe that the old adage failure to plan, is planning to fail holds true and ensure that I use them every day to make sure that I continue to plan to be successful and execute on that plan.

Mike Austin is a sales professional who has successful negotiating with many of the fortune 500 companies. He has a proven track record of delighting his customers, growing sales in new and existing territories and is a co-founder of http://www.ChallengingCustomer.com