Personal Goal-Setting Can Boost Sales Results

Question: Has your Sales Organisation identified the importance of aligning the sales team’s personal goals with company goals to increase engagement – and do your sales managers conduct regular meetings to ensure alignment of personal and company goals to create self-directed sales executives with a sense of urgency?

The Reality 

According to our research at ThinkSales Global, only 41.7% of Sales Organisations have identified the importance of aligning the sales team’s personal goals with company goals to increase engagement.

In addition, 40.5% of companies rate their confidence as Outstanding that their sales managers conduct regular meetings to ensure alignment of personal and company goals to create self-directed sales executives with a sense of urgency.

The ‘Inability to Achieve Goals’ Problem

Star performers instinctively understand that their actions at work lead to favourable outcomes in their personal life – such as attaining key financial goals.

For many core and poor performers however, making this link is not necessarily natural – showing up to work and performing sales activities is a tick box exercise, simply performing the function because they have to – not because they want to.

This lack of self-direction and lack of engagement will not self-correct unless each individual’s goals are aligned with the company’s goals to increase engagement.

Remember: Sales executives come from all walks of life, and not everyone has been exposed to setting and achieving goals through positive role models in life. Don’t take it for granted that everyone on your sales team knows how to do this.

Second, the reality is that while many people are familiar with goal-setting, most people fail to achieve their goals.

Align company and personal goals to improve engagement

Sales leaders can guide both sales managers and sales executives to set – and achieve – goals. The best way to do this is through the questioning method:

1. Write down your goals. Doing so has been proven to increase your chance of achieving them ten times.
2. Structure your major goal as a question. For example: “How can I save enough to buy a new car, for cash?”
3. Write down possible pathways to achieve the goal. This kind of ‘mind storming’ forces you to dig deep for answers. For example: “How can I close 200 new deals in the next six months?”
4. Formulate tasks. Break the goal down into as many small parts as you can and start with one task.

Do This:

Once you have implemented a culture of documenting goals, it’s important to track progress. Conduct weekly, monthly and quarterly reviews to ensure that goals are on track.

1. Use these personal ‘catch-up’ sessions to review if each sales executive is meeting their objectives. Their goals should have been broken up into components that can be tracked.
2. If they aren’t meeting their objectives, evaluate why – what needs to change?
3. Reviews keep everyone on track. They remind them why they’re doing this, and allow everyone to visualise the rewards of meeting their goals.

4. As goals are met, you can celebrate with them, which should help them get one step closer to visualising ultimate success. Then look to the next milestone.

Use If/Then scenarios

According to Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson, a social psychologist and the Associate Director of the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia Business School, Senior Consultant for the Neuroleadership Institute, and author of a number of best-selling books, If/Then planning is a highly effective strategy for achieving goals because it allows you to decide in advance when and where you will take specific steps to reach your goal by replacing an inappropriate routine with an appropriate one.

How If/Then planning works

1. Think of the reasons why your goal might not be met – what challenges lie ahead, where are your stumbling blocks?
2. By preparing yourself ahead of time, you can avoid emotional, knee-jerk reactions, and turn each potentially hazardous situation into something positive instead.
3. Don’t ignore the negative situation – this will only lead to further reinforcing it, because you will think about it. Instead, replace the behaviour with something else.

Assess the health of your sales organisation

Identifying the importance of aligning the sales team’s personal goals with company goals to increase engagement and conducting regular meetings to assess that alignment are two of 322 measures of a world-class Sales Organisation.

ThinkSales Global is a specialist revenue engineering consultancy.

We assist our clients to deliver market-defying results through strategic and tactical intentions within a Sales Organisation Maturity Model that addresses the five key pillars of high-performing Sales Organsations, namely:

1. Competitive Strategy
2. Customer Engagement
3. Sales Talent
4. Sales Management
5. Sales Enablement

How does your Sales Organisation stack up? Find out by taking the ThinkSales 5 Pillar Strategic Sales Assessment™.

This first-of-its-kind 360-degree gap analysis report enables your Sales Leadership team to assess its strengths and detect weaknesses and impediments to revenue growth across the five pillars.

Click here for more information on the ThinkSales 5 Pillar Strategic Sales Assessment™.