A question from Elizabeth: How to focus on doing more stuff, but still keeping an eye on rank and goals? Business professional have goals, how to have goals but not be driven by them and focus on the goal alone. Another comment added: Feeling discouraged on missing goals.
We are going to break it up into 2 parts: I think that goals are a function of your activity + competency. Otherwise, you are a motivated idiot. You need activity and competency.
Let’s talk about what goals even are? A lot of people say, “a goal is a dream with a deadline.” That is the most unhelpful definition of a goal I have ever heard. That doesn’t help me do a whole lot. A business definition would be an observable and measurable result having one or more objectives to be achieved within a more or less fixed timeframe. Still not that helpful.
I use goals for feedback. To me, goals are not, “are you a success or are you a failure?” Reaching or not reaching a goal helps me to identify what I’m doing well, or not. Goals are a metric. It’s the score like a sports team. Like a sports team, I think the point is having a winning season. If a football team wins 10 and loses 6 they are awesome. But then when we look at our goals, we think every single month has to be the best month ever of our entire careers. But that’s crazy. How can every single month be the best month of your entire career? So in a year, I think if we win 7 months or more, we are overall winning. That helps me to have a healthier perspective on goals; I’m not going to win every single game. But the key is to keep playing and to keep using the feedback from reaching goals or not reaching goals and making adjustments in my skill level, strategy activity, time.
I don’t think rank is good for this process. Rank on its own is not controllable. But it’s achieved by selling, and teaching people how to sell. So that is what we need to focus on. Goals are also influenced by the time you have in your business, so we need to consider that.
What kind of goals should you have each month?
How do you break down this business where the pinnacle is rank?
3 Components: New business sales, Customer retention, teaching people how to sell
We can break down really simple goals around these larger components.
New Business Goals
- New customers
- New Biz Volume
- # Referrals – most important metric to keep new business coming in
- These tell me my activity of # New people you need to meet with each week
Retention Goals
- Overall Volume – It’s the discipline of growing volume that will help
- Retention rate
- # Follow up appointments/calls
Team Development
- # of People launched – You want to make sure you are on-boarding new people. My definition of a launch is someone you train, and they go out and make their own sale by themselves
- # OMG Convos with your new people
- 3 Coaching calls – how many can you do in the course of the week.
When you execute this stuff, rank happens. The more you try to focus on rank, the less it happens. The more you think about placement, the less you think about people. The more you are in your back office moving stuff, the less you are solving people’s problems. We don’t buy in; we sell more. We teach people how to sell more. If you are scrapping at the end of the month to trying to reach rank, then your business is not solid, you have to go back to the basics and build a solid foundation.
Great advice – You know are ready to push for rank when you consistently hit your current rank by the 15th of the month. This assures you its, not a “one and done”. Consistency is so important. I feel like so many people will hit a rank, and then want to hit the next rank, and the next. For me, I set the same goal for 3 months in a row, and I don’t know if its a peak or a valley, and 3 months gives me enough data to know where am I with my business and do I need to move it up. You can always crush your goals. I have had goals where I have met them by the 12th of the month. That’s amazing, and that’s ok to do, but I look at consistency. Rank is just a function of how many people you have on your team earning $200-$300. So focus on the goals that will get you more people earning $200-$300 a month.
As you go and focus on these goals, here are the 4 things you are going to focus on a weekly basis once you set your monthly goal.
#1 The number of new people you need to meet with
#2 The number of follow ups and calls you do
#3 How many OMG conversations are you having
#4 How many coaching calls you have
You’ll take these monthly goals, the bigger ones, break them down into these activities, and then go and reach those activity goals. At the end of the month you will be able to take all of those numbers, see how many people you met with, the data and you will be able to reflect back on what went well, what didn’t go well, and what adjustments do I need to make for next month… and that is where goal setting is super helpful.
But we can’t talk about goal setting unless we talk about your skills, because that matters. Someone who is higher skilled in certain aspects is going to get better results, and we also have to look at time. Someone who has 10 hours a week or 30 to do their business, that’s going to impact their goals as well.
So… for next week part 2, we are going to talk about those 2 aspects. We will see you then!+I want to make sure you know about the Sales Leadership Workshop coming up on February 11th, from 8-10am PST. Karen is going to be running the workshop and will be helping you what does it mean to be a sales leader, and specifically how to improve the skills on your team. This workshop is $27. Emergesalestraining.com/salesleadership
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