Goals Without a Plan Are Useless | Sales Strategies

This week, I want to explore sales goals. I know we all have them. Our companies set them for us, our leaders set them for us, and perhaps you set some for yourself.

Setting goals, however, is never the problem for salespeople. In fact, you probably have more goals than you could imagine. We are all goal-oriented and that’s a good thing, but what’s often missing is the pathway to the goal. 

Know the Pathway to Your Sales Goals

The goal is less important than knowing the pathway to get there. And by “pathway,” I mean the number of engagements. Specifically, this entails the number of emails, calls, meetings, proposals, quotes, or closes you need on average to hit that goal. This is what most organizations miss. When a sales team has that pathway to their goal, they can create a process for getting to that goal. They create a mindset to stick to the path and to follow the results. More importantly, the pathway is really simple. It’s just a matter of breaking down that big goal into quarterly and monthly chunks, the average number of closes, and the number of opportunities you need in the pipeline in order to hit that number of closes.

If you haven’t seen it already, you can create a pathway to your goal by consulting our website for sales velocity and sales math conversations. In fact, we wrote about this extensively in chapter three of Nonstop Sales Boom. Once you figure out this pathway, it’s easy to follow. So, create the pathway to your goal now. I promise you’ll get closer to hitting your goals!