Are Your Goals Reasonable and Achievable?

Good morning!

Over the last two weeks, I have practiced on my guitar three times as much as I normally do. On a daily basis over the last few months, I’ve only been able to get in about 15 minutes every day. However, I made a commitment to my guitar teacher and hit 45 minutes pretty consistently.

However …

I look back on this “victory” with disdain and frustration. Why? Because my goal was 60 minutes.

I should have made my goals reasonable and achievable. Lesson learned.

Let’s say you prospect for new business at a rate of seven calls per day. Every day for one week, seven calls. Your goal, however, was 10. So, every day you go home thinking you failed.

But you’re not a quitter, so you make an adjustment in the following week …

You make seven sales calls per day. Every day for that second week, seven calls. This time, however, your goal was five. Now, every day you go home thinking, “I not only succeeded, I exceeded my goal by 40%.”

The client can hear every emotion you’re having. If you spend your day thinking, “I’m a failure,” that’s what the client will hear in your sales attempts.

However, if you spend your day thinking, “I’m killing it!” The client will hear success in your voice.

The interesting thing about the story is, the number of calls never changed. You still made seven calls per day for the first week and seven calls per day for the second week.

The only thing that changed was your attitude, that is, how it made you feel. And that’s what made the difference in the quality of those sales calls.

The change you made was the change that I made: You made your goals reasonable and achievable.

Michelangelo once said, “The problem isn’t that we set our goals too high and we fail to achieve them but rather that we set them too low, and we do."

Could not agree with you less, Mikey.

Set your daily sales activity goals at a number that you can hit and exceed on a daily basis.

Gotta run. The pentatonic scales await …

Think of The Sales Vault is a sales conference that never ends. New live workshops and peer to peer discussions occur weekly. Click here for a list of what’s coming up this week and beyond. If you’d like to talk to Bill Farquharson, call him at 781 – 934 – 7036.