There are so many important reasons to set goals. All high performing business men and women and elite sport athletes set goals to motivate themselves and help measure their success.
As a sales manager I set my own goals but today I want to write about how important it is to help your team write their individual sales goals, how to give those goals visibility and how to celebrate their completion.
At one stage during my career of managing sales agents, I was perplexed by my team’s inability to start their week off strong. We always had a slow Monday or a slow start to a month and worked our way to success by the end of the month or week. I couldn’t work out why. Was it laziness? Monday-itis? Team members hung over from a big weekend of spending their hard earned commission?
No.
It was my inability to apply the pressure of a weekly or monthly target from the very start. Sure, I could highlight where they should be come Monday afternoon but I couldn’t crack the whip until Tuesday. What could I do?
I decided to get my team to set their own individual goals. Each member of my team has different targets, calls different sets of data and requires a different tact so Monday morning I would bust out the post it notes, issue them each with a single slip and ask them to write down three things.
- What did they want to achieve by the end of the day? (make sure their goal is specific)
- What inputs would be required for them to hit their target?
- What would they spend their bonus on for the next weekend?
I would ensure that their targets were in line with the companies forecast, their inputs matched up with my expected output (this might be: number of calls, total talk time, number of callbacks scheduled etc) and that they truly believed that their goal was achievable.
Next I would get them to place their post-it on their computer monitors (visible goals!) and incentivise them with a Friday team lunch or money on the bar if they achieved both their Monday daily goal + hit target for the week. This kept them driven and motivated on Mondays and meant come Friday we were always over achieving.
Is your team always achieving results on a Monday? How do you motivate them? How do you help them set their own goals?
the hungry sales manager 