Sales Planning and Sales Organization
The end of the week is the best time to start planning for the beginning of the next week. The end of the month is the best time to start planning for the next month. And the end of the year is the best time to start planning for the next year.
So now that it’s the last month of the year, December is the perfect time to start planning how you are going to improve your sales for 2009. Goal setting is the first step to take. Decide here and now what you’re going to sell in the next year. Make it a stretch goal, so that you have something to work for, but keep it realistic. If the goal is too low, then there is nothing to be gained from setting it. On the other hand, if the goal is too high, it could work against you and act as a big de-motivator. A good benchmark would be to take your best productive year that you’ve had in the past 5 years or so and set a goal to increase it by 15-20%. And by the way, goals and quotas are not the same thing. Quotas are externally set and goals are internally set. If you’ve got a sales quota, and just about every sales person does, obviously, you need to meet or exceed your quota or else your job could be in jeopardy. So make sure that the sales goals that you set for yourself exceeds the sales quota that your boss sets for you.
Once you have established how much you want to sell next year, break the goal down into smaller sub-goals. With a little bit of math, you can now deduce your quarterly goals, your monthly goals, your weekly goals and even your average daily sales goals. These are your benchmarks. For instance, if you set a goal of $1 million in sales for the year, then you know that you have to sell $250,000 per quarter in order to reach that goal. If you divide your quarterly goals by 3, then you know that you have to sell $83,333.33 each month in order to stay on track for your annual goals. Subsequently, if you divide the monthly goal by 4 weeks, that gives you your weekly goals, ect. Keep in mind that the benchmarks are averages. You could have one down week, or one down month, or one down quarter, but by tracking your benchmarks, you’ll know exactly where you stand in your path to your annual goal, and you’ll know early in the process if you have to make up for loss ground.
And don’t rely on your memory. Write down ALL of your goals. Whether they are daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual goals, make sure that you are writing them down and reviewing them on a regular basis in order to keep you focused and on task. In fact, you could take it to the next level by writing out your 3-year goals, your 5-year goals, your 10-year goals and your 20-year goals. By writing out your goals, you are taking an active role in your future and not just letting the winds of circumstance take you where ever they may be blowing.
Once you have set your goals and your benchmarks, the next step is to sit down and write out a detailed plan about what you intend to do to achieve your goals. The goals are the map, the benchmarks are the path and your plan is the detailed directions. Most intelligent people wouldn’t dream of embarking on a trip to a new destination without a map, yet the majority of people take the most important journey of their life, their future, without any advanced planning whatsoever. Your plan should detail what you are going to do differently and better than what you did last year in order to improve your results. Goal setting should top that list. If you write out your goals and the detailed plan to achieve your goals, and you diligently work your plan, you can and will accomplish anything you set your mind to. See you on the road to success.
Don’t Stress It!
When I was still in my early 30’s, I remember a conversation that I had with my physician. I had been experiencing some stomach issues and was visiting my doctor in order to try and determine what was causing the problem. I had always been fit, active and healthy, and since I was relatively young at that time, I couldn’t imagine what was wrong. Anyway, as part of his examination, the doctor asked me what I did for a living. When I told him that I was a salesman, I’ll never forget his response. He just laughed. Not like a big, boisterous laugh or anything. Just a little chuckle. And then he said something to the effect that “no wonder I was having stomach issues and that it was probably just related to stress”. The way he said it, I know that he wasn’t trying to be funny and he wasn’t just making some off hand comment. He said it in a matter-of-fact way that I knew at the time he was just trying to be, well, factual. Being so young at the time, I dissmissed his comment as being prejudicial of sales, but looking back now, I realize why he said what he said.
Sales can be a high stress, high pressure environment to work in, day in and day out. Especially if you allow it to be. It’s our job to find business and whether we are successful or whether we are not successful can affect a lot of people. Sales is almost like the old ”hunter/gathers” of years past. Sometimes the lives of entire tribes of people depended upon a few select individuals to go forth and hunt for food. Imagine how difficult it must have been to hunt before the advent of guns. That’s sometimes the way sales is. It’s not like you can just get a prospect in the crosshairs of your scope and just pull the trigger. It’s more like hunting with a spear. First you have to find a good hunting ground (good leads). Then you have to be able to skillfully stalk your prey (prospecting). And finally you have to make sure that you’re in good position to go in for the kill (make the sale). It took a lot of practice and experience to become a great hunter and not everyone was cut out for this type of work. Imagine the pressure these hunters must have felt, knowing that they had a hungry family or large tribe waiting and counting on them to return with a bountiful feast. Sales is lot like that.
So what can you do about it? Well, first you need to understand that just like hunting, sales takes skill, practice and experience. I don’t believe that anyone is born to sell. You might be born with some natural talents that can transfer well to a selling career, but no one can become a great salesperson without hard work, dedication and time. I’m reading Brian Tracy’s book “Eat That Frog!” right now and in chapter 4, entitled Consider The Consequences, there is a sentence that says, “Successful people have a clear future orientation”. What the author is saying in this chapter is that in order to make good decisions in the present, you have to have a clear picture in your mind of what you want in the long term future. This is especially relevant to selling. If you want to be great at selling at some future point, you need to dedicate yourself to that goal right now. You cannot sit on your butt all year, doing nothing, and then decide that you need to make some sales today. Do something everyday that leads you to greatness and eventually you’ll get there. Commit yourself to reading great books on selling. By becoming a student of selling, you will remove the pressure and stress of selling because you will understand your field better than anyone. And knowing in your heart that you are seriously doing everything that you can do to become the best in your field will go a long way to relieving you of the daily pressure of selling because you are focused on the long term and you will come to realize that if you just keep studying, you will one day soon get to where you want to be.
Sales is all about focusing on the future. When you know more about selling than your sales manager knows about selling, there will no longer be any pressure on you, because you will know that not only is pressure unhealthy, but it also makes for bad sales habits. Like any performance, the less pressure you put on yourself, the better you will come across to your prospects because you’ll be more natural and more relaxed. And one more thing. As I said, stress is also very unhealthy and can lead to serious medical issues. No career and no amount of success is worth getting sick over or dying for. So chill out, study hard and relax your way to sales success.
What Are You Going To Do Different Today?
If you are completely satisfied with your current station in life, then keep doing whatever it is that you are doing. But if you’re like most people, and you feel like you haven’t peaked and can still continue to improve your life in some way, then I want to ask you, what are you going to do different today than what you did yesterday? Human beings are creatures of habit; really bad creatures of habit. We want our lives to improve, but we refuse to recognize that in order for our lives to improve we’ve got to change the way we think and change the way we do things. How can our lives get better if we aren’t willing to do the work that is required for US to be better?
Fear is what keeps us from changing. That little voice inside all of our heads knows us better than anyone. That familiarity allows that voice to push our hot buttons of fear in ways that are so effective that we don’t even realize what’s happening. “You’ll never be successful”. “You can’t do that.” “It’s never been done before.” “What makes you think you’re so special”. “You’ll fail and everyone will laugh at you”. And on and on and on… These thoughts and many more just like them echo in our heads over and over and over throughout the course of everyday. It’s such a constant drone that we don’t even pay much attention to these types of thoughts anymore because we’ve become so used to them. Unfortunately, they are silently controlling and shaping our future by convincing us over time that we are stuck with who and what we are and that there’s just no reason to even try to change. We have convinced ourselves before we even begin to try some new endeavor, that there’s no reason to try. This is called pre-conditioned for failure, and we do it to ourselves. Sometimes you’re best friends or your closest family members, all well meaning and with a desire to save you from the pain of failure, allow their pre-conditioning for failure to influence you. But it’s you that allows them to do this.
Even when we finally somehow manage to sum up the courage to try something different, our pre-conditioning for failure usually has us give up and quit at the first signs of resistance. Remember, nothing of any noteworthy accomplishment ever comes easy. And even more important keep in mind is the fact that it’s in the struggles and striving of changing that we learn the most and it’s in learning that we succeed. Resistance is how you make a muscle stronger and your brain is you’re most important muscle. Stephen Hawkins is a quadriplegic, stuck in a wheelchair, unable to talk, but he is one of the smartest men that ever lived. If you have full use of your limbs and your voice, what are you afraid of? If the answer to this question is that you aren’t afraid of anything, then I ask you again, “What are you going to do different today”?
