What is your sales goal this month? It’s not surprising that top-performing independent sales agents always have an answer to this question. What’s surprising is that their answer is linked to something they do every single day. Intrigued? In this post, I provide a simple framework for setting sales goals that will help you achieve big results by making a small shift to your daily routine. Let’s dive into habit #7 of the 8 habits of successful independent sales agents.
How to Find Your Upper Limit
To reach your full potential, you have to push yourself far beyond what you ever thought was possible. How? Imagine that the finish line has been removed from a race. How much farther can you go when there’s no line on the ground telling you to stop? Now, think back to the initial question: what is your sales goal this month? Whatever it is, start thinking about it as the bare minimum of what you can achieve instead of the upper limit.
Figuring out what your upper limit actually is takes some testing. Here’s a simple framework to get started:
1.) Commit to daily action that exploits that strength. If your strength is cold calling and you enjoy doing it, commit to making 6 cold calls a day instead of the 4 that you typically do. Here are some other examples of daily actions you can adopt depending on your strengths:
2.) Pick one single strength.
3.) Make a list of things you’re really good at and actually enjoy doing as part of the sales process. It could be cold calling, giving a presentation or demo, building solid relationships or even writing compelling emails or text messages to your customers or prospects.
- Send a follow-up email to each prospect you meet with or speak to over the phone, no matter the prospect’s perceived interest. You never know who might refer your services, or contact you later.
- Connect with everyone you meet in person or over the phone on LinkedIn or other social media networking site and send a quick message.
- Send one lead to a referral partner.
- Ask each of the merchants you visit if they know of any other business owners who need help with payments processing
- Set up one networking call or meeting.
4.) Record and measure your results. Whether you choose to use a Word document, your calendar, or even a sticky note on your car’s dashboard, keep track of the daily actions you’re taking. Reflect on your overall performance after two weeks, then after 30 days. Have your new daily actions paid off?
Setting sales goals for yourself
After you’ve measured how exploiting your strengths in your daily routine have paid off, you should be able to forecast their impact on next month’s sales. Continuing with the example of increasing cold calls from 4 to 6 a day. Say that after a month, you exceeded your original sales goal by 5 merchant applications. It would be safe to expect the same increase next month if you take the same approach. Add that to your typical monthly sales target and there you’ve set a new sales goal for yourself.
The good thing about this framework is that once you’ve successfully added one habit to your daily routine, it’s easy to add more using the same steps. It’s amazing how much more you can accomplish by making a small change to your daily routine.
What habit has yielded the biggest results for your sales career?
