If your salespeople are like most, from time to time they struggle with attaining their sales goals. And, they may offer a number of reasons for this including:
- Pricing
- Competition
- Too few leads
- Quota is too large
- And so on…..
Some of these, all of these or none of these may be true. What is true, however, is that establishing clear, concise activity goals and metrics and holding your salespeople accountable to these goals will help.
As Confucius said “when it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.”
What action steps can you take? Define your sales process, step by step, e.g., initial meeting, analysis, proposal, and close. Determine the metrics required for success. If a salesperson needs to sell $480,000 in products per year, that is $40,000 per month. To do this, how many sales per month do they need to close? To do this, how many proposals do they need? To do this, how many analysis meetings do they need? And, to do this, how many initial meetings do they need? And, to do this, how much time do they need to devote to prospecting activities and what volume of prospecting activity must be achieved?
Then comes the more difficult part: holding your salespeople accountable for their activity. Your salespeople must be accountable; this is defined as an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one’s actions. (Holding them accountable, when delivered professionally and in an emotionally intelligent way, will not feel punitive to them but will feel like they are being coached and developed.)
It seems so easy but, if it were, you wouldn’t hear your salespeople listing off all the reasons they are struggling to meet their sales goals.
If you would like to talk about how you can create an environment of accountability, please let me know.
