Taking Aim at Performance Targets

“Everyone wants to win, but not everyone is willing to prepare to win.” – Coach Bob Knight

Have you hit your performance target for this year? Are you concerned that it’s too late to impact your results? This time of year, the opportunity for generating new business often diminishes. People are focused on the holidays and finishing projects, and less so on negotiating new deals. For sales people, if they haven’t already met their goals, it’s sometimes difficult to make it to the finish line.

No matter where you are in relationship to your targets, there are still things you can do to generate more sales. Now is a great time of year to put together a specific sales action plan. You can test the plan between now and the end of the year, and be ready to hit the ground running in January.

The key to creating a successful action plan is to have enough actions in it to insure you reach your goals! It may sound simplistic, but many salespeople underestimate the number of tasks they should be performing each week if they are going to hit their targets.

We use the 95% rule when we help clients create definitive action plans. Start by making a list of every action you need to take to get what it is you want. If your sales goal is $1MM, what has to happen to generate that much business? Do you need to make 5 sales per month? How many sales calls? How many presentations? How many follow up calls? Break down the sales goal into a series of actions.

Once you have your list, look it over carefully. If you complete everything on the list, will you be confident about reaching your target? We tell our clients that they need enough actions on the list to insure a 95% chance of meeting the goal. If the actions on your list will only get you an 80% chance of meeting your goal, you need to add more actions to the list.

The action plan is an opportunity to start thinking about what exactly needs to happen. Imagine you have met your target. How did you get there? What had to happen on a monthly basis? Weekly? Reverse engineer the goal and get specific about what has to happen every week to make it a reality.

Next time we’ll talk about how to put the plan into action. Because you can’t have an action plan without taking action. You have to play if you want to win the game.

Are you ready to win?