Goal Setting – The Formula for Greater Sales

The average sales person spends their day “stirring the pot of activity”, or as my good friend Gordon Wilson refers to it, “trying to boil the ocean”. A lot of activity and motion may keep one busy and tired, but it won’t necessarily produce sales and wealth. On a bright and sunny winter day, I can sit in my office with the blinds open, enjoying the gentle warmth of the sun. All that sunlight flooding into my office will generate a small amount of heat. However, if I were to pull out my magnifying glass and focus just a small amount of that light into a narrowly focused beam, I could burn a hole right through the carpet.

Sales activities are exactly the same way. Broad and general activities are like trying to boil the ocean, whereas specifically focused activities will burn holes in areas where other sales people couldn’t even create warmth. Goal setting provides a narrow focus of activity sufficient to achieve an objective. The goal dictates the direction of our efforts and acts as a beacon when activities become clouded and obscure. A goal can pull us toward the achievement we so desperately desire.

In the Law of Success, Napoleon Hill’s first book, he describes the insight he gained from his research into the power of goal setting. He said, “Any definite chief aim that is deliberately fixed in the mind and held there with determination to realize it, finally saturates the entire subconscious mind until it automatically influences the physical action of the body toward the attainment of the purpose.”

That statement is a profound insight into the power associated with setting goals. I don’t know that I truly understand how it works, but from personal experience, and the experience of the sales people I train and coach, I can testify that it really works. Let me share an actual example of this principle, in the words of one of my clients.

“I was short about $10,000 dollars when I met with my sales coach, and as he left he said to me, ‘call me when you reach your goal’. I thought to myself I’m going to do everything I can to make that phone call. What a rewarding feeling it would be to know that I gave it all I had and it allowed me to achieve my goal. As the last day of the month approached, I was down to literally the last hour of the day and I got a couple of phone calls from customers that I had quoted last year that I had forgotten about. I had to resend them quotations and didn’t think that they would purchase as soon as they did. Needless to say, I was able to make the phone call to my sales coach to report that I had made my goal and exceeded it by $1000 dollars.”

The power of goal setting is clearly established through a famous survey conducted at one of the leading business schools in America. In 1979 Harvard University did a study among the graduating seniors from the business school. They asked them, "What plans and goals do you have after graduation and have you written them down?" The responses were startling. They were very similar to the Yale study of 1953. The study found that only 3% of the people who were graduating had clear written goals and plans for their life. Another 13% had goals and plans, but they hadn't written them down. An amazing 84% of all graduating seniors had no goals at all except for graduating and enjoying the summer.

Ten years later in 1989, they surveyed these same people again. They found that the 13% of men and women who had goals and plans when they left the university, but who hadn't written them down were earning on average twice as much as the 84% who had no goals and plans at all. But they found that the 3% of men and women who had clear, written goals and plans, blueprints to follow once they'd left the university, were making on average 10 times as much as the entire 97% put together! The power of being clear about who you are and what you want in life is absolutely amazing.

Surprisingly enough, there are sales people who don’t set goals. They will work as hard as they can to achieve all that they can, but they refuse to set goals. Why would this be? The answer is simple. They don’t want to fail! They believe that by setting a goal, by creating a “have to” situation, they are setting themselves up for failure if they miss the mark. Nothing could be further from the truth. By not setting goals they will never realize the power that lies within them to achieve far more than they ever believed they could achieve.

A couple of years ago I had a client who set a company record for the most gross profit sales ever made by a sales person in a year. In thirty years of business, his sales were the most ever recorded! He was feeling pretty good about his efforts, having reached that plateau. He pondered long and hard about his accomplishment and then asked himself how much more could he achieve. He set a new goal, one that seemed nearly impossible, and began working diligently to achieve it. By the end of the year he had not only achieve his goal, but exceeded it. He made the comment that he was driven in his daily efforts by the fact that he had a goal to achieve. His personal sales were greater that year than what the whole company had sold three years earlier, and three years earlier the company had its best year ever.

Sales people without a goal, no matter how hard they work, will fail to achieve their true destiny. They will never be successful until they reach beyond themselves, until they challenge their very core. The world of sales is replete with sales people working hard, but successful sales people are those who work hard with their efforts clearly focused on a goal that pulls them towards success.