How to Set Sales Goals Properly

Here’s the thing – there are good and bad goals

And proper goal setting – or setting proper goals — is difficult. Did you know that more than 80 percent of companies set the wrong kinds of goals for their sales staff? Goals that you can’t possibly meet?

In a recent study, it was shown that setting results-oriented goals made achieving these goals nearly impossible.

Think about it, if a sales manager could directly manage revenue, then every salesperson in the world would be filling their bathtubs with Ben Franklins and gold coins. The only thing I saw the last time I looked in my bathtub was some stale soap and a misplaced toothbrush.

The reality is that we can’t control results – we can only manage our own actions.

The good news? You can achieve astounding sales results by setting activity goals. In fact, the results that come out of carefully planned and managed activities can far exceed any results-oriented goal you may have set in the past.

What activity goals are – a personal example

Imagine a bookseller who sets a goal to sell $1,000 in books each day. What if he sold nothing after talking to 17 people? And worse, what if prospect number 17 happened to be a very harsh rejection? It would surely get you down and make it harder to keep going.

Take it from us, before we founded the CRM tool Pipedrive, we got our start in sales in exactly this way – selling books door-to-door and dealing with harsh rejections.

Now what if the same bookseller had an activity goal of talking to 20 prospects each day? Taking your focus off the $1,000 result-goal and shifting it on the activity goal meant that even if 17 were to say no, it wouldn’t matter – he would only have three prospects left to talk to.