Sales Training Seminars and Tips

Goal Direction and Sales Success

Being goal directed is the ability of a salesperson to establish goals and then to marshal their energies toward the attainment of those goals. There are three components to the process:

1.      Establishing goals.

2.      Sticking to the strategy to achieve the goals.

3.      Measuring feedback in terms of progress toward achievement of the goals.

Sales’ real winners and innovators set goals and then live their lives by them. Learning how to do that is what goal directedness is all about.

Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere wholeheartedly. Enthusiasm for your work is the most priceless ingredient in any recipe for successful living. Human beings were made to create, to achieve, to be going somewhere wholeheartedly. Something in our emotional and mental makeup needs a challenge, an important mission to accomplish, a task that gives meaning and purpose to our existence. When we don’t have it, we get bored and blue.

Enthusiasm for your profession and your goals and what you sell as well as the direction of those goals really does make the difference. No one can motivate another person. Enthusiasm either grows up inside of you or it doesn’t exist. It comes from the inside out; not vice versa.

How do you get excited about your life? How do you become inspired to achieve some overwhelming task? How do you become inspired to make more sales? To make more calls? To call on tougher prospects or clients? Where does it really come from? Real winning enthusiasm comes from a combination of two deep inner convictions. First, being captivated by an ideal.

We start at the end and work back. That end is being captivated by an ideal. Real enthusiasm springs from a strong belief that something is worth doing to the best of your ability. The biographies of all great people, including salespeople, reveal their deep conviction that they believed that they were doing something worthwhile.

The reverse is also true. Enthusiasm does not exist in the absence of a deep conviction that a task is worthy of our best efforts. It’s the belief that something is worth living and dying for that causes people to lay it all on the line – to risk everything – and to suffer for untold agony without a complaint.

If you want to see your sales career really take off, give yourself over completely to the deepest urge within you. Lose yourself in a cause you consider worthy of your very best.

Far too many salespeople are looking for some group, society, or organization to give them something worth living and even dying for. Great societies come from great people with great ideals, not vice versa. Make sure you avoid the escapist mentality. The irony of this escapist mentality is that for all of its efforts to escape pain, it ultimately leads to either empty desperation or a state of constant pain.

The second ingredient for enthusiasm is to have a deep conviction that you can achieve your goals. Enthusiasm is that spark of excitement that you feel when you see a tiny light at the end of a long, long tunnel. It is the deep inner conviction that you can win, no matter what the odds against you. How do you become thoroughly convinced that you can do what you want to do most in your life? First, you have got to have a dream. In order to have a dream, what you need to be able to do is to put some legs under those dreams.

Remember, a goal is a target that you shoot at. It is also very specific. The more specific a goal, the better your chances of reaching it. A goal is achievable. If it is not achievable, you give up half way through your effort and you fail.

You have to take your goals and break them down into long, intermediate, and short range goals and give it a time table. And the goals must absolutely matter to you. It must be something you are excited about. It must be your own. It’s a promise you make to yourself. Goals are things you make a part of your life – both your professional and your personal life.

The most beautiful thing about setting and living by goals is that they keep bringing you to a place where you can set bigger and better goals. Goals are also stepping stones. Become a practical dreamer. That’s goal directedness. That’s marshaling your energies toward the attainment of the goals.

The next most critical step here is to develop a concrete plan to make it possible for you to make your dreams come true. You have to make things happen. You must be able to put points on the board. You must first establish the goals and then develop specific objectives that will take you closer to the achievement of the goals, strategies that you will implement on a consistent and regular basis, tasks to make those things occur, and then work your plan.

Four very critical strategies:

1.      Get yourself organized.

2.      Monitor your progress.

3.      Check your schedule.

4.      Hurry up every chance you get.

Goal directedness is very, very critical to your success. Always have big dreams. But keep in mind that to make those dreams come true, you’ve got to plan your work and work your plan and stay directed toward the goals that you are trying to achieve.

The Brooks Group: http://www.saleshq.com/training/articles/2767-goal-direction-and-sales-success

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