How good are you at this… make the invisible visible?

Do your sellers know the big picture goals?

The monthly or quarterly goals?

Do they have access to where they stand?

Or is all of this invisible?

Kerry Patterson writes about making the invisible visible in The Influencer book.

Companies where goals, standards, expectations and each person knows where they are in relation to the same… out performed others.

Keeping the invisible visible carries over to the reps own business and personal goals.

Sellers may have their personal and professional goals in mind, but not written down – making their own goals invisible.

Not only invisible, goals kept in in ones minds eye is really only a hope and a dream.

Here’s an opportunity to lead by example.

Rather than talking about having goals and keeping them invisible…

take time (30-60 minutes) to stop everything, go to the conference room, close the door and engage your team in a goal writing session.

Keep this formula in mind when writing the goal:

The What

The When

State it in the Now

To say, “I want to meet my sales quota.” isn’t specific enough.

Using the what, when and now the goal looks like this:

I easily and effortlessly meet my sales quota of x$$ by x-date.

or

I meet my sales quota of x$$ by x-date by closing 5 new deals per month.

After writing a clear, specific and attainable goal – request your sellers to determine the necessary actions to achieve the goal.

List the actions with completion target dates.

There is an art to writing goals and then achieving business and personal goals.

Working together with your team – turning the Invisible to the Visible – you’re on your way to grow a winning team.

Every day is a GREAT day to focus on your goals!  Some days write a new goal and other times review a goal to decide:

(1) is it still relevant – and if not toss it

(2) where are you relation to the goal and what adjustments are necessary, or

(3) is it time to celebrate and reward yourself!

If you are serious about achieving more, you constantly review, revise, recycle and recommit!  Good for you!

There is an additional secret to manifesting your goals – and that is Visualization.  Golfers, baseball players, tennis professionals and Olympic hopefuls are using visualization to improve every aspect of their game as part of their training and competition.

Visualization begins with a clear and concise image of your ideal outcome or goal.  That’s why creating Vision Boards – a poster board on which you paste a collage of images and words torn from a variety of magazines – can be a very effective tool.

The idea behind Vision Boards is that when you surround yourself with images of who you want to become, what you want to achieve, where you want to live, or where you want to vacation – your beliefs, actions and results change!

Have a little fun and gather up some magazines, cut words and pictures out and post them around and see what changes in your world!

Have you noticed in October everyone starts blogging about what to do to meet end of year quotas?

And in January the blogs are all about kicking off the year strong to meet end of year quotas.

What happens all the other months?

Don’t managers ask their sellers on a regular basis where they are in relation to goals?

I’ve looked over these blogs to find the nuggets to magically meet end of year quotas.

What I did find were the questions sellers and managers should be discussing at the end of every month.

Here’s your cheat sheet of questions:

1. What’s the gap between what’s closed and the quota?

2. How many new customers or upsells do you need to close the gap?

3. Who’s currently in the pipeline that are far enough along to be those customers or upsells?

4. What resources (people or other) could help you close these faster?

5. What specific actions will you take now to close those?

6. What’s barrier is getting in the way of closing more sales?