The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [126]
To get the most out of goal setting, make sure you set incremental goals as well as long-term goals. Your incremental goals should be things that are challenging but that you know you can achieve. This way you make it easier on yourself to stay focused on your success. If you make outrageous goals and never achieve them, then you reinforce your own failure.
Goal-Writing Workshop
Write down the following:
Five lifetime goals
Five annual goals
Desired annual income for the next five years
Three things you will do each month to improve your life
Three things you will do each month to improve your company or department
Three things you will do each month to improve your performance
Post each of these lists in an appropriate location so that you will see them every day. State them as if they already exist: “I make five sales every day.” “My business grows by X percent every year.” Answer these questions to create more goals and focus your attention on creating success:
What three obtainable things do you want from your business/job? Write them as if you already have them.
What three things will you do with your staff every month to make them more effective?
What three things will you do to make yourself happier and healthier? How often and when will you do them?
Measuring Effectiveness: Keys to Increasing Performance
Another way to achieve goals quickly is to mea sure effectiveness every step of the way. If you are constantly measuring effectiveness, then you will be able to quickly and easily adjust when something is not bringing about your desired result.
People respect what you inspect. So when I work with companies, we put all kinds of measurement systems into place. Here is a tool that you can duplicate and adapt to specific areas of business where you want to mea sure the effectiveness of your procedures. This is a sales performance worksheet for a salesperson selling employee benefits and insurance packages to companies.
First I’ll show you the pieces of the report broken down and then I’ll show you how all of this information fits on a single sheet of paper.
Across the top it shows how many calls this salesperson made each day—in this case, it was a four-day week. Because he was selling these insurance plans to entire companies, his target contacts were CEOs, CFOs, controllers, and human resources people. As you can see, he got eight CEOs on the telephone the first day and 26 during the week. He also got 10 CFOs, three controllers, and 29 human resources people on the telephone.
But if you look down at the next section of the worksheet, you see he only got four orientations or appointments scheduled out of 214 calls he made. It doesn’t sound like much, but this form tracked his Dream 100 effort, so each of the four appointments set were huge companies. Therefore, this was actually a highly successful week.
Notice that he got 35 people who wanted him to call them back, while 21 people hung up on him or told him flat out that they weren’t interested. Then there were 12 times that he couldn’t get through the gatekeeper at these huge companies. I included “actively looking” as a category because every now and then you get someone who is looking for whatever you sell. This salesperson didn’t find any of those this week, but when you do it’s a great day. “Just changed broker” is another important and motivating category to track because those are the ones that you might have gotten if you had called just a few months earlier.
Getting appointments wasn’t the only objective for this salesperson to achieve with each phone call. Here’s the next part of the call report.
As long as you’re going to be on the phone with someone and do all this work, you should capture important data to help target this company even better at every