Setting a goal is like choosing a vacation destination and date of departure. It keeps you focused. It forces you to plan ahead. It dictates what you need to do to get from point A to point B, enjoy yourself at point B, and return home.

Most of us are good at planning our vacations. When it comes to planning our days, weeks, months, years, businesses, or careers, however, we run into all sorts of problems. We wander around aimlessly. We look back at the past five years and realize that we have gone nowhere. We take inventory and can recall no major accomplishments.

The cause is usually due to a lack of planning, and planning cannot take place until you have a destination—a specific goal—in mind. How could you effectively plan a vacation, for example, if you have no idea whether you’re traveling to New York, Beijing, or Nairobi and no set date of departure or arrival? You would have no idea what to pack. You could not arrange your flights or reserve a room. You would not even know whether you needed a passport! Yet, this is exactly how many professionals, including salespeople, approach their careers.

In this chapter, I show you how to take control of your own destiny by setting goals and then setting yourself on a course to achieve those goals.

ASSOCIATE WITH FELLOW GOAL SETTERS

In sales as in any other field of endeavor, people generally fall into four categories in terms of goal setting:

1. People who set goals and deadlines and try to achieve them.

2. People who set goals and deadlines and never follow through on them.

3. People who don’t set goals or deadlines.

4. People who refuse to set goals or deadlines and look down on those who do.

To achieve the greatest level of success in the least amount of time, I strongly encourage you to become a member of the first group and associate with fellow goal setters. As you discovered in Week 4, people can drag you down, and this applies to goal setting. Anyone who’s critical of goal setting or rolls their eyes whenever you mention the topic will only weaken your enthusiasm and resolve.

Remember: Misery loves company. Failure loves company, too. Refuse to allow those who are committed to failure and misery drag you down with them.

SET A GOAL

A goal is generally anything you want to do (a process goal) or anything you want to achieve or be (a production goal). I encourage you to set both types of goals, as explained in the following sections.

Process Goals

I firmly believe in processes and procedures. If you develop a foolproof process, have competent people in place, and give them the resources they need, you can guarantee consistent delivery of a quality product or service.

The same can be applied to you as an individual. For example, I can almost guarantee that top-notch salespeople will significantly boost sales by making 100 phone calls a day, as you will discover in Week 22. This is an example of a process goal.

Process goals may seem more like commitments than goals to you, but I consider them goals. And the great thing about them is that they place you in total control of achieving the goal.

Production Goals

Production goals are often directly linked to your process goals. For example, a process goal of making 100 phone calls per day is almost guaranteed to result in boosting sales (a production goal). For example, you may set a production goal of increasing sales 25 percent or selling 200 cars or 150 houses or X number of whatever you sell per year.

Production goals are useful in setting a bar for yourself and measuring your relative productivity from one period to another. However, you need to be careful not to focus on productivity to the point of damaging your sales technique or future business. For example, if you become pushy trying to meet a sales goal or are too willing to cut a deal with a client to make a sale, your productivity goal could work against you. In addition, if you are so focused on making this month’s sales numbers that you fail to work on building your future business, you could be sacrificing long-term success for short-term success.

I do encourage you, however, to set production goals. After all, as salespeople, how much we sell is often our measure of success. Either you make your numbers or you don’t.

SET A DEADLINE

Goals without deadlines are meaningless. Claiming that you will earn $1 million means nothing without a time frame. Whether you earn it over the course of a decade, a year, a month, or a day makes a big difference. In addition, without a deadline, you have no motivation—time needs to be nipping at your heels.

In some cases, the deadline may be set for you. For example, your manager may set a sales quota for you that you are expected to meet for the year, quarter, or month. If your company does not set a goal for you and specify a deadline, then do it yourself. Set a deadline that is realistic but challenging—a deadline that will motivate you to take action and spur you on to achieve great things.

BREAK DOWN YOUR GOAL INTO MILESTONES

A challenging goal can often seem overwhelming at first. When I set a goal to sell 300 homes in a year, it seemed a little unrealistic until I broke it down. I would need to sell about 25 homes per month or 6 per week. This still seemed a little overwhelming, so I broke it down even further. I could sell 4 FSBOs (For Sale By Owner properties) per month, 6 expired listings, and 8 foreclosures. That was 18, meaning I would need to secure only 7 more traditional listings per month. Now my goal of selling 300 homes in a year seemed more doable.

Making your goals as simple as possible makes them more attainable. It also helps you identify bottlenecks that could be keeping you from your goal. When I decided to sell 300 homes in a year, for example, I soon realized that my current approach did not enable me to have the number of showings I would need to achieve that goal. That led to an innovative solution—take more than one set of buyers on showings.

I also identified another bottleneck—I could not possibly process all the paperwork required for 300 transactions. I knew I would need assistance, so I hired people to process the paperwork for me.

By breaking the goal into milestones and identifying areas where I needed to improve, I could make a seemingly impossible goal possible.

Ralph’s Rule: Set goals for each day, week, month, and year; prioritize tasks to achieve your goals; review your goals at the end of each period; celebrate your achievements; and rework your goals when you fall short of achieving them.