Have Your Sales Goals Hit A “Bunker”?

You’ve set your Goal for 2010 and Management expects you to perform on them.  You’ve spent the last few weeks of the year debating what is attainable, and what is measurable.  Now what? In order for you to achieve your goal, you must first believe you can attain your goal (sometimes believing you already have it, helps).

Let’s relate this to Golf.

How many times have you been invited to play a new golf course that you have never been on (I apologize if you are not a golfer, but if you are not that is your problem)? First of all, it is exciting to play a new course, and second, you know nothing about the course except what you have heard from someone else.  You step on the first tee, and you bomb the ball right down the middle –“because that’s what you do.” However, when you get to where your ball should be, you find that it rolled into the pond. How did that happen? Well, if you would have visited the course before, you would have known that it was only 220 yards to the water, and you could have hit your 3 iron 200 yards. Instead, you bombed your Driver 240 yards smack dead into the pond. Why did that happen?  Because you didn’t have a plan of attack to play the course – you just showed up, and decided to try and “figure it out.”  You think to yourself, “Oh well, I’ve got 11 more brand new golf balls fresh out of the pack.” Is that the way you would treat your business? How many times do you miss before you look at what is right and what is wrong? That’s all fine and dandy for a Sunday golfer but what do the Pros do? Let’s take a look.

Before Pros even play the course themselves, they send out their caddy to walk the course and take precise measurements. They do this by walking the course forward and backwards. Now, if the goal of a golfer is to get the ball into the hole, where should they start? The hole of course! Looking up the fairway from the hole paints a completely different picture. You are able to see where the course designer strategically placed all of the “obstacles.” However, you may not have noticed these same “obstacles” from the tee box.

Once the caddy has his measurements, he takes this knowledge and directs the Pro to hit the ball from the tee to a very specific location on the fairway (with intentions to set him up to be in the best possible position to hit his next shot onto the green).  The Pro must trust all the information that his caddy has given him so that the only thing left for him to do is to visualize where the ball is going, and then commit to that beautiful swing that he has spend countless hours perfecting. He hits his next shot onto the green, sinks his putt, and makes a birdie. Now, he has to repeat this process 17 more times.

Is this what your sales cycle feels like? How prepared are you for challenges that you can not foresee? Most importantly, how accurate is the information that you have available to you to make good business decisions?

Mike Gillett, Account Executive, GoBeyond IT