It’s a month into the new year, and your team’s sales goal for the year ahead is freshly set. The new goal has likely stirred a sense of excitement among your sales team, and perhaps you’ve already worked one-on-one with each of your sales reps to help them establish individual goals that will contribute to the team goal. With the goal-setting completed, all that’s left for you to do is sit back and watch as your team works toward its goal.
Wait. That sounds ludicrous, right?
Yes‚ of course it does! Every sales leader knows that idly standing by and isolating yourself from the daily activities of your team tops the list of things NOT to do. Rather, the setting of goals is just the beginning of a sales leader’s job! After setting the team goal and working with sales reps to come up with individual goals, sales leaders must actively play a role to ensure their sales reps are on track to reach these goals by year-end.
But how exactly do you go about actively preparing your team to achieve the goal you’ve set for them? One way to start is by scheduling recurring (weekly, monthly, or whatever frequency you’ve determined works best for you) meetings with each of your sales reps. In your meetings, it’s important to discuss what action steps were taken the past week or month to work toward their goal, and to set action steps for the following week or month. But perhaps the even more important consideration here is not just scheduling the meetings, but actually making them happen! This may sound like common sense, but when calendars fill up, meetings like these are usually the first thing to get canceled because they are considered less important. When this happens, it’s necessary for sales leaders to change their mindsets regarding the importance of these meetings if they want to help their teams succeed and achieve their goals!
Think Twice Before You Cancel That Meeting!
Think about the message that canceling such a meeting sends to your sales reps. One, it signals that you don’t think they are important enough to make the meeting time work, and, two, it indicates that perhaps the goal you set for the team isn’t that important after all. If your sales reps start to think that they, or the goals you helped them establish, aren’t important, then it’s likely they’ll place their priorities elsewhere. Don’t let this happen! It’s up to you to keep the meetings on track! If a meeting must be rescheduled, stick as close to the original date as possible‚ don’t let it get pushed back to the point of irrelevance.
Leading by example is key! If you want your sales reps to achieve a goal, you should continually demonstrate to them that their goals are important. To do this, always keep the meetings you’ve scheduled with them, show up on time, and be prepared. By demonstrating your accountability towards the goals you’ve set for your team, you will be fostering the same sense of accountability in them.
It may seem overly simplistic, but if you want to help your sales team reach and exceed their goals this year, leading by example is a great place to start!
