Excerpts

The Personal Goal Planner

Module Summary

Selling is an Every Day Business

What your people accomplish today will determine what your organization becomes tomorrow. "Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and only today is an opportunity."

The Personal Goal Planner, which you will receive with your copy of The System, helps you create the behaviors needed to be successful today. It is important to educate your staff on how the goal process works. Most people are not taught about the incredible power of setting and reaching goals. Nor do most people know how to use and monitor the process. Educating your staff on this powerful life-changing process will help them shape the behaviors and create the habits that will lead to their success.

Having Goals Matter
To be effective at the end of the year, sales counselors must be effective at the beginning of every day.

You must:

• Know the desired outcome.
• Break your goal down to monthly, weekly and daily activities.
• Sales counselors must know which activities they must do every day.
• Goals must be reviewed weekly by the manager to know what the counselor needs to do to say on track.

Module Excerpts

THREE PRINCIPLES FOR EFFECTIVE PLANNING (p. 1)

1. You can’t control time, you can manage events. You will have two kinds of events every day: The ones you can control and the ones you cannot control. Just remember to control what you can and deal with what you can’t. Handle interruptions quickly so you can get back to the planned events in your control.
2. If you take time to plan, you will have more time. Don’t look at planning time as wasting time. It is critical that you learn to value taking time to focus on the things that you need to accomplish today. Mastering this discipline will help you get more of the right things done every day.
3. When you define what matters least, you control what matters most. People who don’t have a plan for their day have no focus. When you plan your activities, you have focus, energy, and motivation. You know what you are going to do and that is the beginning of all accomplishment.

TWO PRINCIPLES (p. 3)
Keep these two key principles in mind: 1) Sales doesn’t pay for working hard; it pays for working right, and 2) It is not the activity, but the results of one’s effort that brings success. When salespeople fail to plan, they will find themselves tremendously busy, and enormously ineffective. People need to set a goals for each activity they are going to undertake each day, a plan to achieve these goals, and a way to measure and monitor their progress.

“Success in direct selling begins with an effective prospecting system that is consistently and rigorously applied every day whether or not you feel like doing it.”—David Shipper

TO REACH YOUR GOALS YOU MUST HAVE A DAILY PLAN (p. 5-6)
Setting a goal does not guarantee reaching a goal. Your goals must be broken down into daily activities. It is only what you accomplish in a given day that leads you one step closer to reaching your goals for the week, month, quarter, and year.

Understanding the simple, yet powerful, qualities of having a daily plan and following that plan is one of the secrets of success. To be empowered to create a plan and follow that plan, requires a firm commitment to a clearly defined goal. It is for the attainment of our goals, that we make our plans.

“The top 3 percent of high achievers are all persistent, continuous planners. They are forever writing and rewriting their list of goals and activities. They think on paper and are continually analyzing and reevaluating their plans.—Brian Tracy, Time Power

Goals, like having a system, are essential elements for success. Your role, as the sales manager, is to ensure that your sales team develops the behaviors that lead to the desired outcomes. The goal planner is an excellent tool to help you achieve these goals. Failing to explain the power of goals, in our view, is a disservice to your sales team. By not helping your people go through the process of setting goals and determining what to every day, you are not fulfilling your role.

Properly set goals, give people a sense of direction, create a healthy tension, and give a sense of accomplishment each day. Remember, “Confused people don’t act; setting goals tells people what they need to accomplish every day.”

WARNING!
If you tell your people that this book is important and you don’t make it important, it will never be important. If it is not important to you, it will not be important to them. What do we mean by these statements? Read on.

It is absolutely imperative that you review these goal planners on a very regular basis. Daily? For some, yes. Weekly? For others, perhaps. Monthly? Never! If you only look at this planner once a month, even with your most successful salesperson, 1/12th of the year is gone! Thirty today’s are now yesterdays! You will be creating the wrong system. The System says, “selling is an every day business.” If a sales manager isn’t managing their business every day, failure is a strong possibility.

The PGP: Let’s Begin (p. 7-9)
You will find on page two of the PGP, a place to define the long-term goal. This process allows you to break the long-term goal down into what needs to be accomplished for the mid-term (monthly) and what needs to be achieved in the short-term (daily).

Once this process is completed, a counselor will know what they need to do each day to be where they need to be at the end of the week. They will then realize what they need to accomplish each week to be where they need to be by the end of the month. They will then understand what they need to do each month to know where they want to be at the end of the quarter.

And yes, you guessed it by now, by knowing what they need to do at the end of each quarter they will understand how to reach their goal for the year.

Today becomes yesterday in just twenty-four hours. If a salesperson is not effective today, if they don’t capture the results of today, it will be tomorrow in just twenty-four hours and today magically becomes yesterday.

CAN’T I HAVE A GREAT YEAR?
Yet, how do they get where they want to be for the year? Only by doing what they need to do every day. Selling is an every day business. Salespeople must do what they need to do every day or they will never reach their goal by the end of the year. They must understand that if you don’t use today effectively, today soon, very soon, turns into yesterday. And you can’t do anything with yesterday, no matter how many of them you have.

Click here for printable version