Don't Limit Your Goals to Your Quota

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Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host, Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how.

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Faster, and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset, goals, time management, and so much more. So thank you for listening, and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready, and let's dive into the good stuff.

What up, everybody? One on one time with kd. So, looking to start doing more solo episodes just to get things that are, you know, on my mind, off my mind, or on my chest? Off my chest. So I can talk to topics that are important to me, but also topics that I feel like are important to y' all as well, because I get asked a lot of questions. And so today's topic is about goals. It's about goals because it's one of these topics that people kind of touch around or it gets brought up, but not a lot of people actually do them. And this is an area that I truly believe is one of the biggest misses in sales and sales leadership is we don't actually do a great job of setting real goals. And by setting real goals, here's what I mean. There are quotas. There are targets. You give someone a quota, you give someone a quota, the quota is set by somebody else. The target is set by somebody else, but a goal is set by the individual. And so often, especially on the sales leadership side, we confuse quota with goal. We assume that everyone's goal is to get to quota, which it could be and maybe even should be. But that's not how goals work. That's why there's no ownership on the individual side on getting there. Right? Because they didn't set it. And so it's very, very important that every individual on the team is setting their own goals. You gotta set your own goals. And there are two main buckets of goals that you want to be setting for people on your team and for yourself. So the first are professional goals. Do you have clearly defined professional goals? So right now I'm talking to you as the individual. Do you have clearly defined professional goals, meaning what you are trying to achieve professionally? And then on the leadership side, do you know what these goals are for all of your people? Because if you don't, what can you motivate them with, how can you hold them accountable to something if you don't know where they're trying to go? And so there's three key parts of professional goals. First, one, do you know to the dollar how much you want to make this year? Do you know to the dollar how much you want to make this year? And it's not because money is the biggest motivator for people. That is actually not the reason. It's because money is required for most of the other goals that are going to show up for people. So the first step is how much money do you want to make, leaders? If you don't know to the dollar what every single individual on your team wants to make, how can you possibly get them there? Because without setting the destination, you cannot create a plan. And my salespeople and sales leaders, please write this down. More is not a number. More often than not, people say they just want to make more money. More is not a number. You need to come up with an actual number. Is it 70k? Is it 100k? Is it 200k, 300k? Because if you don't set the number, you can never find a way to get there. There are plenty of y' all listening right now that have never set that number. And then you wonder why you don't get there. But you might literally be two extra meetings a month away from getting to that income goal. So that's the first part. Do you know to the dollar how much you want to make in your role over the next year? Second, on the professional side, where are you trying to go and grow? What title are you aspiring to? What role are you aspiring to? Do you want to get into leadership? Do you want to get into a team lead role? Do you want to change your promotion path? Right? Like, what title are you pursuing over the next 12 to 18 months? And then the third professional goal is skill. What professional skill would you like to develop over the next year? This is where it all starts, is because these are the things that are going to allow us to get our personal goals. So that's the first step, y', all, professionally. How much do you want to make? How much do you want to make? To the dollar. To the dollar, y', all, Monthly or annually, Whatever you prefer. How much you want to make? Where are you trying to go and grow? What title are you looking to get? What? What role are you trying to be in the next year? And third, skills, my leaders. Listening. You need to get this for every single one of the people on your team. You have to have that. Because once you have that, then we can shift over to personal goals. To personal goals. Now, if you ask most people, what do you think motivates people more? Professional goals or personal goals? Most people will probably say personal goals. But then what do we spend 99% of our time talking about professional goals? And even then, we may not even know the professional goals. We're just talking about quotas and targets. So our goal as great leaders is to connect the dots between professional goals and personal goals. Because if you ask most people some of their personal goals, you're going to hear a lot of things like this. Buy a new home or get the vacation home, pay off debt, you know, be financially secure, which isn't a real answer, like financially secure. Then you have to ask, well, how much money money would you need to have that they want to save, they want to be able to retire their parents, they want to take a vacation, get that new car, get the watch, whatever else. As you can see, all of those things do require a certain level of money or performance because there's one on the personal side that sometimes gets brought up, which is like work, life, balance. Well, beautiful, right? How much would you need to be making to feel like you didn't have to run yourself into the ground, right? Or as a leader, hey, as long as your performance is above X or Y or Z, I don't care. You could work two days a week. Doesn't matter to me, right? Let's define what the performance is. But now we can connect the dots because so often, y', all, in sales, we tell our salespeople to do great discovery on our prospects, but then we never do great discovery on our people. We never do great discovery on our people. We don't know their pain points. We don't know the impact they're trying to have and or achieve. We don't know what good looks like for them. We don't come up with a mutual action plan. We don't do any of the same things we do in discovery as for our prospects, as we do for our people. Because now we can connect the dots. Say someone wants to buy a home. Let's do proper discovery here, y'. All. When do they want that home? How much is that home going to cost? How much of a down payment are they going to need? What is the mortgage going to be? How much would they need to be making in order to have the down payment ready to by X date? Now we're connecting the dots between their professional goals, how much they want to make in their performance to their personal goals. Your performance being this will help you get what you want outside of work. This is why goals are so important. And this is why every year, my teams, two times a year, we did goal setting. Two times a year off the floor, off the phones, and we went through goals. Because if you don't know where you're trying to go, I can guarantee you won't get there. And then here's where you wrap on goals. Once someone tells you their goals, you have to ask them, what will change by accomplishing that? What will change by accomplishing that goal? How will achieving that goal make you feel? What will achieving this goal allow you to do you can't do now? Because this is the reason why they need to hit their goals. Because for most people, they don't ever set a goal. For those that do set a goal, they never come up with a plan. For those that do set a goal and come up with a plan, but then don't stick with it, the number one reason why people don't achieve their goals is they don't have a reason why to achieve their goals. If nothing changes, nothing changes. If you don't feel differently, can't live differently, can't do things differently, there's no reason to accomplish that goal. So that's why goals are so important. You need to have professional goals, income, title, skill, personal goals, lifestyle, vacation, home, how you're living, where you're living, where you're spending your money, and then your reasons why. Once you have those things lined up, you'll be shocked at how much easier it is to motivate, hold people accountable, and most importantly, come up with a plan. So hopefully this was helpful. Y', all, over this next week, set some goals, real goals. We'll talk about how to create a plan for those on another episode. But it starts with the goals. What you're trying to make, why you want to make it, and what that will allow you to do outside of work. So appreciate this one on one with KD wrapping up. See you on the next one.