In today’s show we are going to teach you the "secret sauce" to sales management success. And probably as you are listening to this or as you saw this on iTunes you are thinking, "What the heck is he talking about on this one??"

It’s not a secret, but goal setting, and goal setting specifically used in the right way as a sales manager is the absolute secret sauce to you getting the best from your sales people to achieve ultimate sales success to you getting the best from your sales people.

What we are really talking about is goal setting; goal setting specifically for your sales people, not for you as a sales manager or a trainer.

I think we all know how important goals are. Probably a lot of us have been to goal setting workshops. We realize that setting goals is an important part of success.

The crazy and sad things is, not a lot of us actually do it. We want career success and personal success and happiness, those sorts of things. But do we actually put pen to paper and write out goals specific to the end we want to achieve?

Most of us don’t.

There have been hundreds of studies on the importance of goal setting. But one study quoted most often was a study done at in 1979 the Harvard University Business School.

Interviewers asked new graduates from Harvard’s MBA program questions about whether or not they had goals. And they found out that 84% of the graduating class had not specific goals at all, 13% had goals but had not committed them to paper, and 3% had clear written goals and plans to accomplish them.

Ten years later, at the 10 year reunion, the interviewers again interviewed the graduates of the 1979 class. You can probably guess what the results were:

The 13% who had goals were earning twice as much as the 84% who had no goals at all; obviously a marked improvement.

Even more staggering, the 3% who had clear written goals were earning on average, 10 times as much as the other 97% put together! The staggering quantity of material wealth that had been accumulated from the 3% just by applying the plan that they had put together and also setting specific goals surrounding around personal success and personal wealth.

There is no doubt about it that goal setting is an extremely important activity. But the question is, as a sales manager, do you advocate for your sales people to set goals?

Chances are you probably don’t.

If the percentages are right here, I imagine that about 3-5% of you listening probably have done these sorts of exercise, so kudos to you! If you haven’t, this will be a great show for you.

Why are goals so important? And how do we tie it back to things that we talked about in previous shows?

In previous show we had talked about having the "perfection mindset".

The perfection mindset is about shooting higher than the goals that are set for you.

Meaning that, at 100% of quota, and quota is the great measuring stick, or 100% of plan.

Whatever that goal is, the perfection mindset is about setting a goal for your personal team that is higher than achieving 100% of quota.

This is called the "perfection mindset".

Chances are, if you set your goal just slightly higher than you think that you are capable of achieving, because of the forces of gravity, you’ll have a sales team that is around the 100% mark. If you have half of your team above quota and half of your team just about at quota, chances are you are the top sales manager and your company has achieved the goals that they want for that year.

We have talked about sports figures that have this perfection mindset and shoot for perfection. Achieving excellence is the best way in which to set the tone for your sales team. Goal setting falls right in line with that philosophy.

They key is to have your sales people to give you the steps needed to ensure the successful completion of these goals. They have to set their own personal goals with you as the guiding hand throughout the entire process.

At Sales Management Academy we teach you about goal setting and the art of putting this on paper and making it a written contract between you and your sales person.

We will cover this in future shows.

For our purposes here, we want to get you into the mindset of understanding how important goals and how you can integrate them into your overall philosophy for your sales team.

Why is it that goals work? Everyone knows that they work, but why is it that they work?

This is something that when you are preparing yourself to layout out this goal setting agenda, it is important for you to understand why goals work. This is a big question that I would get whenever we did a goal setting workshop.

Let me ask you, have you ever been flicking through the cable channels on your TV and you come across a movie that looks good, but you have no idea how far along it is, but its pretty good so watch it through to the end? Maybe a few weeks later, you are doing the same thing, flicking through the channels and you come across the same movie again, but this time you catch the movie earlier, if not right at the beginning. And you watch it all the way through, because you enjoyed it so much the first time.

Did you feel the same way the second time around? Were you as wrapped up the action?

Were you sitting on the edge of your sit, as you were the first time you watched the movie? Chances are you weren’t.

This happened to me when I saw the movie "The Departed". It was an extremely intense, action packed movie with Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, and Donny Walberg, and it has an unexpected twist at the end. When I first watched "The Departed" I was really anxious and on the edge of my seat, I caught it half the way through, I had gotten to my hotel room after a long flight, I turned on HBO and there it was. I was unsure as to how the story would unravel.

Like you, I am sure that you are pretty good at figuring out what the ending would be. But with this one I had no idea would the good guys win, or would the bad guys win. The suspense was huge and the plot twists were unexpected. I was totally enthralled. I watched it all the way through to the conclusion.

The second time I watched it, my wife had rented it from Netflix a couple of weeks after that, and it wasn’t nearly as good. The reason was because I was anything but tense. Although I enjoyed watching it the second time, I was relaxed and even indifferent to the plot line. I felt this way because I knew how the movie was going to end. There was no suspense at all.

The reason that goals work is because they do the same thing. By knowing how "your movie ends", it enables you to operate in a far more relaxed manner when you are pursuing the achievement of those goals.

Like when I watched "The Departed" I had already seen the ending, so I was relaxed, I wasn’t tense. I just let it all flow.

When you set goals, you see the future in advance. That is the key to goal setting, especially when you put it down on paper. You are magnetically drawn toward your goals because you have already have seen how the end. It pre-programs your mind for a specific end result.

The goal in getting your sales people to set goals is that after they set them they have seen the future in advance and so they become more relaxed and confident in the goal’s achievement because they have already seen the end of the movie. Your reps behavior becomes automatically self directed while being done with greater ease and confidence.

You know that if you’ve been listening that a sales rep with a great degree of confidence, who feels good and is relaxed and in their element, ultimately sells more.

That confidence and ability to know what the outcome will be allows them to take the necessary actions in a more relaxed and calm way to achieve specific ends.

That is why goals work so well, they pre-program the mind. The mind has already seen the future and you are magnetically drawn towards that end result, which is a specific goal.

In our next show, we will get into how to do this and you as the facilitator to help your salespeople that are not only motivating, but goals that you can use to motivate them, because you are going to make them very personal by using their own words in order to motivate them through this goal setting.

You are probably saying, "I don’t really have time to do all of this stuff. I have all of these things coming at me, I have voicemails, and I have expense reports and administrative tasks that I have to get done…."

Well, this is probably the most important thing that you do as a sales manager or VP of Sales, to help your sales people to set inspiring goals. These inspiring goals should exceed the quota that the company expects from them.

I have spoke to many colleagues who have said that they can’t write goals down because they have so many and they don’t have the time. My response to them is, "If you don’t have time to write down your goals, then when are you going to find the time to accomplish them?"

That is a very important thing for you to realize. Not only should you be setting your own personal goals, but you should be facilitating goal writing for your sales people.

In Part 2 we will get into how to do that.