“Goals are important, but if you don’t go one step further to figure out what you’re going to have to do to get there, they’re more like wishes.” – Scott Ingram in today’s Tip 343
What is your own goal and planning for 2020?
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Here in this last week of the year, I’m finalizing my own 2020 goals and strategies. What I discovered for myself years ago is that goal setting by itself isn’t really effective for me personally. Maybe you identify with this, maybe you’ve even given up on goal setting because early on in my career I almost did. The way I think about it now is more in terms of habit setting. The goals are great. Goals are important, but if you don’t go one step further to figure out what you’re going to have to do to get there, they’re more like wishes. Even if they’re SMART wishes. For me, I have to break it down to the daily and weekly actions it’s going to take to get there. This year I’m changing it up a little bit more because about a year ago I had my world rocked by a guy named Jack Wilson. If you’ve been listening to this podcast, then you probably know who Jack Wilson is. He’s become a key part of the Sales Success Community, but it was late last year that I interviewed Jack for episode 57 of the Sales Success Stories podcast and he talked about his 2, 4, 6 8 activity plan. That all starts shortly after the 48-minute mark in that episode if you want to check it out because that was the start of what Jack and I have continued to talk about and think about as Minimum Viable Habits. The idea here is to take your goal, let’s take quota for example and define the minimum number of activities required to get there. That’s what Jack’s 2,4,6,8 model was about. It consisted of 2 meetings, 4 networking activities, 6 walk-ins, and just 8 dials. Your approach and your channels or metrics may vary, but the core idea is to define an easily achievable number of daily or weekly activities that if done consistently will virtually guarantee that you’ll get to your goal. Now, this isn’t for your stretch goal, this is the core goal. So again, quota serves as a great example. Psychologically what you want is to be able to look at those habits and think: “that’s easy, I’ve got this,” and allow them to pull you forward. To allow yourself the opportunity to feel like you’re winning, so that when you’re easily nailing those habits, it’s mentally easier to get to consistently starting knocking down 200-300% of these numbers. The end result might feel the same, but I believe it just feels different. For example. Nearly every one of the top 1% level performs I’ve interviewed on Sales Success Stories starts with a goal that’s at least 2 times their number. If you go through that exercise and back into the activity numbers required it can just look and feel daunting. If instead, you take the Minimum Viable Habit approach and ultimately get to the same activity rate that would be 200% of your minimum habits. You’re going to feel like you’re winning. Again comparing the two approaches. Let’s say you’re working on the 2X plan and you have a 90% day. That’s good, but it’s not a win. You might feel a little defeated and that defeat could carry into tomorrow, and quickly it’s a downward spiral. Now you get the same activity results using minimum viable habits, but you achieved 180%. Sure it was a little short of your stretch goal, but it’s still overachieving. My point in all of this is, you’ve got to consider your own psychology and mindset. You have to understand how you’re wired and know what’s going to drive you. For me, it’s the idea of consistently overachieving. That positive feeling tends to carry over into other things like the outcomes that I’m getting from my meetings because my head is right and I’m not starting out feeling even just a little bit defeated. The way I’m personally translating most of that this year, from a habit perspective, is into the number of scheduled conversations I’m having, and while the goal is predominantly daily I’ll measure it on a weekly basis because I know there will be days that I’m on the road, or otherwise completely consumed where I’m not going to be able to get it done. So again, achieving and overachieving consistently on a weekly basis is going to feel better than measuring things on a daily basis when I know for a fact I’m going to have misses based on things that are out of my control. The other big measurement I’m applying, and this is going to bleed over into another tip that I have for you tomorrow, but I’m excited about the metric is what I’m calling my 10X Ironman goal. Again, if you’re been a regular listener to the show this year you’ll know that I did a Triathlon over the Summer. What you may not know is that I’ve done a pretty good job of maintaining those activities since and as I look at 2020 I thought it would be fun to measure my Triathlon training efforts in Ironmans. For those who aren’t familiar an Ironman consists of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike followed by a Marathon or 26.2 miles Run. My goal for 2020 is to cover 10 times that distance in training over the course of the year. So 24 miles swimming, 1120 miles cycling and 262 miles running. It’s very achievable when you break it down into daily and weekly activity levels, and also provides for a fun metric. So if we cross paths later in the year you can ask how many Ironmans I’ve completed so far. I suppose a little public accountability with a few thousand of your favorite podcast listeners never hurt either.
Hopefully, there was a helpful element or two in this for you as you do your own goal setting and planning for 2020. Tomorrow I’m going to talk a little bit more about the exercise and mental elements and then next Tuesday, that’ll be the morning of Christmas Eve actually, I’m going to share another presentation from the 2018 Sales Success Summit on the Sales Success Stories podcast feed that Trey Simonton and David Weiss presented that’s all about territory and pipeline management. It’s a great goal setting primer and I think you’ll get a lot out of it.
Thanks for subscribing, thanks for listening and come on back tomorrow for another great sales tip!