If you set goals that you don’t have direct control over, you will fail.
Here’s a delusional goal: “This quarter, we’re going to increase profits by 10%.”
If that’s all you’ve written down, achieving it will be a matter of luck. Unless you’re going out picking people’s pockets, you don’t have direct control over your profits. You can’t actually reach into their wallets and extract the money you need to hit that goal.
Here’s a much smarter way of accomplishing the same thing. Let’s say you need to make an extra 10K to achieve that profit goal. Let’s say it takes your sales team an average of five sales calls to make 1K.
According to that math, you’d need your sales team to make 50 additional calls to meet your profit goal. So, instead of writing down a vague goal you have no control over, you write down “This quarter, we’re going to make 50 more sales calls than last quarter.”
Doesn’t that sound a lot more meaningful and achievable than the delusional goal?
