With the end of the year coming, there are probably many small business owners and salespeople scrambling to meet sales goals. Additionally there are other professionals who are rushing to complete mandated continuing education units.
Of course, all this scrambling and rushing continues to reveal the ongoing inability to achieve sales and other goals. According to CSO insights in 2016, only 55.8 percent of salespeople achieved their sales goals. This failure to achieve goals is not new and happens every year.
President Dwight Eisenhower said, “Plans are worthless, planning is everything.” His words are reaffirmed in the book, “The E-Myth.” In it, Michael Gerber writes about entrepreneurs not having time to work ON the business because these crazy busy entrepreneurs were working IN the business.
Consistent goal achievement demands an investment of planning time. This planning is working ON the business.
What is missing beyond the SMART criteria (to be discussed in future columns this month) is the ability to understand our own human nature and then leveraging that nature to become successful. Think for a moment about all those failed New Year’s resolutions. Why did they fail?
Possibly those resolutions, aka goals, were a quick fix to a long-term problem? Also, there was probably no emotional investment brought into the goal-setting process.
People are emotional creatures. We act usually first on emotion and then use logic to justify our actions. Our emotional wants usually exceed our practical needs. When we emotionalize the goal, we create an internal desire to achieve the goal.
Then because many people are in a hurry, they fail to think logically. Beyond resources needed or what some others may call critical success factors (what is necessary and sufficient to achieve the goal), there has been no time to identify all known obstacles.
Each failure to identify known obstacles, many of which are based upon past experiences, is costly in terms of dollars.
The best way to think through a goal is with pen and paper. The paper is a goal-setting/goal achievement worksheet that not only states the goal, but brings in emotions, critical success factors and obstacles to be overcome. To work through this goal planning/goal achievement worksheet is an investment of time. Yet as one of my coaches, David Herdlinger, has said, “If you don’t have the time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over?”
Next week’s column will look at the SMART goal criteria and maybe it is time for a 21st century update.
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Leanne Hoagland-Smith is an author, speaker and executive coach. Her weekly column explores issues that impact the bottom line of firms with fewer than 100 employees. She can be reached at 219-508-2859.