Surveys show many companies struggle to hit sales targets and continue to do so. This article explains why this happens so you can avoid the same mistakes.

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Sales Targets – 2 Reasons You Won’t Hit
This Year’s Target
November 27, 2013 by
Iain Swanston – www.iainswanstononline.com
Sales Targets
Hitting Sales Targets should be one of the top goals for any
Professional Sales person, yet survey after survey every year shows
the majority of sales teams in every industry don’t hit sales
targets. Why are so many people struggling to hit sales
targets? Ask any VP of Sales or Business Owner if you can take
their sales team out of the field for sales training and they become
extremely reluctant as their people are so “busy”. If they are all so
busy then why do so many not make their sales targets? Being busy
for most Sales Professionals means they are stuck on the “Hamster
Wheel” of sales, spinning their wheels and going nowhere fast –
here is why.
1) Being Busy is Not the Same as Being Effective
Quite simply there is a huge misunderstanding between being Busy and being
Effective. They are not the same thing and never will be. The Challenger survey by the CEB
of 6,000 Sales Professionals defined “Hard Worker” as one of the five types who excel at
making more sales calls and more sales visits than any of the other types they
surveyed. Their summary however was this person was unlikely to be a top performer. In
Sales more than any other job, it is easy to not only to appear to be busy, but actually be
busy. The problem however is many Sales Professionals are not hitting sales targets, because
they are simply busy doing the wrong things and or, doing the wrong things at the wrong
times. As discussed in our post on the Top 4 Reasons Companies Don’t Hit Them,
many Sales Professionals simply, a) either do not know or do not employ basic selling
skills, b) move something forward in their sales pipeline or c) move something out of their
sales pipeline. Focus on this for 90 days and remove all the ‘Displacement Activity; and
hitting your sales targets will be easy. To give you an idea of how destructive displacement
activity is (the art of finding something else to do, instead of what you should be doing), I
once had a Field Sales Person confess to cleaning his fridge one morning when working from
home in preference to making sales calls. He was certainly busy, but it was no surprise that
he never hit his sales targets. Some less obvious displacement activity you might want to
check are Sales Professionals writing proposals that never close. Sales Professionals getting
involved in Customer Service, Operations, Finance – in fact they get involved with
everything except closing deals. Lastly, sales people who refuse to follow any sales

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process. These people prefer to “wing it” and revel in not preparing for meetings, not
planning and generally being disorganized.
2) Change – or lack of it.
Change is difficult for everyone, especially sales people, and changing sales behaviors and
techniques are probably the most difficult of all. But unless we change, the laws of
probability tell us that if we didn’t hit our sales target last year, then we won’t hit our target
this year. Unless we change, the chances are we will be doing the same things as last year –
the same things that didn’t work last year. The reality is that the world is changing whether
we like it or not, and we can either choose to embrace change or resist change. The real
question is, “Is Hitting Our Sales Targets important enough to us?” Those that answer “Yes”
are by no means guaranteed to hit their sales targets but they will at least have a
chance. What sales strategies have you changed from last year?
If hitting Sales Targets is truly important to you, simply ask yourself “Are my people and I,
busy or effective and what are we doing different to last year?” Unfortunately when we miss
our sales targets once and then change nothing, we are sending a message to the sales team
that it is acceptable. This is the first step to developing a culture of “satisfactory under
performance”. We need to be so dissatisfied with missing our targets that we take action,
change things, improve things, learn new things, so that we never miss our sales targets
again. This applies to Sales People, Sales Managers, VP’s of Sales and Business
Owners. Take ownership and responsibility for your own actions. Be the one sales person in
the whole team who hits target, be the one Sales Manager whose team hits their target and be
the one Sales VP or Business Owner who bucks the industry trend.
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