A goal is a vision of an end result that could or would be produced by an effort. Goals give us directions and milestones throughout our lives. Let’s look at three of the most important types of goals.

Organizationally Directed Goals

Of course the most obvious goals team members have, and the ones that will support the others, are the goals you and the organization have assigned to them. They can be a certain sales revenue attainment, skills development, gross margin attainments, problem resolution success, new territory expansion, product portfolio acceptance, and so forth. If sales professionals are going to be successful in their role, they must meet and exceed these goals. But another reason for achieving these organizationally directed goals is linkage to their other goals in life. What do you know about their other goals?

Personal or Life Goals

What do your team members want out of life? A personal goal could best be described as what a person would like to achieve during his or her lifetime. These goals might include financial security for their offspring, seeing the world, contributing to new knowledge, a certain level of religious attainment, etc. Even if you believe in reincarnation (my views seem to change as I get older), you only have limited chances in this life to achieve your overall personal goal.

Professional or Career Goals

What do team members want out of their careers? This may or may not be tied to the jobs they are currently doing and the company by which they are currently employed. Somewhere in their minds, maybe from a seed generated back in elementary or high school, they have a goal of what they’ve imagined they could be someday. It may be to write a great adventure novel or to open a charter fishing boat service in the Caribbean. Whatever it is, they will either be happy that their present activity supports growth in that direction or frustrated that it presents so many obstacles. You get only two or three chances in a lifetime to achieve professional goals.

If personal goals are dependent on achieving professional goals, we had better pay close attention to what it will take to help people in their career plans. The result, of course, is that they will justifiably feel that we are supportive of everything that’s important to them in life. To help them feel successful, we need to get a few more answers to key questions so that we can develop a career plan, not just a sales plan, for each member of our team.

• What competencies and attributes are required for the achievement of professional goals? What can you do to make your salespeople successful enough to advance toward their professional goal(s)? Up until now we’ve been concentrating on the skills necessary for them to be successful in their current role, but what about preparing them for the future? As their sales manager, you need to have a clear understanding of where they would like to go and what it will take to get them there. Visualize the future role they have in mind, hopefully in partnership with them, and identify the characteristics and competencies required for them to be successful in that future role.

  I’ve even worked with a few firms that knew their direction was going to change and that most of the sales team would be laid off. To their great credit, they invested a great amount of time and financial resources in preparing these individuals to be more successful as they moved on by providing training and experience based on their individual goals. A pretty humane approach, wouldn’t you say?

• Where are they in regard to the required competencies and attributes? After you and your salesperson have identified the competencies required to position them for, and succeed in attaining, a professional goal, determine where they currently are in the particular knowledge or attribute. Do they have only basic understanding or are they well along in skill set development?

• What experience or training will be required to gain these competencies or attributes? Consider what training or experiential activities you might be able to provide that will help them along the path to goal attainment. Of course, this has to be done as an enrichment activity that won’t impact the sales department’s goals.

• What is a reasonable timeline for achieving these competencies? How you structure these goal attainment activities will be dependent on how fast people see themselves reaching their goals. I know of some sales managers who over-loaded an individual by trying to speed up the process when the salesperson had a much slower, longer building-block approach to new competencies.

• What is a reasonable timeline for achieving these goals? For both of your sakes, be sure you have a clear understanding of when your salespeople expect to have absorbed all the competencies required and would like to move on. More than one trust has been damaged by a difference of opinion as to the releaseability (the effect on the organization of the release) of a salesperson to move to another job.

• Are they working toward goal attainment now? If not, get them on it at any pace acceptable. They will be happier, and you will have a greater ability to manage for change