Why Most Goals Are Set Up to Fail
Most people are setting the wrong sales goals, and it’s costing them. Too many sales teams and individual sellers fixate on big revenue targets, or worse, let someone else set the bar, without ever thinking through the actions it takes to get there.
If the goal isn’t tied directly to daily habits, it isn’t a goal. It’s just a hope.
Break Your Goals Into Action
Sales goals that measure only the end result are setting you up for disappointment. The number (monthly, quarterly, or yearly) isn’t magic. To hit it, focus on the activities that actually generate business.
There are three buckets to pay attention to:
- Recurring Revenue
Business from current customers, month after month. - New Revenue from Existing Customers
Maybe a new product line, a referral, or a new department you’ve been introduced to. - New Customers
Not every new customer deserves the same effort. Some are a one-time deal, others could deliver value for years. Treat them accordingly.
If you’re not tracking the specific actions you control: calls you make, meetings you book, referrals you ask for, don’t be surprised when “the number” slips.
“I can’t achieve my volume number unless I do the actions.”
Success Loves Specificity
One of the most dangerous habits in sales? Setting too many goals. The temptation is to have ten, fifteen, even twenty. But only two or three actually move the needle. Zero in on what you can repeat every single day.
Activity is the currency of sales.
Daily activity rolls up to weekly, monthly, and eventually annual numbers.
“Your goals, your actions need to be created based on the activity that you can achieve, you can do each day.”
Don’t Let Others Define Success
It’s easy to drift when surrounded by mediocrity. When a sales team relies on team goals instead of personal accountability, complacency wins.
Peer groups matter. Surround yourself with other high performers inside or outside your organization. Raise each other’s standards. But at the end of the day, your goals must belong to you.
Corporate sets the target. Winners set higher personal standards and build action plans to exceed them.
“Don’t allow others to set your goals for you. Now, they may set a number for you, and yeah, I gotta achieve that number, but you set your goals.”
Seasonality Is Not an Excuse, It’s a Tool
Not every quarter is the same. Every industry has busy seasons, so identify them and double activity where possible. Don’t split goals evenly over twelve months just because it’s easier for reporting. Be smart. When the heat is on, ride the wave. When prospects disengage, make up for it with extra action early in the cycle.
Start Small, Build Momentum
If this is new, start with goals you know you can hit. Build confidence, build habits, and build momentum. Once you’re in motion, stay in motion. Activity brings confidence, and confidence brings results.
Momentum isn’t luck, it’s the product of consistent action. Give referrals, ask for referrals, set measurable expectations around productive habits.
Own the Process
End-of-quarter panic comes from a lack of routine, a lack of breakdown, and a lack of ownership. Don’t let that be you. Break your goals down, focus on actions, not just outcomes. This way you set yourself up to not just hit, but crush the number every time.
The most successful salespeople are those who build their own standard and connect it to real, daily actions. That’s the only way to guarantee the right results.
Mark Hunter :
It’s time for us to have a conversation about why most sales goals should not be sales goals. Yes, this is going to be controversial, and it applies to you, the salesperson, and you, the sales leader. And the show begins right now. You’re listening to the Sales Hunter Podcast with Mark Hunter, where the focus is to help you as a sales leader sell with confidence and integrity. And now here’s your host. Hey, I love sales goals. I love goals. I am a very goal-driven person, but let me tell you something.
Mark Hunter :
The vast majority of people are not focused on the right goals because they haven’t set— well, that’s the reason they don’t accomplish what they set out to accomplish. So here’s the whole thing. We always say that sales goals should focus on revenue. Now, I’m not saying that’s not correct. That is correct, but at the end of the day, it’s profit. So if you’re a solopreneur, you’re gonna have to look at that a little bit differently. So I’m— but I’m not gonna go down that rabbit trail. What I wanna talk about is We set sales goals, we set volume goals.
Mark Hunter :
It’s a number goal for a quarter or a month or a year, whatever it might be, but we don’t break them down. You see, we have to break them down. Now, whether or not you’re a sales leader or a solopreneur, you’ve got to break them down into the actions. So you got to ask yourself, okay, I may have a goal to have X amount of volume, but okay, now I’ve got to set smaller goals around the activities. That I need to be doing? What are the actions that I need to do to be able to get to that number? Those are really the more important goals. Those are the goals that are gonna make my number. You see, I can’t achieve my volume number unless I do the actions. So what I want you to do is, is I want you to look at the actions and activities.
Mark Hunter :
Now here’s the deal. This is where I think people go wrong. Get to the end of the quarter and they’ve missed their number and they start blaming everything else going around them. Oh, I was just in a meeting the other day and a number of salespeople were complaining about the fact that they were missing their numbers and they were blaming everything under the sun. Hey, unless you have a dominant share of the marketplace, I mean, like a 90 share of the market, There’s, there’s upside. Don’t go sitting there blaming around other things. So this means what you gotta do is you gotta break it down. And I want you to look at your goals in 3 different ways.
Mark Hunter :
One, there’s recurring revenue. In other words, it’s recurring revenue that you’re getting from existing customers. Okay. Then there’s new revenue you’re getting from existing customers. That’s right. New revenue, because the new revenue that, that they have they are bringing to you because of new products you’re coming out with, or they’ve introduced you to a new division, or they’ve referred you to somebody else. So existing customers, huge source. And then there’s new customers.
Mark Hunter :
And I probably have to break down my new customers into a couple different ways. I may have to break down new customers into what are the new customers that are going to be just a solo, you know, a single sale, and which ones could be a long-term sale. In other words, looking at the lifetime value. Now again, I’m going down a little bit of a rabbit trail, But I’m doing this for a very specific reason because it’s too easy to be too broad and therefore they’re not actionable. Now, okay, you may have said, Mark, you just contradicted yourself. And I did a little bit and I did that very intentionally because here’s the whole thing. You have to understand where your business comes from. That’s how you’re going to determine what your goal should be.
Mark Hunter :
Now remember, your goals should only be those activities that lead to business or those activities that help you achieve your goals. In essence, it’s the same thing, right? I’ve talked about this ad nauseam, but what I’ve got to do is I’ve got to make sure that I’ve got that. Now here’s what I’m going to challenge you to do. If you were in an organization, you’re undoubtedly lumped in with other salespeople. And it’s amazing how if there are other people dragging the organization down, It’s amazing how the entire organization drags down. If there are a couple of people flying sky high, it’s amazing how it lifts. You see, now you got to be careful about who you are benchmarking yourself against. I believe that every salesperson should have a peer group.
Mark Hunter :
For some of you, your peer group are your peers that you work with. But for some of you, your peer group are people outside of your company. Or if you’re a solopreneur, then everybody’s outside your company. But you’ve got to have a peer group. Why? Because the peer group, let’s not kid ourselves, nobody gets into sales unless they’re competitive. Nobody gets into sales unless they’re driven. And what I have found is that the more I surround myself with people who are incredibly driven, that’s why I do my other podcast, Sales Logic, with Meredith Elia Powell, because she’s incredibly, incredibly driven. And she’s helped raise me.
Mark Hunter :
And she would say that, Marc, you’ve helped raise me. And this is the whole thing that It’s absolutely imperative that we have that peer group. Now, that leads to another problem because too many times what happens is we wind up creating team numbers, especially, you know, if your peer group is within your company, you have a team number. I work with a lot of companies where they set the numbers and it’s kind of the team, because the team gets it and everybody gets it. The problem is that almost rewards mediocrity. It really does. It really does. And I used to be in an organization that it was basically team.
Mark Hunter :
In other words, the whole district had to achieve the number, and then we got a payout based on our base compensation. Unfortunately, that does not create opportunities. So what you have to do is you have to say, what are my individual goals? What are my numbers? I may not be compensated on it today. But what it’s going to do is going to reward you long-term because it’s going to create more opportunities either in the company or somewhere else. So I— what I’m talking about is you’ve got to be breaking your goals down. But now here’s the whole key thing. Don’t set goals across everything. I have worked with people who have set, you know, 10, 20, 30 goals.
Mark Hunter :
That’s too many. I may have goals I may have 10 goals, but there’s really 2 that drive everything or 3 that drive everything. That’s what I want to get to. And those are the activities. Those are the actions. You see, at the end of the day, they’ve got to be connected to daily activity. You see, your goals, your actions need to be created based on the activity that you can achieve, you can do each day. And you summarily roll that up and it becomes your weekly number, your monthly, your quarter, your annual.
Mark Hunter :
And that’s so true because what I see happening is that too many people set goals. And what happens is they set a number, but they don’t break it down. And then they get into the 4th quarter and they go, wait a minute, I’m going to miss my number. They get into week 11 and 12 of a 13-week quarterly number and they go, I’m not making my number. Again, you have to break this down. And what I’m going to challenge you Is look at your volume breakdown and don’t break it down evenly. Don’t, because not every quarter is equal. I see this all the time.
Mark Hunter :
There is seasonality in every business. Now you say, Mark, is this running counter to what you said earlier when you don’t blame the economy? Don’t blame me. Yes, it does. But why not ride Ride the wave, ride the wave. If you have more momentum, more seasonality in your industry in the first quarter, then you need to make sure that a bigger percentage of your number is there. Or if it’s the third quarter or whatever it is, and you gotta look at things that are macro, like the fourth quarter, the fourth quarter, and what I mean the fourth quarter, October, November, December. There’s a lot of holidays in there, and it naturally creates probably disengagement time when people who you want to try to reach aren’t available. Same thing happens in the 3rd quarter in terms of July and August, depending on where you are in the country, where you are in the world in terms of holidays.
Mark Hunter :
You’ve got to take the— so these are the whole things. And so what you do is you may not be able to change your quarterly number, but you change the activities. I’m going to challenge you that maybe at the start of the 4th quarter, You’ve got to double down on the number of appointments you have, the number of contacts that you have, the number of meetings you have, because you know that when you get late in the quarter, you can’t have them. See, this is called breaking your goals down into controllable actions, and this is what’s so important. Don’t allow other people to set your goals. Yeah, don’t allow. I love that. I don’t care if you work for corporate America, I don’t care.
Mark Hunter :
Don’t allow others to set your goals for you. Now, they may set a number for you, and yeah, I gotta achieve that number, but you set your goals. You set, and at the end of the day, your goals, your actions, your activities are to roll up to a sum that is greater than what your company has set for you. Every high performer I have a chance to coach does just that. You set your number to ultimately allow you to achieve something far greater. Here’s why this is so important. If, for instance, you fall a little bit short in your personal goals, you still make the company number. That is key.
Mark Hunter :
That’s key. Yeah. But chances are you’re going to wind up achieving your own personal goals, your personal actions, your personal activities, and you’re going to surpass that. Here’s what I found. When people begin setting personal goals for themselves, personal actions that are going to roll up, they tend to overstate. Don’t overstate. I want you to set numbers. If this is your first time doing this, set numbers that you can easily achieve.
Mark Hunter :
And then you build your way into it. You build your way into it because momentum creates momentum. I see this so often. Again, I was with some salespeople and they were commenting about how business is slow because for this particular industry, they were really dealing on prospecting. But they said they find something interesting that as they create momentum prospecting, it just creates more momentum. And the more momentum comes 2 ways. One, they just feel better about calling. They feel better about reaching out.
Mark Hunter :
They feel better about engaging. They feel better about doing those things. And 2, for some reason, it just creates more business. I see this time and time again. This is why I say you have to set a goal number around referrals. You know, I have a personal goal that I give 3 referrals every week. Every week I give 3 referrals. And you know what’s interesting is I’ve been doing this for a long time.
Mark Hunter :
It’s amazing the number of referrals I get back. Yes. I love it. I love it. Hey, we’ve been talking about, are your goals set right? And I want you to have a deep-seated conversation with you because if you don’t, you’re going to wind up achieving somebody else’s goals and you’re never going to achieve who you are. Hey, I’m Mark Hunter, The Sales Hunter. Check out my new book, Integrity First Selling. CEOs are loving it.
Mark Hunter :
I get more comments back from CEOs about how much they love the book Hmm, maybe that’s rubbing some people the wrong way down in the trenches. I don’t know. But do me another favor, would you? Share this podcast with somebody else and leave me a review. If you download this on Spotify or Apple, just leave a review real quick, would you? I’m Marc Hunter, The Sales Center. 2 episodes a week, one like this where we do a single topic dive. Second episode is where I take a subject matter expert and we have a great conversation. I do the podcast for one reason, to help you see and achieve what you didn’t think was possible. And hopefully I’m doing just that today.
Mark Hunter :
Great selling.
