If hope is your strategy to hit your Q4 goals, I am sorry to burst your bubble, but you will need more than that. A strategy with clear, measurable and time-bound goals is the only way to get you to your end result.

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Sales organizations who live by their goals know where they are headed and carve out a path for their team to follow. Having a clear set of goals allows you to see your progress and gives you the framework and confidence to keep going. It also shows you how your efforts fit in and are aligned to the bigger picture. Horizontal and vertical alignment plays a key role in your company’s success.

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Alternatively, you can see when you are off-track, allowing you to pivot and redirect your focus. Goals are a gauge as to how you are performing against expectations. The challenge is without defining “the how”, we are lost. Having an objective is fine, having 3-5 measurable activities that will help us get there is often overlooked. It becomes too daunting of a challenge - we easily abandon or focus on other less important things.

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Here’s a roadmap of 7 steps that provide the framework to better position you to achieve your Q4 goals:

1.  Are you following your company's sales process? Is it up to date? Are there areas you are deviating from or getting bottlenecked? Is it too long? Most importantly, does it reflect the way your buyers buy? If any of these are true you are not being set up for success. This is your road map to success and a crucial part of the selling process.

Your sales process is dynamic; it must be continually updated by your front-line people to reflect your buyers' activities, trends in the industry to ensure a consistent, repeatable process for the entire team.

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2.  Reviewing your sales goals regularly is critical. This ensures they are in fact achievable, account for any changes in the industry and you are taking incremental, actionable steps towards achieving them. Managers must work with all levels of the sales organizations to understand what their top and core performers are doing to create successful outcomes. Promote peer learning, share their updates with their team.

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3.  Self-awareness is the first step towards improvement After every sales call, complete a self-assessment document. What did you do well? what could you have done better? What did you learn? Complete this exercise while the information is fresh in your mind, it is very valuable. This process will identify patterns, habits and areas of improvement that you can implement into future calls to ensure you are exchanging value for your prospects' time. Following this step, do you have a sales call recording platform? Can you listen or watch a game tape with your manager? This is a powerful exercise, the tape doesn’t lie.

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4.  Support from your manager is important when reviewing your goals. There are certain tasks you may need the support/input from your manager, SVP etc. in order to advance the sale. Make your priorities become their priorities so they too benefit from the outcome. When you hit your goal, they hit their goal.

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5.  Are your goals S.M.A.R.T? Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant & Timebound. If not, make modifications so they become SMART.

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6.  Are you prioritizing goals based on opportunity size, close date, budget / resource allocation, triggers etc.? The gap between your prospects' current state and future state is your opportunity to provide value with your solution. The bigger the gap the more time, energy and resources are required. Plan accordingly, ensure you are meeting them where they are and you can support the entirety of the project.

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7.  Do you have a mentor or another sales Rep / Manager/ Coach you can bounce ideas off, hold each other accountable, and discuss any challenging situations? Do you attend Regional account meetings whereas a group you can share updates on your top accounts?

Many times, your colleagues are experiencing the same challenges you are, why not create an open forum and brainstorm potential solutions as a group. Consider bringing in a customer to get the true experience from the source.

Year-end, this is like New Years. Before you can set your goals for the following year, reflecting on your successes and losses and understanding what contributed to them, what you learned, what you could have done differently is critical. This behaviour will allow you to enter the new year with a new and improved mindset of how you will approach your goals. Leaving the negative patterns, habits in the past.

How are you setting yourself up for Q4 success?

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