2015 is nearly at the halfway point. Are you on track for your revenue numbers? You should be monitoring your activity performance weekly and reporting on it monthly. Now is the time to review your activity and reports to determine if your sales strategy and your marketing strategy are delivering on the goals you set for the year. Where are you now? Are you on track? Forget about that pie in the sky ‘elephant’ deal you carried in your pipeline for the last six months based purely on hope. Hope is not a course of action, and it will not move you closer to your dreams. In fact, if left to itself, hope withers and dies. It must be nurtured with thoughtful plans and meaningful activity that moves the needle forward toward accomplishment of important goals. In the 1937 classic, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill outlined 17 traits of great achievers. The hardest trait for most people to implement, especially sales people, is Accurate Thinking. Many sales representatives allow misplaced optimism cloud their pipelines with hopeful deals that have no basis in fact. It is much more useful to apply a harsh and purely pragmatic set of standards to your sales pipeline, cut out the wishful deals, and focus all of your time, attention and energy on the few deals that are left. Whenever I make this suggestion to clients, I always get push back. However, the few who take my advice prove the strength of focus by closing more of what they would have if they continued to spread their focus across a few poor prospects. If you focus on improving the top traits of your sales people it will help improve their results over time.
