I was talking to a client last week who was feeling defeated because his team was not meeting every goal he had set out for the year. I get it, good sales leaders hate to lose and should be upset when they don’t deliver the number. But this is a very strong team, delivering strong performance. And they keep setting tough goals in lots of different areas. They have a big vision for where they are going! They aren't going to be able to hit every goal, every time.
If you are properly challenging yourself and your team, you will miss some of what you are aiming for. You certainly don’t want to miss everything, all the time—that’s not what I am encouraging. But the sales leaders in the best organizations understand that vision should always outpace available time and budget. Lock onto that. It’s a powerful truth.
This means that sometimes you won’t be able to pursue all you imagine. To use vision to properly challenge and motivate your team:
- Dream big to cast an inspirational vision.
- Make tough choices about which dreams you will pursue because you can’t do everything.
- Resource the organization correctly in the areas you are pursuing.
- Celebrate the success you achieve.
- Acknowledge where your vision created goals the team couldn’t achieve.
- Don’t celebrate those, but don’t dwell on the failure.
- Break down what happened in those areas where you came up short and get after it again.
And remember, vision should always outpace time and budget.
