What To Do When You Miss Your Sales Goals

For more than 20 years, I’ve coached business owners and their leadership teams to achieve their goals and see tangible results. Since I’ve been in the business for over 2 decades, I’ve seen all the ups and downs, and not hitting your sales goals is a very common issue. While this is frustrating and disappointing, these setbacks can provide valuable insights and along with your EOS tools, you and your team can get your company back on track toward growth and success.

Reflecting On Missed Goals

There’s no doubt about it – missing your sales goals doesn’t feel good. However, focusing on the negative and beating yourselves up is unproductive and unhealthy, and can even cause “learned helplessness” among your team, which ultimately just leads to more failure. EOS gives your team the space and tools not only to meet and discuss how and why you fell short but also how to make sure it doesn’t happen again. To begin the process of improvement, it’s essential to evaluate your sales situation objectively. Here are some tips on how to do just that:

Dig Into the Data

Dive deep into your sales data, metrics, and customer feedback to gain a comprehensive understanding of what went wrong. Identify the specific areas where your sales performance fell short and pinpoint any external factors that might have influenced the outcomes.

Reflect and Learn

Honest reflection is key to understanding the factors that led to missed sales goals. Review your sales processes, strategies, and the effectiveness of your sales team. Consider whether there were any internal or external challenges that affected your performance. Engage in open and transparent communication with your team to gather insights and feedback.

Identify Improvement Areas

With a clear understanding of the challenges, it’s time to identify the specific areas for improvement. This could involve refining the sales strategy, enhancing the client’s sales team, or optimizing processes to overcome bottlenecks. By collaboratively identifying improvement areas, your team can align their efforts toward the business’s shared vision and goals.

Remember: The past is the past, we learn from it, then let it go. The rest is about the future.

Leveraging EOS Tools for Success

EOS offers a powerful set of tools to help you analyze and improve your business as a whole. Here are the best ones to revisit to help improve sales performance:

1. V/TO: Revisit and refine your business’s vision, long-term goals, and sales targets. Clarify your ideal customer profile and develop a compelling strategy to reach your sales goals – don’t forget your marketing! More specifically, the 4 parts of your Marketing Strategy: Target Market, 3 Uniques, Proven Process, and Guarantee. Get the entire team 100% aligned on these, then communicate it to everyone. You want everyone to know exactly who to send to you, and what message they should use to attract your customers to you.
2. Accountability Chart: Review your organizational structure and ensure that you have the right people in the right seats. Clarify roles, responsibilities, and performance expectations for each team member. Does 100% of your sales team GWC (get, want, capable to do) their seat? Once you get this, you’ll see exponential improvement.
3. Scorecard: With the right Scorecard metrics, you can proactively anticipate problems within your business before they actually happen. Use your Scorecard to keep laser-focused on what your goals are right now and make sure everyone knows their numbers and is working toward hitting them. Once you establish the perfect scorecard for your team, you’ll be able to answer big questions like:
   1. Is your sales team focused on the right activities to produce your desired results?
   2. Are they generating enough leads?
   3. Creating enough demands?
   4. Converting enough opportunities into orders?
4. L10s: Take advantage of the face-to-face time with your coworkers your weekly meeting affords you. Go deeper and discuss specific challenges, successes, and solutions to different issues. Some topics that might come up include:
   1. Is there a disconnect between what is being produced or delivered to the customer and what is being sold?
   2. Does the marketing and sales team need additional resources, collateral or support to be successful?

As a business operating on EOS, you and your team have the power to identify the reasons behind missed sales goals and implement effective strategies for improvement. Remember – progress over perfection. Even if you follow all these tips, it’s not guaranteed that you’ll hit your goal next quarter, but keep with it. As long as you see a positive change and you’re making progress, you’re moving in the right direction to hit your goals.

If your sales goals are consistently not being met, contact me! You and your team may benefit from some guidance from your EOS Implementer to help you figure out how to finally hit those goals.