How to Close the Gap Between Sales Goals and Results: The Ultimate Guide to Doing the Work

To achieve extraordinary sales results, commit to the work others are unwilling to do.

If you want results, first you have to do the work.

You can have any result you want, provided you're willing to pay the price in advance. This is obviously a sales blog, so we talk a lot about sales here, but the same is true in leadership and management, productivity, and personal success. People come here to learn about all of these topics. But let’s talk about doing the work, because that's the most important thing.

If you want new opportunities and new sales, begin by doing the work of researching, identifying, and targeting your dream clients. Your value prop is going to resonate perfectly with a particular set of clients. They're going to look at you through the lens of their problem and recognize that you can get them from where they are to the future that they want. But you have to do the work of nurturing those clients. And I can't tell you how many people aren't prospecting because they haven't done the work of making a list of who their dream clients are, identifying the stakeholders within that client account, and making the calls. They haven't done that work, so they make no calls.

If you're already nurturing your clients and you're not getting the result, it's because there's a lot of noise out there . Among the popular claims are that inbound marketing is enough, social selling is enough, and you need to build a brand to where people come to you. In truth, there aren’t 600 salespeople in your market right now that have clients beating down their door because they've established a brand on social selling. That's content marketing. It’s above the funnel and it's important, but it’s a long-term play. Establish a good LinkedIn profile and do the work on social to connect with people, but don’t rely on that to hit your goals.

Short-Term Sales Strategy ➔ Why Outbound Sales Should Be Your First Priority

Short term, you have to create opportunities every single day, and if they're not coming in at the level you need from inbound, then you move to outbound. In fact, you should put outbound first. This means you make the calls. If you're not making the calls, you can't expect to have the appointments to build the pipeline you need. Opportunity creation comes before opportunity capture. The work of opportunity capture includes controlling the process, creating value for your buyer at every stage, collaborating with them to build a solution that they can say yes to, and building consensus inside their organization. Capturing opportunities means reviewing ideas and asking for investments. It's all the things that allow you to be a value creator and a trusted advisor. If you're not doing that work, you can't expect to win. And you can't expect to have opportunities to capture if you're not doing the work to create them.

Bridging the Gap Between Goals and Outcomes ➔ How to Close the Gap Between Your Sales Goals and Actual Results

Most of the time, if there's a gap between the results you want and the results you're generating right now, that gap is going to be closed by doing the work necessary to produce the outcomes. This is the way it works: You've got a financial KPI you're shooting for. Sometimes this is a quota or your company’s KPI, but closing the gap between your current performance and your desire results rests should be based on your own personal KPI of “this is what I want to make, this is what I want to earn, this is the lifestyle that I want to choose for myself and my family.” Achieving that KPI requires certain outcomes. In sales that means you're having client meetings, you're developing and delivering solutions, you're presenting, you're resolving concerns, you're controlling the process, and you're having those meetings.

That's the work that actually goes into that. And there are other KPIs that each have their own work and outcomes. Listen, if you're not getting the outcomes you want, then you have to look at your activity, something no one wants to talk about. Salespeople don't want to talk about a lack of activity, and, unfortunately, neither do their sales managers. But activity always precedes outcome. If you're not generating your professional outcomes, you're not going to get the financial outcomes you want for yourself. That means you need to look at your activity and ask:

• Who do I need to nurture?
• What relationships do I need to develop?
• Who do I need to call to get an appointment?
• Who has the kind of problems that I can solve?
• How can I get in front of them and start creating opportunities?”

Then, work through the process of capturing those opportunities because that's what it takes to succeed.

If you're not getting the result you want, it's not because you're not good enough. I'm sure you are. It's not that you can't learn to do these things. It’s not that there's a shortage of information that prevents you from figuring out how improve some of these things. It’s because you're not willing to do the work. Be willing to do the work, and be willing to outwork anyone else. Because if you're being out-hustled that's a choice.