6/19/2025-Tighten your Q3 goals

How’s Q3 looking? …for both your revenue quota and your skills goals?

As you prepare for another 90-day combat term, remember the classic sales mantra: manage your performance, not your results.

"Results" is represented by your quota goal. Your performance relates to your activity goals…and that’s where you focus on your skills.

By now your manager has dropped your Q3 revenue quota on your head, but today and this week should be spent solidifying your Q3 skills goals.

Today, work on your account and skill goals for Q3…get ’em locked-n-loaded this week. Ensure that you include specific measurement metrics for each.

Which of your top accounts needs a specific goal to stretch you? Is "Grow ACME by 20% in Q3" a big enough goal?

And which skill do you want to improve? Pick one! Probing? Listening? Qualifying? Revenue projecting? Objection handling?

Write the specifics down for both your key account(s) and skill.

A goal without a timeline is just a dream.

Goals are essential, but measurement is the glue. To become good at goal-setting, you must use the SMART measurement framework.

SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Against each goal, write a few sentences for each SMART criterion.

The most straightforward criterion to complete is the last one, T for Time-bound. Since these are 90 days goals, your deadline is already set as the end of Q3. To better help your attempts to complete your SMART work, ask yourself, "Specifically, what does success look like for each of these goals on September 30?"

The S in SMART is for Specific – and that speaks for itself.

Measurable is crucial because if you can’t measure your goal, how will you know you are successful? Create metrics for success that you can use to understand progress.

Achievable refers to those above of creating goals you can hit yet will push you a bit too. This part is a little art vs. science.

And Relevant is simply making sure your plan aligns with your job function and what your department is doing in the big picture.

Setting and working towards goals is not hard, but it can be intimidating because of the fear of failure. However, nobody anywhere said goals should be unreachable. The truth is just the opposite. Goal setting is about establishing accomplishments that can be attained. Success, not failure, is the objective. You can expect there will be some failures. (You don’t close every deal, do you?) Nevertheless, failure is what makes learning so valuable.

In this clip from the cult-classic Office Space, Peter describes how he works – or in his case, how he doesn’t work. Yet, he helps us remember a healthy goal-setting thought process….

1. Thinking about goals: gooood!

2. Writing goals down: NOW you’re talking.

3. Measuring goal achievement regularly throughout the quarter: WHOA baby! You go…!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgg9byUy-V4