The All-Year Resolution

New Year’s resolutions don’t work, plain and simple. Whether it be socially, psychologically, or neurologically, there are many reasons, and they all contribute to why they don’t work. When it comes to the sales hustle, the reasons can be boiled down to two root causes—habit and goal orientation.

CREATURES OF HABIT

In sales, having a resolution is great, but they need not only come at the New Year, and in fact, they shouldn’t. The journey between being a good salesperson to a great sales professional is knowing how to set goals, how to use them to improve, and how to achieve them.

We all know someone who wants to get better at things all the time—play a new instrument, learn a new language, do CrossFit—but they always peter out after a few weeks. It was boring, it was too hard, I wasn’t seeing any improvement. They claim they were patient; they simply weren’t seeing results. Their issue lay in their habit.

New Year’s resolutions are operating under the guise that with the turn of an arbitrary date, some new powers must enter the world that will change our nature and how we approach our goals. Humans, however, are not creatures of change. We are creatures of habit.

Think about your sales processes. Hopefully, by now you know that finding success in sales comes from having a repeatable process—a habit—that you continually fine-tune, improving bit by bit. The same can be said of creating a change in sales habits. Do it bit by bit. For example, maybe you have a resolution to hit five million dollars in revenue this year.

How do you make this resolution work? You don’t make it once a year, and you don’t let that be the only goal you set. Of all the companies I have worked with, the best have resolutions throughout the year. None of them have one giant overhaul to start a new calendar and suddenly go from lousy to greatness. Greatness can’t be rushed.

In learning to create a habit of year-long resolutions, you learn professional sales patience. This sales patience is the best way to improve your habit of setting resolutions, aspects of your craft (e.g., changing your questioning, learning when it’s time to leave a deal), and your pipelines and relationships. Rushing for one giant resolution never works—patience does. But this means knowing what patience is.

Waiting idly is not patience—it’s negligence. Patience is concentrated effort and smart planning. Sometimes patience is knowing that a deal can be closed quickly, but it’s also recognizing when things will require more time.

THE ITALIAN GUIDE

I recently heard about a success story that explains this perfectly. A man on a small island off Italy has a boutique hotel that is an extreme success. He has a business he loves working in, a hotel he is proud of, and he makes enough money to pay his bills and then some. The thing is, this hotel was not some New Year’s resolution, not even an overnight idea quickly put into action. His hotel took EIGHT years to set up before it ever hosted a single guest. EIGHT. In eight years, most people would have started ten new businesses and moved on from all of them. They conflate their impatience for drive and motivation. But this man knew what he wanted, and he wanted it so much he had the will to be patient. A hotel with his level of detail on his small island is not built in a day, or even a year.

So, if your resolution is five million dollars in revenue a year, or to make a boutique hotel, the step beyond patience in your resolution is good goal setting.

THE GOAL

The hotelier’s goal was not simply, “make a boutique hotel.” That goal alone is too large and will inevitably fail. I have never met a successful person who did not have many exponentially smaller goals each time they had a big goal to reach. This is how you should approach closing deals, getting better leads, improving your practice, and every other aspect of sales for which you have a goal.

It has to do with human psychology. When the only goal is five million dollars in revenue, it is too large to achieve quickly. After six months, you won’t have come close to achieving your goal, and you will quit. There have been no rewards along the way.

THE BREAKDOWN

Instead, a good sales professional has a goal like this—a revenue goal—and forty other goals to achieve that main goal. Five million in revenue means I need forty sales, which means I need four hundred qualified leads, which means I need a thousand leads. On top of this, I can improve my close rates this year by setting aside 20 hours a week to work on my craft. I will work on one small aspect of sales each month, starting with finding better leads. I will start by doing online workshops, then books…etc. These are all much easier goals that, when accomplished, give the brain a reward. It helps you stay focused and on target for the big goal.

With this comes the proper research and knowledge to know what smaller goals are needed to reach the big goal. It’s why successful workers work under the aforementioned twenty-hour rule. Forty hours of work on your projects a week, twenty hours on improving, studying, and honing your skills. These are the hours you should be using to find out what you need for a resolution, and then work at it step by step.

THE TASK

So go do it. Find a resolution and write it down. Right now. Something you want professionally this year. Then try to map out at least ten steps or requirements you will need to reach the goal. Seriously, at least ten, even if they seem so small and simple.

Order them logically, determine which ones require you to improve on a given skill, and go step by step, week after week, achieving goals and studying and improving the skills you need to get there. Then do it again in a few months, and again after that.

You’ll be glad you did, and next year, when people share their New Year’s resolutions, you can tell them about the all-year resolutions you had throughout 2023 and how they changed your life.

Happy New Year from all of us at Maestro Group. Let us know about your resolutions and how we can help at mastery@maestrogroup.co.