This is the last day of the first month of your best year ever.  By this point you have one month under your belt implementing your new sales action plan.  And it’s a good time to step back and make sure
your plans will keep you on track.

There are 3 questions you should ask yourself:

1. Have I identified the obstacles that have kept me from achieving my sales goals in the past, and will my new plan overcome them?
2. Have I reviewed my daily actions and identified how I will spend more time selling and less time doing other things?
3. Have I identified my top 10 new clients & developed a marketing plan for earning their business?

Just setting sales goals without expanding those goals into the specific actions you’ll take doesn’t work.  It also doesn’t work to set the same goals you’ve set before that you didn’t achieve
expecting that somehow you’ll achieve them this time.  Sometimes the biggest obstacle between you and your goals is you, but until you figure out what you’re doing or not doing to sabatoge yourself and
why history will repeat itself.

It’s sad but true that most sales professionals spend very little time actually selling.  Sometimes you find lots of things to do to avoid selling.  The biggest reasons you spend so little time selling
include: fear of delegation, fear of rejection, you don’t know how to market yourself so you can’t find people to sell to, you don’t feel comfortable with your sales skills so you aren’t all that excited about holding more sales appointments, and instead of planning your success you’d rather fly by the seat of your pants and
hope for the best.

Focus and action, and focused action are differentiators between successful salespeople and everyone else.  If you don’t know who you want your next client to be you can’t make a conscious and focused effort to obtain that new client.  Even when salespeople do identify the list of top wanted future clients they screw it up by doing nothing more than calling these people every few months to “touch
base”.  That’s not a marketing plan and it doesn’t help your efforts.

Take the time now to make sure your sales action plan is serving you well and continue the good work.  There are no free lunches and there certainly aren’t any free lunches in sales, so get to work;-)