2024 Sales Resolutions

4 Steps to jump-start your sales year.

Happy New Year to 10,012 SaaS sales professionals!

I hope you enjoyed your holidays with family and loved ones.

Our 1st newsletter of 2024 is a step-by-step plan to jump-start your 2024 Sales Year. Let's go👇

Step 1: Set Goals

If you don't set goals you will lack direction. There's no clear path forward. You will lose focus and drift through daily life.

Goal setting is the 1st step to have clear direction in life. To progress towards your desired future.

I spend every year between Christmas and New Year's to set my goals for the following year. Here's what that entails:

1. Life Goals or "End Goals":
   What do I want to achieve in life?
   For example: travel to 3 new countries, buy an apartment in Barcelona
2. Financial Goals or "Means Goals":
   How do I need to perform financially to support my life goals?
   For example: double my net worth
3. Sales Goals:
   How much do I need to sell to meet my financial goals?
   For example: win 100 new customers for the SaaS Sales Academy

This 3-step process ensures that my sales efforts are actually linked to what fulfills me in life. I have no interest to sell like crazy & make a lot of money, only to feel empty and burned out after.

Step 2: Build New Habits

Building new habits is hard. That's why 91% of people fail their New Year's Resolutions.

Luckily, there are 4 effective strategies to make habit creation more easy (taken from James Clear's classic, Atomic Habits)

For example, let's say you want to make cold calls more consistently:

1. Make it obvious: give yourself visual cues. Block 1h for cold calling every morning in your calendar. Use a strong signal color like red or yellow.
2. Make it attractive: write a strong cold calling script that you're eager to test out.
3. Make it easy: have your cold calling script & objection handling rebuttals printed out & pinned around your desk.
4. Make it rewarding: allow yourself your favorite barista coffee once you've done your 30 dials.

Regardless of which habit you are trying to build: employ these 4 strategies to increase your odds of success.

Step 3: Quota Attainment Plan (QAP)

The QAP is all about knowing your numbers.

A good QAP reverse-engineers a path to quota. It takes into account all the important metrics, such as

• annual quota
• average deal size
• pipeline conversion
• meeting to pipeline ratio
• prospecting to meeting ratio
• prospecting channel conversions

The result of any good QAP: you know exactly the input & output KPIs you need to hit every month, every week, every day of the (sales) year.

This will give you a great deal of clarity how to achieve your quota, and beyond.

Step 4: Prospecting KPI Tracker

It's one thing to know your KPIs from the QAP.

It's another to actually execute on them and measure your results.

That's what the KPI tracker does. It's a simple spreadsheet you update daily or weekly. It shows

• Research target: net new accounts & leads added to your sequence each week
• Input factors: prospecting activities such as cold calls, emails, social outreach.
• Output factors: meetings booked, pipeline created, new opportunities in the CRM.

Tracking your weekly execution & performance empowers you to make data-driven decisions. If you fall behind your plan, you can adjust course.

Data collected by the authors of the 12 Week Year (my favorite book for goal setting) shows: if you execute 80% or higher against your plan, you're in good shape.

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That's it for today!

Over the next 4 weeks we will dive deeper into each of the 4 steps above.

I'm excited to fast-start your 2024 Sales Year together! 🚀

Want to work with me to jump-start your 2024 sales year and smash your professional, personal & financial goals?

Book a free Strategy Call with me to see if you're a fit for my private coaching program.