In our Action in Progress program lie several sub-programs that turn a company around, week by week.  One of them is to insist on some sound tenets of sales management.

Here’s one of those tenets:

Open Objectives and Results

1. Ask them to generate a list of who they’re going to target that week or that fortnight.  Not that month, for reasons we’ll go into on another occasion.
2. Clearly identify whether they’re existing customer or new prospects.
3. Ask them to state, ahead of time, what their objective is for each target.  Ask them to include with that what their sales objective is.
4. Get them to share this with you and their peers.
5. In a week or a fortnight, review with them what happened.

What successes were made?  What obstacles were met?

That’s it.  There’s a lot to an AIP.  But this, alone, is enough to get traction and results.