Are Sales Goals Undermining Your Team’s Productivity?

Every sales leader knows that sales goals are critical to achieving high performance. Without them, salespeople have nothing to strive for, and no metric against which to measure them...

Hundreds of articles have devoted themselves to teaching salespeople and their leaders how to set smart goals, goals that are just the right amount of stretch without being unattainable, goals that inspire and motivate, while setting appropriate revenue expectations for leadership.

But what if all those articles, the thought leaders, and the gurus are wrong? What if goal-setting is actually holding your team back?

That’s the idea behind the research and writings of several current thought leaders who argue that goal-setting is not only a waste of time, but actually counter-productive. Aubrey Daniels, a well-known authority on human behavior in the workplace, cites research demonstrating that unmet goals create a demotivating effect among employees, leading to declining performance. 

The behavioral psychologist and performance management expert James Clear argues that goals reduce happiness, impede long-term progress, and create a false sense of control. To illustrate the second point, he uses the example of individuals training for a half-marathon. When participants set a goal to “complete a half-marathon,” they may train hard for months, but often relapse back to old habits as soon as they complete their goal.

But is it true for sales teams?

Well, we don’t know. But what we do know is this:

• Globally, sales goal attainment continues to decline (CSO Insights)
• Salespeople are human

Nearly every sales team everywhere sets sales goals, and a great deal of time and attention is given to getting them right. Yet… sales teams by and large continue to miss them.

Is it possible that the same de-motivational and long-term detrimental effects on productivity that goal setting has for other humans might also apply to salespeople?

I think it’s likely.

Okay, so no goals?

Before you ditch the goals, it’s important to note that even experts who question its usefulness agree that goal setting is not all bad. 

L.A. King and C.M Burton, who wrote The Hazards of Goal Pursuit for the American Psychological Association, argue for a narrow, limited use of goals:

“The optimally striving individual ought to endeavor to achieve and approach goals that only slightly implicate the self; that are only moderately important, fairly easy, and moderately abstract; that do not conflict with each other, and that concern the accomplishment of something other than financial gain.”

Let’s break that down a bit. Applied in a sales setting, King and Burton’s suggestion means only setting goals that are concrete (so far so good), easy (so, no Big Hairy Audacious Goals), not very important (what’s the point?), and are not related to financial gain (so, nothing having to do with sales numbers…).

Then what are we supposed to do?

To understand how sales teams can overcome the problems associated with goal setting, let’s take a look at the brain science behind why it can be detrimental. From Ray Williams in Psychology Today: 

“Research shows the brain works in a protective way, resistant to change. Therefore, any goals that require substantial behavioral change, or thinking-pattern change, will automatically be resisted. The brain is wired to seek rewards and avoid pain or discomfort, including fear. When fear of failure creeps into the mind of the goal setter, it becomes a ‘demotivator,’ with a desire to return to known, comfortable behavior and thought patterns.”

This neuroscience finding at least partially explains the common “rubber-band” effect that occurs when salespeople return to old behaviors following completion of sales training. It also indicates that setting new, scary goals following training can actually cause a faster and more complete “rubber-band” effect. 

The solution is to set goals in a much more limited, mindful way, and to support goal achievement with systems designed to reward and reinforce effective habits. In other words, successful teams shift the focus from goal attainment to building positive systems and habits, and thus—ironically—achieve higher goal attainment.

In practice, a sales team might still have goals, but management, coaching, rewards, and reinforcement will shift focus from attaining those goals to supporting positive behaviors and habits that lead to long-term achievement rather than artificial goal attainment.

Building high performing systems

Psychologist Karl Weick, in the article “Small Wins,” advocates for building small, achievable targets that support slow, steady growth. On a sales team, for instance, the sales enablement software can be used to track salesperson progress through the sales process, and reward successful completion of specific actions and behaviors that move the sales forward. By focusing on achieving these “small wins” inside the system, the salesperson steadily builds the habits that lead to long-term sales performance.

Meanwhile, sales leaders can use the information gained from the system to identify where individual salespeople and the process as a whole can be improved to gain even greater progress.

What do you think? Should sales teams relegate their focus on goals to the past, and adopt a systems approach to improvement? Or is there a happy middle ground to be achieved?