Clarifying Short Term Intermediate and Long Term Goals

What you have just discovered are the prioritized goals of your organization as a whole. You have also defined what your team’s contribution to the attainment of these goals might and should be. You must now develop some short-term, intermediate, and long-term goals for your sales team.

Short-term goals are defined as those results that can be achieved in twelve months or less. They are often stated as your team’s sales quotas, but they are also there to support your organization’s yearly objectives, as created and viewed by the leadership, the investors and, of course, the capital markets or capital markets community. They generate immediate cash flow for the company that will, hopefully, exceed expenditures and justify your organization’s approach to contributing to the strategic plan. Short-term goals can usually be achieved with existing resources with only minor modifications to personnel, products, support, or the customer base.Many sales managers find themselves in difficulty because they focus only on longer-term objectives for their team. If you look closely at the first items on the list of your organization’s prioritized goals for the organization as a whole, you will recognize that there are some that must be achieved right away. They may be:

• Increased sales revenue

• Increased profitability or margin on the average sale

• Improved order entry quality to reduce returns

• Costs control and/or staff reductions

• New product or service acceptance by the targeted market

• New geographic expansion

• What else? (Must be attainable in under twelve months)

Long-term goals are usually defined as those results that can be achieved only over a longer period of time, say five to seven years. They tend to be linked with the long-term vision of the organization as a whole, and several complex changes and steps must be made to attain these goals. Some of these changes are dramatic and can cause instability to a sales organization. The best way to prevent this is to have clear, concise, and measurable pathways to achieve these long-term goals. They may be:

• New market penetration

• Strategic sales alliances

• Cross-organizational team selling

• Complete change of customer’s brand perception

• What else? (Must require a period of time to attain)

Intermediate goals are those that fall somewhere between the short- and long-term goals, usually around three years. They could be called milestones because they are often used to sustain support for the long-term goals. Nothing succeeds like success, and these goals are used to persuade senior management and executives that your ideas and reasoning are sound and that significant advances toward your long-term goals are being made. They must link the short- and long-term goals, and they might include such areas as:

• Sales competency training curriculums

• Sustained sales growth

• New electronic connectivity platforms

• What else? (Must require a period of time to attain)

Specific,

Measurable,

Attainable,

Relevant, and

Time Framed