The 3 Biggest Threats To Your Annual Sales Goals

When we miss targets, we often like to blame external factors, like customers who don’t make good on commitments, market conditions that become unstable, or competitors who disrupt our model and steal share.?

While those are legitimate challenges, leaders should focus on solving issues within their control. In that regard, I've continuously witnessed three critical issues that every leader should more proactively face head-on to increase their odds of accomplishing their annual goals:

1) Insufficient Funds. Without enough ‘gas in the tank’, cash flow challenges stall growth and hamper day-to-day operations. Business-as-usual quickly becomes business-as-unusual as leaders quickly and bluntly scale back on talent, technology, or partners required to deliver their goods or services or provide ideal customer experiences.?

Any size business can run into a cash crisis. Size is not as indicative as volatility, meaning business models with highly unpredictable or inconsistent inflows or outflows of cash. Leaders in these environments must adopt more variable-based operating models. In addition to negotiating favorable vendor payment terms and securing attractive financing, leaders should convert fixed expenses to variable costs by doing things like:

• Create employee compensation agreements with lower base salaries with a higher percentage of remuneration tied to performance-based outcomes
• Reduce overhead by replacing some full-time employees with on-demand contingent or fractional workers
• Renegotiate long-term contracts to shorter-term agreements, i.e. expensive leases

2) Unanticipated loss of team member(s). The leaner an organization runs, the higher its dependence on key talent to function. Without sufficient redundancies in place, or without accounting for sufficient time to offload and onboard new people, costly mistakes may be made, attractive opportunities may be missed, and momentum will most certainly be lost as leaders stop what they were working on to deal with an unexpected vacancy.?

To reduce the risk of unpleasant surprise departures, leaders must not become so busy managing the business that they neglect their duty to manage their people well. Leaders must ensure employees are sufficiently engaged to prevent unwanted exits before they happen. To do so, regular 1:1 touchbases with intentional talking points and candid conversations are required. Managers must also invest in culture and team building, perhaps more important now than ever given an era of employee ‘enlightenment’ (some have dubbed it entitlement) and hybrid work models.

Here are four suggested meeting types that should be implemented or enhanced.

3) Tasking people to do things they are not qualified to do. Achieving annual plans requires those plans to be smartly made in the first place. Leaders are heavily dependent upon talented team members to provide proper forecasts and to produce anticipated returns on investment. People must be capable of executing plans expertly to generate desired results. An A+ strategy with B- delivery will always fail to deliver what a B- strategy can do with A+ execution. Well-intentioned employees with good aptitudes and attitudes can accomplish a lot, but they will rarely deliver a project better than an adequately trained professional with subject matter expertise.?

The more junior or inexperienced a project owner is, the more time must be allocated to deliver, and performance expectations should be lowered. Employees should produce pleasant surprises by underpromising and overdelivering rather than the alternative. Unqualified staff need time to learn, either through publicly available sources, coaching, or trial and error. That learning curve is on the employer's dime, and their eventual proficiency at a task is difficult to predict.

Leaders need to increase their tolerance for errors and missed deadlines, or they need to invest the time and energy necessary to get ‘the right people in the right seats on the right bus’, which is the single biggest tenant of Jim Collin’s classic business book, Good to Great. Leaders must first solve Who, then What.