Fourth and goal

You are looking ahead to the fourth quarter and wondering if you can accomplish your goals for 2013. Can you do it? Are you feeling like your goal is too big to accomplish? Are you feeling like your goals are overwhelming? This month, I want to help you focus on what’s important to gain an edge mentally.

As the late Zig Ziglar used to say, “When you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.” The first thing you need to do is create a fourth-quarter goal that is big enough to get you excited. Finish the year strong; make it the best quarter of your career. One of my business coaches is Andrew Hoh from Creighton University. He says you need a BHAG — a big hairy audacious goal. This type of goal will stretch you and cause you to think bigger.

See also: Midyear goals checkup

Let’s say you are an annuity producer. Your goal should be simple; let’s say $3 million of new business in the next three months. This would break down into $1 million per month or $250,000 of new business each week. With five working days in each week, you should aim for $50,000 of new business per day. Now, that is doable. You just need a lot of activity to accomplish this goal. If you see three people per day, or 15 people per week, then you might just get a new client per day.

That’s how simple goal setting is. The book, “The 4 Disciplines of Execution,” by Chis McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling outlines the process of focusing on one wildly important goal, or WIG, at a time. Lead your team into having one goal as your WIG. So, if your goal is to do $3 million of new premium in annuities, then you may consider getting your team on board and creating a scoreboard to track your progress toward this goal.

A scoreboard will help you stay focused, keep you engaged and hold you accountable to your goal. Have you ever seen the United Way thermometers that track the progress toward their annual fundraising goals? Just like playing a basketball game with a scoreboard makes you compete more intensely, a scoreboard for your whole office will help you stay motivated and on track. Create one overall scoreboard for the overall goal, and then set up another scoreboard as a dashboard to keep you doing the activities necessary to accomplish this goal.

These activities are referred to as lead measures. You need to act on lead measures that get you to your WIG. For example, you must track your phone calls, your appointments and your sales. Do you know what your ratios are? Do you know what your average client invests in annuities? Do you know how many new clients you need to find in order to accomplish your goal? Are you motivated today to make the right number of phone calls that will keep your schedule full tomorrow?