SMART Goals: Tips for Goal Setting in 2021

As a dealership manager, you are going to be engaged in a lot of goal setting for yourself as well as with your staff. It is therefore particularly important that you have a good handle on the fundamentals of setting smart goals and also learn the actionable tips that will make it easy to set and attain those goals.

It would seem that goal setting is becoming increasingly more challenging as life is more unpredictable than ever before. These challenges don’t mean that we should no longer be setting goals, rather, we need to be astute and mindful of how we can be flexible in setting our goals.

To many people, goal setting refers to listing the things that you would like to achieve in the different areas of your life. However, as a leader, you also need to be aware that what most people are doing is merely writing down a wish list.

What really distinguishes someone who will attain their goals and another who will not is an awareness of the price that needs to be paid for the attainment of those goals.

To move from a wish to an actionable goal.

Think of this boating analogy when thinking about goal setting:
Each sailor sets the rudder in the direction of their destination. Needless to say, that alone will not get them where they want to go. Instead, they have to invest effort (whether it is rowing using oars or powering up the engine) so that they can move towards their goal.

Your success as a leader may therefore hinge on how well you can both guide your staff to set goals and encourage them to be willing to pay the price needed to attain those goals. In the end, it will not matter which of the types of goal setting your staff adopt as long as the “rudder and oars” function!

One tried and true method is using the SMART Goal setting method to get your staff focussed. The elements of a SMART goal includes:

  • Specific: A clear and well-defined goal that is capable of answering questions as to what the outcome of the goal is. Example: I want to sell 120 vehicles this year, 10 per month or 30 per quarter.
  • Measurable: A goal with specific criteria, which measures your progress towards accomplishing the goal, it is important to set daily, weekly milestones which give you the opportunity to re-evaluate. Example: My goal is 10 vehicles a month, my closing ratio is 10%, therefore I need to see 100 customers a month or 25 a week or 5 a day.
  • Achievable: The goal must be attainable; you must be capable of achieving it. Setting goals you can reasonably accomplish within a certain timeframe will help keep you motivated and focussed. Example: For the financial year 2020 I averaged 9 units per month, my goal for 2021 is 10 units per month. A goal of 15 may be unachievable and therefore may result in you being unmotivated and unfocused.
  • Realistic / Relevant: A goal that is applicable to your life purpose and your resources. This also follows on quite closely from keeping your goal achievable.
  • Time-bound: A goal that is clearly defining the timeline, including the start date and the deadline date. This helps you to prioritize and stay motivated.

BE SPECIFIC

As children, we marvel at how green grass could suddenly dry up and burst into flames once you concentrated the sunlight bouncing off a magnifying lens on a specific patch of grass on hot afternoons. That simple observation is a testament to the power of focus.

As a leader, you may need to be very firm in helping your staff eliminate less important goals ruthlessly so that all their energies and resources can be centred on what is the most important goal or set of goals.

For example, think about the different resolutions that people make at the beginning of each year. Those resolutions (or goals, if you like) are from diverse areas, such as work, finances, relationships, health and fitness, etc.). If you must do something every day to move towards the attainment of your resolutions for the year, will you stand a higher chance of succeeding if your effort is divided between 20 different things, or when you have to attend to only 4-5 things? Seems like a no-brainer, right?

Now, it will not be easy to narrow down dozens of goals to just a handful. That is where techniques like the 25-5 rule help a lot. In this technique, you write down 25 goals that you would like to attain and then revise that list downwards until only five goals are left. You can then work with your staff to throw everything available at those five goals until all have been attained. What happens to the other 20 goals from the original list? That list should be kept as a reminder of the 20 things that you must avoid giving any attention.

If you are in sales your goal may be to sell X many vehicles a month, you then break that target down to weeks and even days. You may want to link your goals to sales activity (daily). If you know your closing ratio, you can then calculate how many face-to-face customers you need to see or how many quotes or trade-in evaluations, finance applications per day etc. If you are managing in the service department, your goal may be to sell X hours per day or X hours per job or parts per job card.

Be specific, be focused.

MEASURE YOUR GOALS

Regular feedback can help to motivate us towards the attainment of any goal. All the types of goal setting emphasize that a goal should be measurable for this very reason. You cannot control what you do not measure. This where proper daily planning is critical combined with daily sales activity management feedback.

For example, a salesperson can use the “paperclip method” to track their progress towards the attainment of a set goal. One gets two jars and places a given number of paperclips in one jar. That number represents the number of sales calls one needs to make each day. For every call made, the individual picks one paperclip from the first jar and places it in the second jar. This is repeated until the target number of sales calls have been made.

This method works because it provides a visual cue or reminder about how much progress has been made, and that feedback motivates the individual to continue until the goal is attained.

As a leader, can you devise different ways to apply the paperclip method or variants of this method to the different short-term and long-term goals of your staff? Your success in doing this will be reflected in the success of your staff attaining their goals!

MAKE THEM ACHIEVABLE

You need to help your staff to reorganize their environment so that it supports the attainment of the goals they have set. In this way, it will get progressively easier to automate choosing the right thing and form the desired habit.

For example, a person who always carries a water bottle will automatically take a drink from that water bottle each time he or she feels thirsty. It will therefore be easier for that person to stop taking a processed drink, such as a soda, when thirsty.

One of the easiest ways to fail to attain your goals is by trying to achieve too much too quickly. We are human and can easily burnout, yet we must be in for the long haul if we want to attain anything worthwhile. It has been said that there is nothing more unfair in life than the equal treatment of unequal.

Not every sales executive can sell 10 vehicles a month, yes, there needs to be a minimum standard, so assuming all your SE’s are at least achieving the minimum, if you target them 1 unit extra on their 3-month average unit sales x by all SE’s the growth is huge; the sum of the parts – small achievable measurable goals.

The same philosophy or methodology can be applied to all departments.

BE REALISTIC / RELEVANT & SET TIME BOUNDS

One crucial tip in setting and attaining smart goals entails setting upper limits to the minimum daily activities that you do. For example, someone who wants to improve their level of physical fitness can set a goal to “do at least 10 pushups each day, but not more than 20.” This upper limit helps you to stay within the sweet spot where you can do what you have to do each day for several months or even years.

Compare that to another person who wants to improve his or her physical fitness and then attempts 200 pushups in one day, only to spend the next fortnight nursing a sore or injured body from that over-exertion. This individual is more likely to abandon their goal as unattainable!

Using the previous analogy, if a sales executive is selling an average of 9 units per month, a goal of 10 would be realistic, a goal of 20 would be unrealistic. Applying the upper limits, you may want to limit the number of outbound calls, quality is very often better than quantity.

As a leader, it is your duty to reign in your staff when they get a burst of motivation and they feel like they can do everything at once. Help them to set upper limits that are in line with what is realistic for where they are at as you get started.

The set time bounds are usually monthly or quarterly but they can be broken down to daily, weekly & monthly.

Work smarter in 2021, set SMART goals and smash those budgets.