Short Term Goals that Support Your Long Term Vision

As 2018 gets underway, sales professionals and their leadership should have evaluated last year’s performance and set goals for this year. Goal setting is often accepted as a critical part to meeting expectations. After all, how can you hit a target if you don’t know what to aim for? However, the goal setting process often becomes formulaic based on company projections or past performance rather than being driven by a powerful vision of what the person is seeking. Goals only become personally motivating if they are linked to a long term vision.

The Dallas Business Journal interviewed Lynn Moore, President of Tyler Technologies, about where the company has been and how he envisions their future. Mr. Moore outlines his 15 year vision of leveraging their status as market leader to become a market standard in government software deployment. He very clearly describes strategies that he wants to develop to become the obvious solution for his target market.

Don’t confuse goals with vision. Goals are a near term benchmark that include a plan for achieving a defined result. Vision is a longer term description of where you intend the goals to lead.

The differentiator is time. How long will you take to achieve the goal you’ve set? The timeliness of your goal has a direct impact on its attainability. Not setting a deadline may seem like it reduces the pressure to deliver, but it also lowers the urgency level. Something that is impossible to do in a week may be attainable over the course of a year. A goal with a timeline is easier to break down into weekly and monthly tasks, and easier to track and measure, too.

Vision needs to be clearly defined but won’t necessarily include a defined step-by-step plan to achieve it. It’s about describing your purpose for executing on your goals rather than the plan for getting there.

Make sure to break your goals up into timeframes and check for a clear correlation to your long-term vision. Because any goals that lack a plan and/or a relationship to your personal vision will not provide the motivation necessary to make both the goals and ultimately the vision a reality.