The Journey is more important than the Destination

I was reading this part in Bhagavad Gita where the almighty lord is giving gyaan to a stranded prince facing against his own kiths & kins and well-wishers including his Guru who has taught him all the warfare as his opponents in the battlefield. In one such place, the lord says, the journey is more important than the destination emphasizing the need for the prince to liberate the souls of his opponents by slaying them. By doing so, his actions would be in accordance with Dharma.

Well, I get you!

We all have come across this phrase in so many places already, what’s so special in it?

So I was just pondering, what is new about it. I am one of those majority of the guys, who picturizes things as we comprehend them in mind. So until few days ago, I had always taken literally that journey is more important than destination.  So whenever we go on a road trip, I used to assume that the real fun is by enjoying the travel than the actual scenic spot itself. But that’s not what the quote intends to say..

After working for many a years, an ideal mind will always look into things from daily life and try to take away what’s in it for me as learning. So I tried to relate that to my work. As a sales professional, my life has revolved around only two things Targets and incentives. So, every morning I used to wake up and think how much I will be able to achieve of my daily target and be relieved of the tension that would pile up by end of the month.

In all my workplaces we used to do breakdown the Yearly target to monthly target and then break it down further to weekly target. In peculiar cases, it would be even drilled down to daily target. But how am I supposed to reach the other end of the shore, if I don’t even know how to control my breath and flip my legs and hands to swim across? That’s exactly where the real essence lies in.

By breaking down the target, I know that the target is in my hands reach, provided, I focus my actions towards it.

So the habitual/behavioural change that I am going to put forth is what is going to define my success and not just how clear I am seeing my goal.

I started to set the behavioural targets instead of number targets. For sales, it had been always about building pipeline and funnel for a successful closure strategy.  For building that pipeline of sales what is the back process that I have to do?

The direct sales process usually follows the same flow in most cases, and the conversion from each stage narrows done like a funnel and the success rate would be in single digit ratio.

I started focusing on what should I do to keep the funnel always working. You need to fill it with huge quantities of leads for cold calls and build your warm leads by doing qualitative work. So I set myself a reasonable target on generating new leads by getting information about decision makers in my targeted client companies in LinkedIn/Bloomberg portals, getting new contacts through referrals, yellow pages, corporate websites of client companies etc., This way the number of leads for cold calls where always fed well.  Hence I would set myself an objective that I have to generate this many number of leads from the various sources mentioned above. Hence, my behavioural action would be going through ‘x’ number of LinkedIn pages,’ Y’ number of personal meetups for gaining referrals, ’Z’ number of corporate sites with in a stipulated timeline.

Likewise, I had broken down the set of actions that I should do for each of the stages of this sales funnel to keep the sign off numbers floating high.

If you are sales professional working as a manager in consumer goods based company, you will have to breakdown your target in to set of action based objective which if done successfully will help you to achieve your goals. A quick example would be generating this many number of walk-ins by doing ‘X’ number of tele calls, ‘Y’ number of personal invites, ‘Z’ number of follow up calls from previous customer base etc.,

This will help to relieve you the tension of last minute shocks of not able to achieve your target. Also, by doing this in a structured way, you can guide any novice to achieve the same level as an experienced sales person which he/she might do in an unorganized way.