Rating Your Performance & Making Changes

Rating Your Performance and the Necessity to Make Changes in 2006

As we begin a new year it is important for any salesperson to look back at 2005 and rate their individual performance. I personally like to use a grade, but whatever measure you use it is important that you create a list of positive and negative events that support your performance rating.

It is also important to put this in writing to get the results you will need so that as you enter 2006 you can make real changes to your business plan that will give you more of a chance to get a positive result in the New Year.

For those of you that scored high in 2005, be careful. Make sure that your results were based upon sound business moves and not the accidental ‘big deal’ that gave you a boast in your production. Also, make sure that you were not riding the wave of a positive market adjustment that may change in 2006. For instance if you were not typically an investment sales broker but sold several buildings in 2005 because the sales market was so hot, be careful that market may no longer exist in 2006. If you do not plan for this change by concentrating on your core market, such as office leasing, you could achieve much different results in 2006.

Finally for those of you that had a low rating, you need to spend a lot of time focusing on the reasons why you failed in 2005. One area that you can look at first is whether you successfully started 2005 with an actual business plan or not. If you did not have a plan, you already started the year unstructured with no way to measure results. In essence you were gambling and hoping for positive results instead of having a measuring stick to guide you through the year. Next, if you had a plan but did not achieve positive results the next area to look at is whether you calendared time each day toward meeting your plan's objectives.

In order to make 2006 successful, whether you were successful in 2005 or not, you must rate yourself and recreate yourself each year to achieve positive results.