It is impossible to motivate anyone but yourself. All a sales manager can do to motivate those members of the sales team, is to set a climate where staff members motivate themselves. However, some managers sincerely believe that formal goal setting sets a climate for self motivation. And, because managers believe that goal setting motivates, a variety of programs that use goal-setting strategies, like Management by Objectives (MBO), have been widely employed in businesses and professional organizations across the United States and Canada. But, longer term studies of these methods suggest that the success of these programs is minimal at best--because as some observers have found, while on the surface goal setting looks fairly easy. The truth is, that effective goal setting is a difficult skill to master.

Many sales professionals, through a lack of experience at setting appropriate sales objectives, set unrealistic goals, which in turn assures their failure long before they even start to execute their plans for achieving them. When they find they are not able to meet the objectives they