Part of my job is to teach business owners and sales leaders how to develop business plans and set goals. It has evolved to a formula: Decide what you want to achieve, set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound), commit goals to writing, share with your team, make sure you understand the consequences of your plan, and start working.

Recently a client told me he had started doing a different kind of goal setting based on the “10X Rule” of setting a bigger target for your goals. The concept has been around a while – the book was first published in 2011 – but it’s gained a lot of traction recently. This time it really resonated with me. So, I’ve begun to wonder: what can we learn from these principles? Why not set bigger business goals for your leadership and sales teams?

The 10X Rule

The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure is a book by Grant Cardone, a professional sales trainer, motivational speaker, business consultant, and entrepreneur whose net worth is now estimated at $300 million. His philosophy, distilled, is, why reach for the ordinary? He recommends that companies/sales break with traditional ideas of success and set goals 10 times (10X) larger than what most competitors would think to accomplish.

Cardone coaches 10X Rule followers to expand their reach, assume control, overcommit, and take massive actions to reach goals. He offers steps and encouragement to help you break away from being “average.” If you’re interested, you should read Cardone’s book and watch his YouTube videos. What he has to say about setting bigger goals is very compelling.

Here’s my takeaway for using the 10X Rule.

Set Bigger Goals for Your Leadership Team

Shoot for the Moon

We often fall short of the business goals we set. If you’re not going to achieve all of your goals all of the time, then why not reach for 10X your typical sales goals? Falling short would still mean that you’re way ahead of where you would have been, had you set less ambitious goals. What’s the quote? “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

Be an Unstoppable Force

The 10X rule forces your team to work more creatively, and more aligned as a team. From my perspective, it’s exciting to see a client’s enthusiasm and energy inevitably spread to their sales team.

Cardone says that nothing great would ever happen without “voracious obsession” and “fierce drive.” Kids are the best example of becoming consumed by their passion. They’re relentless! They live out their goals 24/7 at every age, whether it’s practicing dance steps, playing basketball, or dressing up as Queen Elsa and endlessly singing songs from Frozen. Adults would be more successful if we could harness some of that childhood obsessive energy. 

Don’t Stop Believing

Once you set your business goals, don’t stop working to achieve them. Remember: you don’t succeed until you accomplish your goals, and you won’t fail unless you quit. Let your leadership team know you expect them to do everything in their power to reach the company’s new goals.

Adopting the 10X Rule May Impact Your Organization

Adopting the 10X rule may fundamentally change how your organization operates. You and your leadership team will have to think about doing things differently than before.

Here are some of my thoughts about which business areas may need to change.

Hiring

You may need to hire more employees if you’re gearing up to achieve, say, 300% more business this year instead of past years’ 30% planned growth. And possibly you’ll need different personality types in your sales team – racehorses instead of plow horses.

Level of Effort

Your leadership team may understand the need for changing the way things are done rather than simply increasing their level of effort. To exponentially increase business growth, there have to be some hard questions asked and answered:

  • What do we do best/what are the efforts that get us the best returns?
  • How do we leverage what we do best in order to reach our new goals?
  • What can we give up/what work has been the most unproductive? There are huge learnings inside this point…
  • What are we not doing that we should be doing from now on?

If you don’t have a good CRM software system that’s able to track sales activities and results (and answer the questions above), now’s the time to rectify that.

Accountability

Results of a recent study showed that getting your employees to successfully achieve goals in the workplace is tied to giving them to three key steps: writing their goals, committing to those goals, and being held accountable for their actions.

The group that completed all three steps reached the highest success rate (identified as accomplishing their goals or getting halfway there or more). Results grew from a 43% success rate in a group completing one step, to 76% of those completing all three.

My suggestion is to make sure you have these three steps in place (or something similar) and enforce them for your leadership team as well as for your sales team members.

Nothing Great Will Ever Happen Without…

Grant Cardone has many words of wisdom in his book to apply to thinking big and setting bigger goals, whether or not you implement the 10X Rule. If you’re passionate about your business and inspired to grow, these words may remind you of yourself:

“Nothing great will ever happen without…voracious obsession over a concept and fierce drive. [If you have that] it’s impossible for you to run out of ideas and energy.”

“Obsession isn’t a disease, it’s a gift.”

Does your sales leadership need help setting or meeting goals? Does your sales process or team need overhauling to reach company goals? If so, give me a call and I can help.