S2 E1 - Stop Setting Sales Goals Start Building Sales Systems | The Selling Point Podcast

If you're a CEO or owner of a small or mid-sized B2B business, this episode is  one shouldn't miss.

Most companies don’t struggle because their sales goals are too ambitious, they struggle because they don’t have the sales system required to achieve those goals consistently. In this episode, “Stop Setting Sales Goals. Start Building Sales Systems", I break down the shift every SMB leader needs to make before planning for 2026.

You’ll learn:

• Why goals alone won’t fix inconsistent sales
• The difference between “activity” and effective execution
• What a real sales system looks like
• Why SMBs feel sales pain more intensely than large companies
• How strong sales leadership turns chaos into predictability
• Where Fractional Sales Management fits into the growth plan

If your sales results swing month to month, rely on one or two top performers, or feel impossible to forecast, this episode shows you exactly what’s missing and how to fix it.

This is the roadmap to predictable, repeatable revenue for SMBs.

Listen if you want to learn how to:

• Build a structured sales process that actually gets followed
• Diagnose what’s really slowing down your pipeline
• Improve forecasting and pipeline accuracy
• Strengthen your team without adding unnecessary headcount
• Turn goals into systems — and systems into growth

About Transformative Sales Systems
We  help CEOs and SMB owners implement real sales leadership, structure, and accountability through Fractional Sales Management. If you want a sales engine that produces results on purpose — not by accident — you’re in the right place.

Book a Strategy Call
Ready to build the system behind your sales goals?
https://transformativesalessystems.com/sales-leadership/

Straight talk for CEOs and business owners who want a sales engine that works.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Welcome back to the Selling Point Podcast, Season Two. And this is our first episode of this new season. And this is where we talk about real-world sales leadership for small and medium-sized businesses without all the BS. My name's Anthony Nix, and I am the founder of Transformative Sales Systems. And today we're going to be hitting on a topic that every CEO and business owner needs to hear, especially hitting into 2026. So let's be honest with each other. Every year, companies set bigger sales goals, and every year many of them fall short. Not because the goals were wrong, but because the goals didn't create results. Systems do. So today's episode is called Stop Setting Sales Goals, Start Building Sales Systems. And I'm going to walk you through exactly what that means, why it matters, and what you can do about it starting right now. Let's start here. Sales goals are not the issues. They're fine to have. You should have sales goals. Those are the mile markers that you're going to use to determine whether or not you're being successful. Targets are fine. Revenue expectations are fine. All of those are good things. But the problem is that most small and mid-sized businesses just stop there. They'll take a um revenue number from the previous year. So let's just use numbers that are easy. $10 million in top line revenue. And they just add 10%. So next year we're going to do uh $10.1 or uh $11 million. But no data looked at, didn't poll and look at uh what how the sales reps um uh performed, who was leading the group, who wasn't. Um, and there was no real process employed in developing those numbers. And since there was no system, the the sales team is just left to figure out what is it I need to do to try to hit my goal. There's no process, there's no system in place. They're just left to their own devices uh to figure out what to do, and that's just not a strategy. Um that's just hope with a logo on it. A sales goal is an outcome that's lagging. A sales system is the set of behaviors and processes and standards and accountability that actually produces the outcome. And when I step into a business that keeps missing targets, what I usually see is this everybody knows the numbers, they know what the goals are, they know what they're shooting for, but nobody knows the system behind it and how they're going to achieve those goals. All right, so here's a quick test. If I walked into your company today and asked you to explain your sales system to a brand new salesperson in under five minutes, what would you say? Well, this is what I would hear. Most CEOs come up with something like, well, we follow up quickly, um, or we qualify the leads, or we try to ask good questions. That's not really a system. Um, that's just muscle memory. That's just repeating the things that that you think you should be saying. And if every rep is doing their own version of selling, you don't have a system. You just have organized chaos running through your organization and not making the progress that you hoped that they would. A real sales system is clear, uh, it's documented, it's measurable, it's repeatable. It tells you, tells your reps exactly how to qualify, how to run discovery, how to move through the pipeline, and what standards they're going to be held accountable to. Now, without that, your results are always going to feel very unpredictable. So, why do small and medium-sized businesses feel the pain the hardest, the most, when the sales process has just basically gone awry or there's not one in place? Large organizations can absorb inconsistency in their sales process, in the uh production of sales reps. They have layers of management and sales enablement teams and onboarding systems and monthly coaching, which helps to temper that inconsistency. But what about a small and mid-sized business? You feel every mistake that is made, every bad deal, every unqualified quotation, every forecast that's off by, say, 40%. That's why sales teams, sales systems for small businesses matter more than anything else. The smaller your team, the bigger the impact of every missed step in a sales system or a sales process. A system protects you, it creates consistency, it gives an average rep a path to become good, to be a good sales rep, and prevent top reps from carrying the entire revenue plan on their shoulders. Now, when we get into that situation, more activity doesn't fix a broken system. Um, I hear this, I hear this all of the time. We just need more activity, we need more calls, we need more demos, more presentations, we just need more proposals in the CRM. And those are not things that are going to work. If your team is pouring more activity into a broken system, all you're doing is speeding up the inefficiency. You're not really creating any real progress. Everybody feels busy, but you're not moving forward. You're just creating potential burnout in your sales reps. More activity only works when the underlying system, the process, the qualifications, the accountability is solid. Sales systems need leadership. And now here's the truth: even the very best sales system won't run on its own. Tools can't manage your team. CRMs don't enforce accountability, and that the data is put in properly and that good data hygiene is being followed. PowerPoints don't coach sales behaviors and things that salespeople should be doing. A system needs leadership. Someone to run the cadence, enforce the process, coach the reps, mentor the reps, and keep the structure alive. This is exactly why fractional sales management is exploding in the small and mid-sized business world. You get to the leadership of a VP of sales or a uh a director of sales without a six-figure salary. Fractional sales managers become the engine behind the system. They design, they deploy, coach, uh, create accountability, and refine by going back and updating the system and the processes as you learn more. And FSMs cover all of it. Now, when I work with clients, we build systems in four phases. Diagnose reality, what's really going on in the in the process in the system that you may have, what's working well, what isn't, who are the best reps, who are the ones that are struggling. Design a process around the business, customized to your particular uh market, who you're going after after we've identified your ideal client uh and designed a process around that. Uh, and then deploy that process, that sales system across the team. Train everyone, bring everybody up to that level so that they understand exactly what it is that they should be doing on a daily basis. And then we refine that as time goes forward to make it run smoothly, to enhance success, to reduce the average sales cycle, to increase win rates, which in turn helps to build more revenue. Now that's how I move from we hope we hit the number to we know we're going to hit the number. Okay, well, that's the end of this episode of the Selling Point podcast. So if you took anything from today's episode, let it be this. Uh, goals don't drive growth, systems do. And if your sales results feel inconsistent, unpredictable, or too dependent on just a handful of reps, it's time to build the system you and your team deserve. If you want help with that, that's exactly what we do at Transformative Sales Systems. We build sales systems and leadership structure that creates predictable, repeatable growth. If you're ready to stop guessing and start executing, you can schedule a uh strategy call with us in the link in the link below. Um really appreciate you listening. Thank you so much, and I'll see you in the next episode. Thanks.