"Do your best" is the worst goal you can give a salesperson. Four decades of goal-setting research show that specific, challenging goals with visible progress structurally produce more performance.
"Just do your best." It sounds like friendly leadership, but it is measurably the worst goal you can give a salesperson.
Edwin Locke and Gary Latham summarised four decades of their own and others' research in American Psychologist in 2002. Their conclusion, based on hundreds of studies with tens of thousands of participants: specific, challenging goals consistently produce higher performance than vague or easy goals. It is one of the best replicated findings in organisational psychology.
"Do your best" fails for a simple reason: it has no external standard. Everyone can decide for themselves that this was indeed their best. A specific goal, seven sent proposals by Friday, leaves no such room. It defines what success is and makes visible how far away you are.
The relationship between difficulty and performance is nearly linear: the higher the goal, the higher the performance, until the limit of someone's ability or commitment is reached. That makes the stretch goal not a management fad but applied science, provided the conditions are met.
Locke and Latham describe four routes through which goals raise performance. One: goals direct attention to what matters and away from distraction. Two: they mobilise effort, people demonstrably work harder for a concrete goal. Three: they prolong persistence, people with a goal give up later. Four: they stimulate strategy, whoever fails to reach a challenging goal with the old approach automatically starts looking for a better one.
For sales teams, that fourth mechanism may be the most valuable. A salesperson who misses their conversion goal with the standard follow-up starts experimenting with timing, channel and message. The goal forces learning.
Goals only work under two conditions. The first is feedback: whoever cannot see how far along they are cannot adjust their effort. The goal and the progress bar therefore belong inseparably together. The second is commitment: the goal has to become the salesperson's own. Goals that are set together, or at least explained, beat goals imposed without context.
Interestingly, leaderboards fit this framework. Landers et al. (2017) showed experimentally that a leaderboard psychologically functions as a goal: the position above you acts as an implicit challenge, and the effect on performance was comparable to that of an explicitly difficult goal.
Honesty requires saying that goal-setting research also has a critical tradition. Ordóñez et al. (2009) warn that overly narrow goals cause tunnel vision: whatever is not in the goal gets ignored, and in extreme cases the system gets gamed. A salesperson with a pure volume goal will, if needed, send ten rushed proposals of low quality.
The remedy is twofold. Choose metrics that weigh in quality, and do not punish missed goals. Whoever punishes missing mainly teaches their team to negotiate low targets. In our own implementation, a missed goal therefore expires quietly, without a notification. You can read why we made that choice in the scientific underpinning of our gamification.
Start with one goal per salesperson: a concrete number, a concrete date, visible progress. Discuss the goal instead of imposing it. Set the bar high enough to challenge and attainable enough to stay credible. And when the deadline passes without the goal being met: no reproach, but a conversation about what the next sprint should do differently. Forty years of research are on your side.
Landers, R. N., Bauer, K. N., & Callan, R. C. (2017). Gamification of task performance with leaderboards: A goal setting experiment. Computers in Human Behavior, 71, 508-515. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.08.008
Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705-717. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705
Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2019). The development of goal setting theory: A half century retrospective. Motivation Science, 5(2), 93-105. https://doi.org/10.1037/mot0000127
Ordóñez, L. D., Schweitzer, M. E., Galinsky, A. D., & Bazerman, M. H. (2009). Goals gone wild: The systematic side effects of overprescribing goal setting. Academy of Management Perspectives, 23(1), 6-16. https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2009.37007999