Planning for Success: Set your Discovery Goals
~ Guest blog by Chris Baker – an inspir’em coach & trainer.
Have you ever thought about the psychology of goal setting and planning? I was fascinated to read the study reported in New Scientist, which found that the areas of the brain that activate when we imagine “future me” are the same as “other people” and distinct from “present me”. They concluded that your brain often treats future you more like a different person or stranger than like present you.
This helps explain why we procrastinate, avoiding increasing our pension contributions, discounting the long-term consequences of lifestyle choices, and for the purposes of this blog, failing to plan effectively to guarantee meeting our very own goals.
Setting SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound) is useful. But writing them down is not enough. The real shift happens when you define them clearly enough to reverse engineer the path and build a plan that you can execute with discipline.
In sales, that reverse engineering always starts with discovery. Without understanding the reality in front of you: your customer’s context, your territory, and your pipeline, planning quickly becomes wishful thinking.
Let’s break it down across long, medium and immediate time horizons.
Jump to:
Setting Long-Term Goals: Design for your Future Self
Given enough time, extraordinary things can be achieved, in life as well as business. In my case, I had the good fortune to work with Mindset Makeover creator David Shephard at a Change Your Mind, Change Your Future event.
At age 40, I set myself the goal of giving my future fifty-five-year-old self the freedom to do whatever he wanted to do. Reverse engineering that goal forced practical questions:
- What level of financial independence is required?
- What sales results must I achieve consistently?
- What skills and interests must I build?
- What health standards must I maintain?
- What networks and relationships must I nurture?
The goal was powerful, because at forty I had absolutely no idea what I would want or need in fifteen years’ time. That future person was a stranger. But what I could do was create options.
In sales terms, that meant setting and overachieving ambitious revenue targets and being rigorous about discovery in every deal. Because long-term financial freedom is built on short-term deal quality.
My long-term clarity created short-term commercial discipline.
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Setting Medium-Term Goals: the Power of a BHAG
A fiscal year is a strong medium-term horizon that begins at your sales kick-off event. I’ve always enjoyed encouraging my sales teams to set goals that initially scare them but then energises them.
On the final morning of a successful kick-off, after the awards ceremony and celebration night are over, I would invite everyone to imagine a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal, or BHAG, a concept introduced by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras.
BHAGs work when:
- The kick-off has aligned and prepared the GTM team
- Territories and quotas are clear
- Compensation plans are understood
Then comes the critical step: Discovery at a territory level.
Before reverse engineering earnings, sellers must first discover four things:
- Where real opportunity exists
- Which accounts justify focus
- Where competitive risk sits
- What pipeline coverage is realistic
Many sellers set goals to achieve 120%, 150% or even 200% of OTE. But the best then interrogated the mechanics:
- How much pipeline is required?
- What conversion rates must improve?
- What outbound activity drives that pipeline?
- How does product mix affect accelerators?
- What contract terms improve earnings?
- Where can services and financing increase deal value?
Territory and account plans translate ambition into activity. And strong discovery within those accounts turned activity into revenue. Ambition without discovery is assumption. Ambition with discovery becomes predictable growth.
Immediate-Term Execution: Turning Planning into Closed Deals
Ultimately, planning for success in B2B sales means closing deals:
- Leads must be qualified
- Risks must be systematically identified and mitigated
- Internal resources must be aligned
- Complex buying processes must be navigated
This is where discovery matters most. Using a qualification framework like MEDDPICC turns planning into execution by improving deal predictability and forecast accuracy: two pillars of high-performing sales teams.
Discovery is not just a stage. It is the discipline of uncovering Metrics, validating pain, accessing the Economic buyer, and understanding the Decision process before optimism creeps into the forecast.
All in the Detail: Scoring what Matters
I’m a fan of scoring every MEDDPICC letter out of ten, with an action plan for each until ten is reached.
In deal reviews and clinics, each letter is reality-checked and the action plan to advance is agreed. Many such plans evolve into comprehensive close plans, becoming mutual with the Champion and key stakeholders.
Take Economic buyer (Eb) as an example.
0/10: You cannot identify who they are.
The plan: Research potential candidates.
5/10: You have identified the correct candidate but have yet to secure a meeting.
The plan: Challenge the Champion to introduce and set up a meeting with the Eb.
10/10: You have met them. They confirm the Metrics. They agree the Decision process supports a quantifiable economic impact. They are aligned on the Paper process and prepared to sign on completion.
Note the pattern here; each jump is underscored by better discovery.
Excellence in execution: where plans succeed or fail
There is one final element of planning for success: preparation.
Every action in your plan requires rehearsal.
I once met a team in a customer lobby who were discussing the meeting plan for the first time. “Winging it” is rarely a winning strategy in complex enterprise sales.
- Plan every meeting
- Rehearse every pitch and demo
- Stress-test your understanding of the Paper process
- Clarify procurement mechanics: serial or parallel signatures, system requirements, holiday risks.
The best BHAGs and the strongest MEDDPICC scorecards mean nothing without diligent discovery and execution.
Revenue growth rewards discipline.
Summary
- Set long-term goals: with enough time anything is possible.
- Set medium-term BHAGs: reverse engineer them.
- Use MEDDPICC as a planning-to-execution framework.
- Be excellent in execution.
In sales strategy consultancy, we see it repeatedly: the teams that invest in structured discovery outperform those who rely on hope.
Your future self may feel like a stranger.
But disciplined planning, grounded in great discovery, ensures they thank you.
This blog is one of our Discovery series. These blogs are accompanied by our newsletter and a live webinar.
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