Business success is almost impossible to achieve without an appropriate and comprehensive goal sales setting. First it is important that you draw a line and separate actions that are taken without specific planning and those that have been or are being carried out according to a plan. The plan is one of the methods to make sure that you achieve something you have thought about. For those actions that do not belong to the pre-established plan, it is advisable to analyze consequences and implications and thus include them in a larger picture. If sales goal setting is not performed, you are most likely on a drifting rug that takes you nowhere where revenues and profit are.
You need to start learning the difference between pro-action and reaction. The former implies the fact that you initiate action according to a plan and that you have something very well-defined in mind regarding where you want to get with numbers and figures corresponding to sales and profit. This means that you have done your sales goal setting for at least a certain period in advance. Re-action on the other hand refers to that kind of action that assumed for survival in the conditions of very tough competition while you you have to fight back crises out of which struggle is the only way; as such, there is no profit to get you higher above the minimum survival line.
This being said, keep in mind that sales goal setting could prove insufficient; action is the necessary one. According to a well designed plan, you should act along the lines, adapting to all sorts of real life challenges and unsuspected situations. Supposing that you would like to learn a foreign language, and you set a three-month goal to learn the basics; if you do not buy a book and get down to actually working from it, in three months you will surely see no progress, not to mention anything about achieving your goal. The same thing stays valid for business, so sales goal setting remains pointless in the absence of a clear plan application.
Consequently, we may conclude that sales goal setting and taking action to meet goals are complementary. It would be highly improbable for anyone to think otherwise and to enjoy success quite out of the blue and without the tiniest of efforts.