At the end of the year you take a sheet of paper and write “grow sales” among your goals for the new year. Then the sheet goes into your desk drawer, and three months later you don’t remember what you wrote and nobody on your team knows what you were all supposed to reach.
That sentence isn’t a goal, it’s a wish, and no day ever comes when you can say whether you reached it.
A goal needs a number and a date
To turn “grow sales” into a goal, add two things to it: a number and a date. For example, “by the end of Azar (late December), the number of customers who buy from us again goes from 30 a month to 50”. Now there is a specific day when you will know whether you got there.
Next to the goal, write down today’s number too. If you don’t know how many customers buy from you again each month right now, you won’t know at the end of Azar whether you moved forward.
Set just one goal
In a team of five, if you set goals for sales, old customers, costs and a new product all at once, every one of them ends up half finished, because the same few people have to find time for all four.
Pick the goal that would have the biggest effect on your business if you reached it. If you don’t know which part of your business has fallen furthest behind, find it first with a few simple numbers.
Turn the goal into this week’s work
When your goal is three months away, you need to decide what you will do this week to move toward it. If your goal is bringing old customers back, for instance, this week call ten customers who haven’t bought from you in three months.
If that work belongs to one of your staff, give them the same number so they know exactly what result you want from them. Someone who has only heard “we need more customers coming back” has no way of knowing when their job is done.
Write the goal down and review it with your team every week
Gail Matthews, a psychology professor at Dominican University of California, took people from a range of companies and businesses who each had a work goal for the next four weeks and split them into several groups. She asked one group only to think about their goals and write nothing down. She asked another to write down their goal and the actions they would take, send it to a friend, and send that same friend a progress report every week.
After four weeks, 35 percent of the first group had reached their goal or got more than halfway there, against more than 70 percent of the second. When a goal is on paper and someone follows up on it every week, you don’t forget it, and you do something toward it every week.
In your business, write your goal down and tell your team, so everyone knows what number you are aiming for and by when. Then every week, in the same hour I suggested in business management for working on your business, compare this week’s number with the goal together with your team and see how far you have come.
And if you don’t know which part of your business your first goal should be for, in a free diagnostic session we will find it together.