“You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.” – Paul J. Meyer

Have you heard this business quotation before? It’s one of my favorites because it’s absolutely true. Unless you have a strategy for measuring your goals, you have no way of keeping your business on track and no way of knowing when you’ve achieved success.

Good management of goals begins with setting measurable goals. (You may recall my reference to SMART goals in previous blogs – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Tangible goals.)

If you’ve set measurable goals, then you’ve asked some basic questions, such as: How much? How many? By when?  Now you’re ready to measure.

Choose Measurements that Can be Managed for ROI

Every business is different, so measurement strategies and types vary. But here are a few standards to get you thinking about measuring your business goals and determining your Return on Investment (ROI):

General Business Measurements

• Dollars per contracts signed
• Number of call-backs per 100 jobs
• Increased your profit  by [insert your goal percentage here]

Sales Measurements

• New accounts as a percentage of total accounts
• Number of new accounts per day
• Percentage of referral business to your total business

Ask yourself: How can you track your success? Or, what does success look like to you?

Remember the quote we started with: You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.

Set up Dynamic, Motivational Measurements of Achievement

Once you establish measurements, then share them and your checkpoints reached – even if the sharing is just with yourself. We humans need to celebrate our achievements!

Create the visual that works for you. It might be a chart that shows your upward progress, a graph that compares, counts, or illustrates checkpoints reached. It might be pins on a map, numbers on a spreadsheet, and it might be the old-fashioned thermometer graphic that you fill in as you reach your checkpoints.

Celebrating the checkpoints reached along the way to ultimate success builds confidence and keeps us motivated. And that, finally, leads to the grand celebration when we’ve reached all the checkpoints along the way and we stand at the goal itself. Success.

Most of my clients have heard of SMART goals, and I suspect you have too. But just as a refresher, let me remind you that SMART goals are:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Tangible

Even SMART goals can fail you unless they’re accompanied by smart action strategies, and that’s what I want to talk about today: Smart Action Steps to Achieving Goals.

Put Your Business Goals on Your Calendar

The easiest and one of the most effective action steps you can take is to put your goal on your calendar. In other words: Give yourself a deadline. When should this goal be attained?
Until you move action steps and your goals onto your calendar, you have great ideas but no real means of achieving them.

Make Time to Succeed

Set aside the time to reach your goal. Too often, we ‘add’ goals to our business days, somehow hoping our days will expand to meet them. (Wishful thinking!) As long as goals have no time allotted to them, we have no plan to achieve them.

How to Plan Your Steps and Checkpoints

For most business goals – whether it’s sales, productivity, or other business-related goals – you’ll increase your chance of success exponentially if you have prioritized action steps and checkpoints to keep you on track. So, block out the time for the action steps you need to take to reach your goal.
Creating successful action steps:

• Think through the steps you need to take to reach your goals; make them specific.
• Prioritize your action steps and set target dates.
• Identify checkpoints along the way to your ultimate goal.
• Move your action steps and checkpoints onto your calendar, allowing sufficient time for completion.

Get started today!

Mark McCormick in his book What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School tells of a Harvard study conducted between 1979 and 1989.  Researchers found that the 3 percent of 1979 MBA graduates who had created clear, written goals were earning, in 1989, on average, 10 times more than 97 percent of their graduating class. They also found that the 13 percent of the Class of ’79 MBA graduates who had set goals, even though they were not in writing, were earning, on average, twice as much as the 84 percent of students who had expressed no goals at all.

Goals and the clarity of goals made a lifetime of difference for these Harvard MBA graduates.

Goal-Setting Process

In my consulting practice and workshops, I often include a 9-step goal-setting process. I’ve found that one of the most overlooked steps in the process – the one so many of us dearly want to skip over – is one of the most intuitive.

That skipped step: identifying obstacles and challenges that are likely to appear along the way and thinking through solutions.

These obstacles are usually quite easy to identify. Begin with the top two: you and everyone else.

Consider the obstacles you put in your own path: procrastination? Chaotic time management?  Inability to delegate? Then consider the obstacles others contribute: Interruptions? Lack of support? Lack of training?

Once you’ve identified your obstacles, then set about finding workable solutions. I encourage you to hold to your goals. Resist the urge to reduce your goals; instead, improve your solutions. And remember, well-planned and supported goals – the ones most likely to succeed – include lifestyle and family goals as well as business ones.

Take the time to set goals for your company and your life. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll succeed.

As we go into 2010, my clients are telling me that they are hitting the road with tighter workforces, tighter margins and greater needs for productivity in all departments, especially in sales. In response, I’ve teamed up with a national sales expert for a 10-workshop series I’m calling Make the Sale! – Powerful Selling Strategies for Business Owners.

We’ve set this up for business owners because owners are (or should be!) the best sales people in their business.

Business owners who learn to sell can typically outsell anyone they hire to sell, even while running their business. Much to my chagrin, I outsold every sales person that ever worked for me. Why? Because business owners have the passion, belief and know-how to answer client questions and deliver on their commitments, as well as make decisions on the spot.

Think of this Make the Sale! series as our gift to you, a self-propelled economic stimulus package for you to put in place immediately. I’m jazzed about Make the Sale! because my clients need it. You need it; in fact, we all need big sales to pull us out of the slumps of 2009. I hope you can make it a part of your 2010; I’m sure that this program can make a difference for your business.

The Sales Strategies Details

Make the Sale! is a 10-session series providing beginning to advanced sales techniques for business owners. Don’t forget: We’re focusing on owners because the higher you go in the organization, the better your sales techniques need to be. The workshops are limited to 15 participants, and designed for owners of small to medium-sized businesses. This is an in-depth, in-person course, the only one of its kind offered in northern Nevada.

The sales techniques learned during Make the Sale! – Powerful Selling Strategies for Business Owners are based on individual preferences and personalities, and you’ll build your style through real-world application, using your own strengths to create personal sales techniques that will work for you in your ongoing businesses.

Make the Sale! includes sessions focused on defining target markets, developing personal sales approaches, planning for and conducting a sales interview, determining individual buying motives, closing sales, and everything that comes in between.

The course begins Feb. 5, 2010, and meets weekly on Wednesdays for 10 sessions. So, my final question to you is: Are you ready to make a powerful leap forward into 2010? I hope so, and I hope to see you there. (Click here to read more about this series on my dedicated Make the Sale! Web pages.)

“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” he said, “What you’re saying is that company productivity is really all about personal productivity. It’s all about us.”

You can imagine my response: “Excellent,” I said. “Gold Stars.”  All productivity, whether your company is a small firm or a global corporation, derives from the personal. And what does that mean to you, the leader or owner of a company?

It means that your company’s productivity begins (or ends) with your personal leadership and productivity. You get your team to be more productive by setting an example of personal productivity.

Leadership Matters in Productivity

Productivity starts at the top, in your office. Think of who has the most invested in your company or department. I’d wager that that person is you. If you own the business, it’s your money on the line. If you’re the managing executive of a department, it’s your career and reputation on the line. Your investment in productivity is huge.

Now, consider the essential nature of productivity. If I’m on your sales force, I can bring in all the work in the world, but if it can’t be done within budget and without cost overruns or rework or, at worst,  orders cannot even be filled, then we do not get the net result we’re looking for.

In fact, we do our business more harm than good when we over-sell and under-deliver; i.e., when productivity cannot meet needs. This is no small order, either, and is especially challenging now that many workforces have been reduced and everyone has to be more productive without having a nervous breakdown.

Productivity can mean the difference between survival or not and/or profitability or not.  Right down to whether the business owner can pull a paycheck or not.

So, when my client said, “It’s all about us,” you can see, he was right. Productivity begins with you, the leader, personally, and it is also fundamental to your net profit.

– Success begins with a blueprint.
Valerie

Keeping a little ahead of conditions is one of the secrets of business. The time to repair your roof is when the sun is shining. So, do things before they need to be done.

Let your advance worrying become advance thinking and planning. Position yourself ahead of time in the best place for you.

You’ll gain the advantage in any situation through the medium of time. When you think ahead of any approaching action you’ll always have the advantage. You’ll be the winner.

When you do what is necessary, all the odds are in your favor.

(Reprinted with permission, Sam Maitz, Director of Marketing Technology, Leadership Management® International, Inc.)

Many businesspeople I consult with hear the word productivity and immediately fall into a deep sleep. There’s just nothing exciting about the word.

But I have to tell you that the difference productivity can make in your life and business is very, very exciting. Improve your productivity and you improve your chances of spending quality time away from business, leaving you more time with the ones you love.

How to Improve Productivity

Productivity is fundamental to meeting any business goal. And in challenging economic times, being strong on the fundamentals can be a make or break for a business. But how do you improve and increase your productivity?

This is one of the essential business concepts I tackle during some of my first meetings with clients. We go through many steps and use several different tools to reveal the truth underlying the hours spent at the office. When we do, we almost always discover that too many of the hours we spend at work are virtually “lost hours”, which in turn contribute to long days – and weekends – at work instead of play.

I want to share with you one of the first steps toward discovering these lost hours and the holes in your own productivity:

Know – and understand – what your time is worth. Your productivity will always be tied to how you spend your time, so seriously evaluate how you spend each minute and hour at work.

• What are your high-payoff activities, and how much time do you spend on them?
• How much time are you spending on low-payoff activities?
• How much time is lost to no-payoff activities?

Once you’ve taken this step, you should see some opportunities for increasing your productivity. And when you increase your productivity and begin to see the ripples of effects this can have on your work and home life, I guarantee that the word productivity is going to begin to sound a lot more exciting.

You’re special and unique among all the creatures on the planet earth. You’ve been endowed with the capacity and the power to create desirable pictures inside your mind and to find them automatically printed in the outer world of your environment.

You’ll gradually grow into any condition you desire, provided you first make yourself in habitual mental attitude the person who corresponds to that condition.

Picture yourself vividly as winning, and that alone will contribute immeasurably to your success. All your dreams can come true, if you have the courage to pursue them.

(Reprinted with permission, Sam Maitz, Director of Marketing Technology, Leadership Management® International, Inc.)

You don’t have to buy from anyone. You don’t have to work at any particular job. You don’t have to participate in any given relationship. You can choose.

You steer the course you choose in the direction of where you want to be today, tomorrow, or in a distant time to come. You hold the tiller.

You can decide to alter the course of your life at any time. No one can ever take that away from you. You can decide what you want and go after it. It’s always your next move.

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Reprinted with permission

Sam Maitz, Director of Marketing Technology

Leadership Management® International, Inc.

For more information about Strategic Essentials small business training and education programs or our coaching and consultation services please call 775.826.8282 today!

Strategic Essentials primarily serves business owners, business leaders, entrepreneurs, managers, supervisors and decision makers in Reno, Sparks, Carson City, Tahoe, Truckee Meadows and surrounding communities.

Strategic Essentials is a Managing Partner for Leadership Management International.

You must give up something to get whatever you want in life. The greater the value, the greater the sacrifice that will be required. Everything has a price.

You pay a price if you want to make things better, and you pay a price for just leaving things as they are.

Nothing worthwhile will come easily to you. Work, continuous work and hard work, is the only way to accomplish the results that last.

You’ll find no success at bargain basement prices.

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Reprinted with permission

Sam Maitz, Director of Marketing Technology

Leadership Management® International, Inc.

For more information about Strategic Essentials small business training and education programs or our coaching and consultation services please call 775.826.8282 today!

Strategic Essentials primarily serves business owners, business leaders, entrepreneurs, managers, supervisors and decision makers in Reno, Sparks, Carson City, Tahoe, Truckee Meadows and surrounding communities.

Strategic Essentials is a Managing Partner for Leadership Management International.