Well defined goals increase motivation and determination, better, they define your sense of success. However, most companies fail because they didn’t define it properly. So, where to start and how to proceed to funnel your success?
Setting goals has to be done through 03 steps : pre-work, goal setting itself and ongoing management of these goals.
Pre-work
Here, you are certainly thinking about your needs or dreams but first of all, you must question yourself in order to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threads (SWOT analysis).
From the SWOT analysis, you will precisely know where your priorities are and then, come out your companies top goals for the year. However, if you are not able to identify your top objectives for the year, think about where you want to be in five years or much. For example, if you hope to have 500,000 customers within 5 years, your goal for your first year might be to focus on growing your global business. Another goal might be to launch a new product successfully.
Goal setting
Suppose that you are just starting with e-commerce and main users of your market use Facebook and from the pre-work above, you have identified that you want to grow your business on facebook. Now it is question of formulating the said objectives according to the following characteristics:
- Specific and descriptive: the more specific and descriptive you can be, the more it will be easy for everyone to understand each goal in the same way. For the above vision about your Dream Shop, you can have: “obtain at least 50 new customers per quarter”; “build a product catalog of about 200 articles in 5 categories every 3 months”; “increase the number of facebook page followers to almost 100 each week”
- Measurable and appropriately sized: in this step, you have to make sure that you can get a metric from your targets. Metrics will allow you to track your progression for every goal. Examples for the previous ones, the metrics are respectively the number of customers; the number of articles per category per catalog and the number of facebook page followers.
- Achievable: when talking about achievement, we are saying that you have to be feasible. The simple way to verify is by trying to draft a strategy for every goal so that if you look if feasible, you are one right way. For the example above, we may think that about new customers that, we will ask our facebook friends to recommend us to others on one hand and on another, we would ask to every satisfied customer to share our facebook page to his / her timeline. This second approach can also work for the ambition to increase the number of followers. But about the catalog, we may think that every day, we must prepare the content of 5 products so that for during 5 days per week, we get 25 products ready to be mounted in the catalog and at the end of the first 2 months, we have our 200 products ready to be mounted in the catalog, what we can do, during the first week of the last month.
- Relevant: do the selected goals really useful for your business? Here is the place to ask yourself about. If you think so, just answer to the question why? Why do you have to get new customers usually? Certainly, because it will increase your sellings. Why would you build a catalog? To help actual and potential customers to know what your are selling, what is new and so one. Why a big number of followers may be useful for you? Certainly because, more they are and more it will possible for you to touch some for every published product.
- Time based: we have it on blood right? What do you remark about our goals: … per quarter … every 3 months each week. For yours, you have to be sure that, you added a timescale for every target. More, you can go further by defining a precise date like the 18th of December 2020 to get 50 new customers for example.
Ongoing management
After setting 3-5 SMART company goals, you can then begin cascading them by deducing down goals for departments or organisation’s units. For that, you will remember that these specific goals must set so that the end result is an aligned network of goals that gives all employees a direct line of sight into how their contributions are driving progress on company priorities.
Finally, all the above stuff, is just the beginning of an important process where executives which have had the good idea to set goals fail too. The reason is simple, they are not able to track their progress but … they don’t have SEAMS. This productivity tool is an interactive one for tracking all your teams tasks related to the setted targets. Think about, prepare your team and enjoy building your success.
