What goals have you put in place for your business to achieve this year? In these competitive times, the everyday activity of your business can become all-consuming. As you know, simply supplying your product or service to your customers requires a huge effort of planning and activity. With that in mind, it’s easy to put certain things on the long finger, to focus your attention on what needs to be done today, and simply never to get around to a proper analysis of your strengths and weaknesses. At Customer Perceptions, we’ve work with thousands of clients, and we know that putting in place a proper analysis of your business performance and staff behaviours, arriving at an achievable but ambitious set of goals is an exercise that often never moves off the to-do list. In this article, we have some simple tips to help you implement a proper set of business goals and targets, and to achieve them!
Try this simple and effective performance enhancing exercise:
1) Monitor the number of visitors you have engaging with you, visiting your business. Set a goal for an achievable improvement in this number within a fixed period, eg: increase new visitor numbers by A% in B months.
2) How many of your current visitors purchase/buy from your business? Again, set a goal to improve this ratio by C% in B months.
3) What is the average value of a sale? Again! Set a goal to improve this ratio by D% in B months.
4) How many customers return to your business? One last time, set a goal to improve this ratio by E% in B months.
These are four very simple-to-do techniques, they cost nothing to implement and they could end up making your business money, right? Well, yes and no. Each step on the chain requires certain specific things:
1) Increasing new visitor numbers requires examining and improving your marketing communications and social media activities.
2) Increasing your customer purchase ratio requires improving your customer engagement and identifying more specifically customer needs.
3) Increasing the average value of a sale requires improving your staff selling skills and a commitment from them always to “sell up”.
4) Increasing the number of customers returning to your business requires improving customer service skills, staff attitudes and behaviour and driving relationship-building with your customers!
The point, ultimately, is that goals and a plan won’t on their own help your business – it requires a serious commitment on behalf of your managers to implement the processes necessary to achieve them. It requires a sincere attempt at understanding what your customers really think about doing business with you, and how your staff feel about working for you. Finally, it also requires excellent communication, training and involvement at every level of your business.
And here’s the thing: all of the above, when you’ve planned it out, done it, achieved every goal – all of it’s nothing more than a good start. This process is ongoing forever, it doesn’t end ‘till your business ends and amounts to nothing more than a relentless drive to achieve a never-achievable state – Perfection.
