3 Critical Values

Can You Achieve Your Goals in 2005?

By Dino Eliadis

The answer is yes, if you know what to do to get there before you start. The problem is many of us set a goal with no idea how to achieve it. Then we just keep doing the same thing wondering why we don't get a different result.

I'm here to tell you the answers to achieving year 2005 business goals are locked up inside your current business numbers. A few critical values can tell you where you are and how you got there. From there it’s easy to project what you need to do to reach your goals for next year.

Most of us use revenue or profit as our yardstick. But, these are historical indicators that tell us what happened. Another problem is we haven't got a clue what it took to get the revenue in the door or how we managed expenses to get the profit results we got! We need better tools that can help us predict what will happen before we start. So here are three critical values that will tell you more than you can imagine. In fact, if you are not collecting and managing by these values now, you probably got the results through lots of hard work or sheer luck. Not managing with these forecasting tools, your chances of achieving your goals are the same as if you walked into a Las Vegas casino!

The first value is operational capacity. Your capacity tells you the maximum amount of work that you can put out under your current circumstances. How much money can you really make with your current resources and way of doing business? This number will tell you if your goal is attainable or not without a change to your current business model.

The next value is your sales effectiveness. Sales effectiveness tells you how many proposals/quotes you need to produce in order to close a deal. Without knowing this number you haven't got a clue how much time you need to spend selling or how many sales you need to close in order to meet your goal. You need to evaluate this in the light of your current sales situation to understand if your goal is still realistic or not.

The third value is your marketing effectiveness. This number tells you how much marketing you need to find the opportunities to write proposals/quotes. Most small businesses don't have any idea about this number. That's because not many people see the value of keeping information if they can't make an immediate sale. The real value is understanding how much marketing you need to do to hit your goal. Without this, again your goal is just a Las Vegas crap shoot.

The important point of these three numbers is to understand how much effort will be required to meet or exceed your goal in 2005. If it's not achievable under your current situation reset it, or better yet make plans to change your business and achieve that goal in 2005.

You can achieve your goals in 2005 if you know how to get there. By looking at your operational capacity, sales effectiveness, and marketing effectiveness you'll know what you need to do and when to do it to be successful in 2005. Good luck!