Not advisable: Wandering off in a goal’s general direction and hoping you’ll get there.
By MARK RIFFEY for the Flathead Beacon
2017 is almost underway. Ready to start working through the first task on the detailed 2017 business roadmap that you painstakingly carved out over the last month? I’m referring to your checklist of all the things you want to get done to grow and improve your business this year. I suspect that list includes a number of tasks that execute on the strategies you worked out to improve your finances, marketing, sales process, and customer service – all while edging your way into adjacent markets, right? If that’s you, I hope you stay the course, crank through your roadmap and make some great things happen.
If that isn’t you and you’re beginning to consider what aspects of your business need your focus for 2017, maybe this 2017 business roadmap brainstorming discussion will help.
What’s your business roadmap expected to accomplish?
Without knowing your specific business, it’s tough to focus on the exact challenges you’re facing. So what do we do?
Experience tells me that you likely have one or more of these four things on your todo list for 2017:
Increase sales.- Reduce expenses.
- Improve profitability.
- Improve quality
While those are all good things to accomplish, let me first suggest that you nail down exactly what you want to accomplish with this list.
What does “Increase sales” mean to you? Does it mean double or 10x your sales? Does it mean sell one more car a day? Does it mean that each salesperson will sell $1000 more a week?
Until you decide what “increase sales” means, it’s going to be pretty hard to hit that goal.
You may tire of this process, but it’s exactly what you need if you’re looking at a 2017 goals list that looks like the four item list above. You need to know how far (and where) you want to go and what is involved in producing with the increase you’re striving for. Not advisable: Wandering off in a goal’s general direction and hoping you’ll get there.
What’s hiding inside “Increase sales”?
The first item can and should be broken out into multiple goals even if each one of them isn’t applicable to your intent to triple sales:
- Get new customers. (What kind of customers? From what lead sources?)
- Keep more existing customers.
- Sell more to existing customers (selling more frequently, selling more expensive things, or both.)
- Find new products to sell to your customers. (things that make sense in the context of your relationship)
- Find new services to sell to your customers. (ditto above)
These can be broken down as well. Drill down until each goal’s first step is obvious. You’ll have to delegate. Delegation won’t go well without specifics.
Now you have a bit of a template for breaking down annual goals so that you can start executing.
What’s involved in tripling sales?
Let’s say you sold $340,000 last year and you want to triple sales this year. A 300% increase is a tall order, but it isn’t impossible. The big question is “What makes this possible?”, because the effort is in the details.
If I ask for explicit details on what you need to do, you need to know what it’s going to take because there are resources that must be invested to make that kind of growth happen.
Let’s say you have two sales people and each of them sold $170,000. To hit $1.2 million, you’re either going to have to hire four additional sales people capable of selling $170k a year, or have your existing sales people work *at least* four times as hard, or some combination thereof.
But that’s not all.
Four more sales people will need four times the leads. Customer support will be affected by a 300% increase in sales, as will delivery, storage, accounting, supplies (and suppliers) and finances.
You need to think about exactly what it’s going to take, map it out and then start implementing your plans.
Running off the roadmap
What if you miss a month? Or a quarter? How does that affect your execution of the impacted areas (service, delivery, etc)? Have a plan B figured out in advance so that you don’t have to figure out plan B while plan B is being executed. Last minute, panic or fear-driven planning seldom works out well. Think about contingencies for each aspect of your plan that has risk of failure. Communicate early and often if it happens.
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Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him at mriffey@flatheadbeacon.com. Check out the Flathead Beacon archive of all of Mark’s blogs.