With the first of the year on hand, many benefits professionals will be making the business equivalent of New Year’s resolutions: a business plan. Most will face this task with dread. After all, no one ever got into sales out of a love for paperwork.
Business plans, however, are far more than paperwork; they are an extremely effective means of guiding your business through change and aligning your team. I’ve explained how business plans accomplish this magic in previous columns. Suffice to say the Trailblazed Sales Project Study found a high correlation between having a business plan and sales success. You can make substantial sales without a business plan, but it’s easier with one.
The good news is that writing a business plan doesn’t have to be hard. The book that grew out of the study, Trailblazed: Proven Paths to Sales Success, lays out one simple approach to creating a meaningful plan.
And having a meaningful business plan is the goal. One way to be sure your plan is worthy of the time you’ll invest in it is to pay attention to how you state your goals. I’ve worked in and advised organizations large and small. I’ve seen all sorts of business plans, read more mission statements than is recommended by the Surgeon General, and perused more goals than Transformer movies have explosions. And like those special effects, too many deliver more noise than impact.
Why the disconnect between goal statements and something useful? Because too often they articulate actions as opposed to results. They use words like “meet,” “discuss,” and “consider” instead of “launch,” “implement,” or “achieve.” They refer to what someone will do as opposed to what that person will get done.
This should not be a surprise. Talking about an initiative is easy and safe; executing what’s needed to make the initiative come to life is hard and risky. Describing goals in terms of results means someone is responsible for achieving that result. Identifying who is accountable for making something happen can be uncomfortable (especially if that someone is you).
Results-oriented goals are risky in the sense that they are like on-off switches: you either succeed or fail. As a wise Jedi put it “Do, or do not. There is no try.” (OK, actually Yoda was a puppet, but referring to him as a Jedi does give the statement a bit more heft).
Sometimes activity-goals disguise themselves as results-goals. For example, “Hold five seminars with 10 prospects at each concerning Product X” sounds good, whether seminars totaling 50 potential buyers are conducted or not. But holding seminars isn’t a result that matters—it’s something someone will do. Turning some percentage of those prospects into clients is what’s important—and needs to get done. This means a stronger goal statement would be to “Hold five seminars generating at least $10,000 in commission revenue from Product X sales by Oct. 1.”
The difference between strong, result-oriented goals and the weaker, action-oriented variety is strong goals are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Agreed to, Realistic and Timely. SMART goals provide enough detail that everyone understands what’s to be accomplished, what success looks like, and how success will be measured. They appreciate that the goal might be a stretch, but it’s doable, and they know by when that goal must be achieved.
With SMART goals—or SMART New Year’s resolutions for that matter—you’re far more likely to have a happy and successful new year. And that, coincidentally, is my wish for all of you.
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