Goal Setting: Find the ROI – Measure Your Goals
By Valerie G. Cardenas
“You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.” – Paul J. Meyer
Have you heard this business quotation before? It’s one of my favorites because it’s absolutely true. Unless you have a strategy for measuring your goals, you have no way of keeping your business on track and no way of knowing when you’ve achieved success.
Good management of goals begins with setting measurable goals. (You may recall my reference to SMART goals in previous blogs – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Tangible goals.)
If you’ve set measurable goals, then you’ve asked some basic questions, such as: How much? How many? By when? Now you’re ready to measure.
Choose Measurements that Can be Managed for ROI
Every business is different, so measurement strategies and types vary. But here are a few standards to get you thinking about measuring your business goals and determining your Return on Investment (ROI):
General Business Measurements
- Dollars per contracts signed
- Number of call-backs per 100 jobs
- Increased your profit by [insert your goal percentage here]
Sales Measurements
- New accounts as a percentage of total accounts
- Number of new accounts per day
- Percentage of referral business to your total business
Ask yourself: How can you track your success? Or, what does success look like to you?
Remember the quote we started with: You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.
Set up Dynamic, Motivational Measurements of Achievement
Once you establish measurements, then share them and your checkpoints reached – even if the sharing is just with yourself. We humans need to celebrate our achievements!
Create the visual that works for you. It might be a chart that shows your upward progress, a graph that compares, counts, or illustrates checkpoints reached. It might be pins on a map, numbers on a spreadsheet, and it might be the old-fashioned thermometer graphic that you fill in as you reach your checkpoints.
Celebrating the checkpoints reached along the way to ultimate success builds confidence and keeps us motivated. And that, finally, leads to the grand celebration when we’ve reached all the checkpoints along the way and we stand at the goal itself. Success.
