Whether it be business planning or weekly goal setting, getting clients to make plans is really important.
Without any plans, it is easy to just drift along hoping that something positive will happen.
Weekly goals/targets give you something to aim for; and the ability to see measure your level of success during the task and see what results were achieved for your efforts.
For example: A goal of making 50 sales calls in the week is about motivating activity. It is easy to record that you did, or did not, make those calls to real live prospects. The results will speak for themselves. But, this in itself will not get you more business. The real goal is to convert ‘x’ number of prospects into clients (new and existing) at ‘y’ income. It may be that you are aiming for 1 client at £1000 per month on a 1-year project. Would it be ok if you signed up 2 clients at £500 per month for the year? … if you did this by only making 85 calls? Keep a focus on the real deliverable and keep the rest of your activities flexible.
At each review of the annual business plan, clients often remark that it didn’t take long for the plans to be out of date. The reason for this is that the world doesn’t stand still so you can complete your plans.
At each weekly, bi-monthly or monthly coaching session, we go through the goals and measure the results. These results drive the goals for the next time period. These goals are there to deliver the overall annual goals for the business; such as annual sales, annual profits and annual progress towards the aim of the business.
Plans need to be adaptable – Indeed, the most successful businesses are continuously adapting their plans.
From my experience of working with over 160 clients during my 14 years of coaching and mentoring, I can’t remember any time when a plan made it ‘unchanged’ to the end of the program. There will always be amendments in our ever-changing fast paced world.
The strength of successful planning is to be adaptable.
If you would like to learn more about how to make your planning work better for you, drop me a line to see how we can work together to help you achieve the bigger picture.
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