Goals

As part of FAST one of my key take-aways for people is that they should limit their goals to a maximum of three.

One of the reasons for this is because when we try to focus on too many things, we usually end up focusing on nothing. As the saying goes if we try to catch two rabbits we will end up with neither.

Also, if we have big goals they often have several sub goals that make them up, for example if my goal is to be fitter that could end up with sub goals lose 10lbs and exercise 3 times a week.

So if we pick too many big goals they can very quickly break down into to far to many sub goals for us to focus on them successfully.

So we need to be really diligent about keeping our goals to a minimum, and I was reminded of this yesterday as I was coaching a client. They are looking at running an event in September and when we were discussing the goals of the event they talked about number of attendees, expected revenue, etc., etc., but the more we talked the more it became clear that we still lacked clarity on what the goals were.

Too many of the goals were being grouped together and this was confusing the approach and our ability to be able to communicate to the team what was needed.

The reality was that there were two key goals

• Number of attendees
• Revenue generated

But as we discussed this and got clearer about it, we noticed that actually these goals were  completely separate, although they were both equally important and would have an impact on each other.

Our attendance goal was to have 1000 people attend the event, which is a 5 fold increase on least years 200 people that attended. When we started to talk about ticket prices, my client said, if we get 1000 people to attend then we could have them attend for almost free, because the revenue will come from the up sell during the conference.

This now meant that we had 2 clear goals:

1. Get 1000 people to attend the event
2. Generate all revenue targets from the up sell

By understanding this we could now communicate to the team responsible for getting people to attend the conference that they didn’t have a revenue target, they just had 1 target. 1000 people to attend.

By understanding this it now allows the team to be much more aggressive and also be much more creative about how they will try to attract people, they are no longer selling tickets and trying to persuade people to buy, but they are looking to persuaded people of the value of attending a free conference.

With our greater clarity has come greater simplicity, which would help us get closer to the target.

It also now gives the sales team a much clearer picture of what they are going to be tasked with. They will need to achieve the revenue target by selling products and services to 1000 attendees.

Which actually means that their confidence in their ability to hit the revenue target has increased. Because they know what their historical conversion rates are, i.e. customer to sales ratio, and with a 1000 potential customers they know they only need to achieve a small percentage of their usual results to exceed the sales target.

So by keeping the goals simple, clear and to a minimum it has allowed us to better communicate to the teams what they need to do and also to increase their confidence in their ability to meet them.

This is the benefit of taking a FAST Approach. If you’d like to know more about FAST, or would like to sign up for a free 30 minute strategy sessions then email me at gordon@leadership-principles.com

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