Sarah Worsham

When it’s the end of the year and you haven’t reached your goal of 5% increase in sales, what do you do?  Hopefully you take a bit of time to reflect on why you didn’t reach your goal.  What went wrong.  What didn’t work. Here are some reasons companies often don’t reach their goals:

1. Impossible. The goal is unattainable.  The reason for goals is to set a line in the sand that you can reach and celebrate.  If you put the line too far out, you’ll never be able to achieve it.  There’s no reason goals can’t be a bit of a challenge, but they need to be within the realm of possibility.
2. Communication. The goal was never clearly communicated.  Ever work for a large corporation?  Did you know what their goal was for the year?  Yah, it was probably buried in an annual report somewhere.  If you want your goal to actually help move your business in the right direction, everyone at the company needs to know what it is and how they can help.  Overall corporate goals should be translated into appropriate goals for divisions, groups and teams.
3. Wrong Incentives. How do most companies “grade” their customer support centers?  Oftentimes its by the number of calls per hour.  Or tickets closed per hour.  What if customer service is important to your company?  (It better be).  Incentives that reward call centers for then number of people served create a situation where employees want to get off the phone with each customer as soon as possible.  Regardless of whether or not they actually helped the customer – or if the customer was satisfied.  You need to be careful what actions your incentives actually encourage if you want them to work towards your goals.
4. Strategy. Goals are nice, but once you have them, you have to figure out what your company needs to do in order to achieve them.  Having a strategy to reach a goal is important, making sure your strategy will actually reach your goal is also important.
5. Implementation. Game Time.  Did all your planning work out?  Were all the players able to follow your game plan?  Companies often have difficulty actually implementing a plan – especially if its overly complex.  Make sure plans are clear, relatively simple, and are known by everyone at the company.

I’m sure there are lots of reasons business goals fail.  What’s your experience?

(photo by Joe Colburn)

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