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5 Reasons Business Goals Fail

failJoeColburnWhen 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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On a Crusade Against Drop-Down Menus

crusadepuroticoricoAnyone who worked with me at the publishing company will know that I am completely (almost) against using drop-down menus on websites.  Why?  Well there are lot’s of reasons…

They’re cool

I hate using anything because it’s cool.  If you have a business reason for using something, that’s one thing, but using something because it’s cool, just isn’t.  Most things that are used for this reason are annoying and quickly become yesterday’s fad.  Besides, you’re running a business, not trying to join a high school clique.

They don’t work well

While this problem has improved, many sites still don’t implement drop down menus very well.  They’re hard to use and clicking on just the right link is very difficult.

They don’t show up on mobile devices

This has been improved as well.  But even if they do work on mobile devices, they’re even more difficult to use than when you have a mouse.

What about people without a mouse

There are people out there using computers without mice – text readers and other devices for people with disabilities, and other devices.  Some drop-down menus will have accessibility for people with keyboards or other devices, but often this is forgotten.

They’re a crutch

In order to properly (if there is such a thing) use drop down menus, information needs to be organized in a way that makes sense.  There needs to be some sort of hierarchy.  Most sites that use drop down menus don’t have a true information hierarchy, they just use cute titles that only make sense to the designer or marketing guy.  And there’s almost always a bunch of pages that don’t fit anywhere and are thrown under a Misc. heading – not very helpful.

It’s hard to find things

People are much faster at scanning a page than mousing over menu items to see what’s in them.  While your drop downs may seem like they’re saving time, they really are causing seconds of time for every use – that really adds up.

They’re annoying

I don’t know how many times I’ll go to a site with drop down menus and my mouse will happen to be over one of them.  All of a sudden a menu pops up when all I’m trying to do is read an article.  Now I have to take the time to move my mouse so I can do what I came to the site to do.  Or, I’ll be trying to navigate through a site but I can’t seem to get my mouse in the right place to keep the menu open long enough to click on the text – it can be pretty trying to click on a small word just to go to another page.

They’re a fad

For the most part, large sites have started to go away from drop-down menus (yay!).  They’ve found that people can scan through a long list of links much faster than they can hunt through different drop-down menus.  Having all the major links on a page means that it’ll be easier for people to find other reasons to stay on your site, instead of leaving or clicking off.

(photo by puroticorico)

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What Benefits Do You Provide For Your Customers?

I’m guest blogging over at Insights Group today with a post about product benefits and why it’s important to clearly communicate them to your customers.  Here’s an excerpt:

A lot of companies get caught up in how much they’re selling or how great a deal it is and they forget one vital thing.  Customers buy your products or services because of the benefits they provide for them.  Benefits equal the value of your product or service.  If customers don’t see value (benefits) in your products or services, they won’t buy from  you.

I hope you’ll join me at Insights for the rest of the post – What Benefits Do You Provide For Your Customers.