One of our students asked how to set true business goals that help her to move forward. This is part 2.
Activity + competency = reaching goals
Last week we talked about breaking down your overall goals like rank or advancement into smaller performance indicators to help with the health of your business. Your business breaks down into new business goals, retention goals, and team development. Ultimately you want to have the following activities- appointments with potential customers, appointments with existing customers, appointments with recruiting prospects, and coaching appointments with team members. These goals are great for feedback so you can look at what is going well, what isn’t, and what you need to focus on moving forward.
This week, let’s talk about your schedule and skill level, and how those relate to your goals. You can have the most beautiful spreadsheet of goals and great plans, but if you don’t have the time or the skills to execute the activities and get results, you will still be stuck.
If you have 10 hours per week to work, you should have different goals than if you have 30 hours per week. So how should you be allocating your time and how does this impact the amount of appointments you have? An easy rule of thumb is to divide the number of hours you have in a week by 2.5, and that’s how many appointments you can probably do. That accounts for them going over, time to set them up, and space for other tasks in your business. So, if you are working 10 hours in a week, you can complete 4 appointments. If you are working 30 hours per week, you can complete 12 appointments. Do you see how this is going to impact your goals?
Oh but my friend, remember there are different kinds of appointments, based on the different parts of your business. New customers, existing customers, recruiting, and coaching. How do you break that down? Well, if you have no team, they would all be for new business and your goals would match that. 10 hours a week, your goal would be to schedule 4 appointments, 3 would show up, and you would have 2 customers. Your monthly new customer goal would probably be 8. What if you have a team? We would make half of your time for new business and customer retention, and the rest for your team. 2 appointments for new customers and so your goal for the month would probably be 8 appointments, 6 would show up, and 4 new customers. And each week you would have 2 coaching or recruiting appointments. So this is how your schedule would impact your goal setting.
The last area you need to consider when setting goals is your skill level. We must focus on progress not perfection. If you are new, your results are likely to come at a slower pace than someone with a lot of skill and experience. It’s still great to set aggressive activity goals and shoot for those but it’s really important to focus on progress to keep yourself from getting discouraged. A new person would be doing great with a 50-60% closing percentage, where if one of my sales coaches were at 50% I would wonder what the heck was going on.
Skills matter. But which skills matter? And in which order?
- The quality of your appointment- measured by closing percentage and average order. I would say you want to be at least at 60% and $120 average order for most network marketing companies. This is the first area you will want to address because you want the hard work that you put into your business to lead to actually helping customers solve problems. The only way they can solve their problems is if they actually own the products.
- Time management and appointment setting- I put these together because they work together. If you don’t have your schedule set up properly, then it will be hard to set the appointments. You will want to offer customers two times to help them choose and so your schedule needs to be in order.
- Referrals- this is an urgent skill level to help you maintain a strong customer base for the duration of your business. Don’t wait until you run out of people to meet with. Start earning referrals right away. This will also save time because you won’t have to troll Facebook to find someone to reach out to, or attend day long network events to get one potential prospect. Having people host parties or classes is also a way of getting referrals so that totally counts.
- Recruiting and training- now that you know how to sell a product, you will transfer those skills to selling the business opportunity to earn money. You can use the same format as your sales conversation. Once you have some people, let’s start training them on their skills so they get off to a fast start and retain well.
- Coaching and developing- the last skill to focus on is your ability to help your team members improve their skills and reach their goals. Great coaching matters, take a look at some of the major sports dynasties. The players change. The coaches were the constant. Over time you will want to develop these skills as well.
I recommend to focus on one of these buckets each month until each skill group is to the point where you can get decent results consistently. As you get better and better, you can be more aggressive with your goals. You gotta learn how to actually do the stuff. If your kid wants to play baseball in the pros, he will need to learn how to throw, catch, hit, slide, and play defense. It’s no different for you in your profession.
Ok whew! What a sexy podcast right? If you feel like your head is going to explode, just check out the main site or the show notes on your phone and you will have a breakdown. Next week, the plan is to have our student on the podcast and I’m going to coach her through setting her goals for next month. You won’t want to miss it. 🙂