Business Challenges and Business Goals

Establishing Business challenges and achievable business goals is a key motivating factor for your sales force. However, it can also be a real headache for managers! How to fix them? Should we evolve them? How to talk with his team? Objective management – theorized by US consultant and author Peter Drucker – provides some answers to these questions. It is an iterative method in which each cycle breaks down into 3 phases: definition, monitoring and evaluation of objectives. Below are the few steps, you need to remember for establishing business challenges and to achieve them.

Business Challenges to Business Goals | Be Smart

1. Business Tour Business Goals

The starting point of your approach must be the business strategy of your company. Your roadmap for the coming year for example. It is important to define and formalize the business objectives of your organization. From there, you will be able to determine precisely the means to achieve them, and the commercial objectives that your teams will have to achieve.

For your business goals to be truly effective, they must be motivating for your teams: goals that are too easy to reach or completely unrealistic will have the opposite effect. Make sure that the challenges you offer to your sales force are SMART:

2. Specific

First, your business objectives must be clear. It is necessary to be able to answer the following questions without ambiguity:

Who is concerned, is it an individual or team objective?

Which mission is concerned? – The more accurate it is, the easier it will be to evaluate the objective.

In which case is it reached or not? Objectives will be avoided with several components, preferring them with a single purpose.

3. Measurable

In addition, your goals must be measurable, as accurately as possible.

It is very easy to meet this requirement of measurability when the objective concerned is quantitative in nature: “this month, you will have to increase your turnover by 5% compared to last month”. Metrics are obvious and easy to set up with tools like Incentive.

When you want to implement qualitative or behavioral business objectives, the choice of metrics is less obvious. For example, if you want your salespeople to give more importance to customer satisfaction, you can refer to the analysis of customer returns in a qualitative way. Also, do not hesitate to discuss with them the”

4. Ambitious:

This is a crucial dimension if you want your business objectives to be motivating for your teams. For this to work, it is also important that the goal be accepted by all stakeholders – your teams and your hierarchy.

5. Realistic

If your teams believe that their business goals are beyond the realm of reality or disproportionate, they will not make any effort to achieve it.

For a goal to be realistic, the level of achievement must be reasonable. Your goals will ideally be expressed in terms of progression. It must also take into account the possibility of external factors making its success more difficult (political context unstable, economic crisis,).

6. Temporal

That is to say defined in time. The chosen duration must be consistent with the nature of the objective. Generally speaking, the more specific the business objectives, the shorter the duration of the business, which will allow them to alternate. Conversely, the more complex they are, the longer the time it takes to reach it.

Business Challenges and Business Objectives | Stay SMART

Setting business goals that are both challenging and achievable for your salespeople is one of the keys to motivating your teams. But it can also turn out to be a real headache from the point of view of the manager. This article is the second part of a series dedicated to objective management. Objective-commercial-management

In the first part of this article, we sought to produce business objectives that create commitment. We will see in this second part how to live these objectives on a daily basis. How to make both effective management tools and motivational levers for your teams.

Give meaning to your business goals

So that the goals you set for your collaborators are motivating, it is essential that they understand what strategy they are driving. If you followed the advice in the first part of this article, your business objectives are defined by following the logic below:

• Define your business goals in the medium and long term.
• Establish a business strategy to achieve them.
• Deduct your operational business objectives.

It is important that your teams understand the link between their daily actions and the organization’s strategy. They will feel more involved in the success of the company. For example, do not hesitate to organize a quarterly meeting during which you will outline this strategy in the longer term. Invite other stakeholders (other departments, members of top management …) to make the vision clearer and more comprehensive for your sales people.

Your business objectives are a support for dialogue.

In addition, internal trading is an essential component to ensure relevance of your business goals over time. Make room for consultation. This can be done through a regular point with each of your collaborators. You will be able to take stock of its progress. Integrate the characteristics of its clients with the objectives; pay more attention to the segmentation of the client portfolio that is assigned to it. Also give the opportunity for mutual feedback: that of the manager on the work of his collaborator, and that of the collaborator on his missions.

You will be able to adjust your management on a daily basis. Rather than negotiating the amount of the goal, focus first on the means to be used to achieve it. The idea is to make your business goals as ambitious and realistic as possible. Be clear in advance about the degree of adaptability you can give.

New Call-to-Action

Involve your employees in the (re) definition of their business objectives.

Finally, involve your teams in the definition and evolution of their objectives. You can animate once a year a time dedicated to an in-depth feedback on the objectives of last year. You will be able to take a step back on what worked well and what motivated you. Take stock of what worked and why. Beyond an inventory, the aim is to bring out solutions to be implemented in order to do better the following year.

This is an opportunity for your employees to express themselves: to give their ideas, to develop their vision of their role within the organization. These meetings are actually quite difficult to conduct. Relationships between your sales people and your customers involve many special cases. They are often a source of dispersion when their teams are brought together. Good upstream preparation will be a key to success.