It’s that time of the year where even the most live-in-the-moment people can’t help but think a little bit about their goals for the new year.
Resolutions are being written; businesses are stepping out of the action to take time to reflect on the happenings of the year. Everyone’s laying down plans for the new year.
For a lot of sales and business development professionals, this is a time to assess and be assessed. Did we meet targets? What were our challenges? What worked and what didn’t? What will success look like in 2020?
Crucial questions for business growth.
Collaboration On Business Goals
My team and I have our annual goal-setting meeting every December, and we put down firm, challenging goals for the following year. This year, it was on Monday, December 9th, that my team of two and I shut the world out, buckled down, and dove into our 2020 plans. It’s a full day of planning and goal-setting, 9 am to 5 pm.
Most of our discussion is focused on business goals: how many Right-Fit Clients we want to sign on, who these clients are, our sales and outreach strategy, our key messaging, and our unique selling proposition.
We walk out of this meeting knowing exactly what the following year is going to look like for us. We even have in place our presentations and sales tools, all the enablers to help us hit our goals.
We also talk about foreseeable challenges and changes that need us to readdress our business strategy. This year, for instance, we know that a lot of regulatory changes are coming to the UAE’s financial sector.
The way Life Insurance and Financial Advisors are going to earn their commission is going to change. I think it’s going to lead to a significant exodus of the short-term mindset advisors, but more on that in an upcoming article.
Goals Beyond Work
Once those strategic discussions are out of the way, we get to an equally important park: personal goals.
Each of us talks about what we want to achieve personally at work, our health and fitness goals, family time goals, personal development goals, and we figure out how we can support each other to make these goals happen too. For these goals, too, we put down action plans.
I’ve learned that this is a HUGE part of keeping a team happy. Great managers go beyond workplace results and focus on whole-person development. They care.
Following this annual goal-setting meeting, we then have monthly meetings where we assess progress, approach, and do a quick check on how we’re coming along with those goals.
The reason I’m sharing this process with you is to give you an idea of the detail we go into to set out an action plan for our vision. I’ve seen people simply ‘deciding’ with determination they want to achieve something but then leaving the plan to fall into place itself. In that case, you’ve got yourself a dream, but not a goal. A goal is a dream with a deadline and a detailed action plan that you can put in motion to get there.
Without that action plan, it’s hard to find the drive to get out of bed every morning and chase your dream. It’s something that you want to achieve six, eight, eleven months from now, and it’s so easy to snooze that ‘action’ button to tomorrow, isn’t it? Especially come February when the New Year Resolution fires start to die down.
Another big part of our goal-setting exercise as a business is that we plan alongside our clients. We invite one of our right-fit clients into our strategy meeting to get their perspective on our goals, plans, and processes.
It has been invaluable for us to understand from our clients what more we can do for them. Because we have defined our right-fit clients so closely, the revelations that come from having this Category A or B client in the room with us give us some close insights on how we can sharpen up our offering.
What about you? How do you set your business and personal goals? Have you got a book, concept, or philosophy to get the gears churning and ready for 2020?
