Dan MoyleWhile everyone else scrambles in the fourth quarter to meet their 2019 goals, what are you doing to set your business up for a different success?
If everyone else zigs, shouldn’t you zag?
Your competition is working furiously to make their sales and growth goals. What if you kept your team going on their path, but added a focus on setting up your first quarter for growth in 2020?
For instance, while your competition focuses on cutting deals in Q4, you could look at adding visitor tracking software to your website so you can actually see how people are using your website - or not - before you make assumptions and sweeping changes.
The truth is, we all have opinions. But facts make all the difference. And if you’re only making guesses on who’s visiting your site, when and for what reasons, then no amount of last minute deals will save you. The right tracking software/analytics will inform decision making to remove personal opinions.
How to Get Ahead of Your Competition in 2020
Let’s start at the beginning. (Thanks Captain Obvious)
Focus on your 12-month goal or goals. What do you want to accomplish in 2020? Make it a SMART goal. Is it specific? Can you measure it? Is it attainable and relevant? Can you make it timely? Those are all critical.
“We want to increase sales” doesn’t match any of that.
“We want to increase revenue by 15% while decreasing expenses by 10% by the end of Q3 2020” is much better.
Once you have your 12-month goal set up, plan out your exact results. Is it number of customers? Amount of revenue? Profitability?
What Does Success Look Like in the Next 12 Months?
As you hone in on exactly the results you want to see, you will already be pulling ahead of your competition. Far too many companies go into the new year with a vague dream of growing.
Next you’ll want to set aside time to brainstorm on the progress milestones you’ll measure.
What gets measured gets improved.
Do you want to increase landing page conversions to 15%? Maybe you can plan to increase lead flow to your sales team by 25%. The leading indicators of growth you plan for will help you see your progress by the quarter.
What are the Top 4 Things That Have to Happen in Order to Reach the Desired Outcome?
These top four things will be your quarterly initiatives. Choose the tasks and actions that will fuel the milestones you’re measuring. Increased social media advertising, contextual blogging for your ideal client profile or buyer personas, creating a searchable resource library on your website and other projects can be planned by the month and week. In each quarter, you’ll have 12-to-13 weekly tasks to get you there.
Breaking down the year into bite-sized chunks your team can manage will help cast the vision of a successful 2020 growth year.
A Few Tools to Fuel Your 2020 Growth Engine
In addition to the Impulse Creative 2020 Strategic Roadmap, you’ll want tools to help you grow and manage your world. Here’s a short list of what we suggest to get you started.
Asana for Task Management
As your team sets up its daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly tasks and projects, keeping them organized and time-based is vital.
One of our favorite project management tools is Asana. For those not familiar, Asana is a web and mobile app designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work.
Your team— or better yet your project manager— can move your quarterly missions into projects, create monthly or weekly tasks in those projects and add daily subtasks within those. All of these are tied to your calendar, which keeps everyone accountable and on track.
A great asset in Asana is the ability to add files and links to keep everything together and visible to the entire team.
Tettra for Process Documentation
Keeping with the team visibility theme, we use Tettra to document nearly every process we have at Impulse Creative. This helps make them scalable and mobile between team members.
Twelve months is a long time. What might change over the course of a year? Adding process management to your 2020 growth plan will put you ahead of your competition and help focus your team on the right points on your growth journey.
Bonus Resource: Listen to Tettra’s Nelson Joyce talk about process documentation on Wayfinding Growth
Slack for Team Communication
Communication is key to a team’s success. How do you ensure a constant open line of communication? The right tools are a great beginning.
Slack can help you manage specific projects and their communications. It can help your team organize professional discussions separately from more personal conversations.
We have Slack channels for specific client work along with random, music, GIF channels and others. You could have a channel for your revenue team, for your content team, for your website redesign and other needs.
Bonus Resource: Wayfinding Growth with Impulse Creative’s Project Manager Audrey Dimartinis
Ready to map out your vision for success in 2020? We’re here to help.
Photo by Boris Stefanik on Unsplash