It takes time to build a business that you can scale the structure. As a founder, you have traction with your product/services but to gather momentum you have to have a tangible vision and strategy for where you are, where you want to go and how you’re going to get there. To do this it's important to:
Have a clear measurable goal: this needs to be easy to view, and easy to track with a clear timeline of when you want to achieve it. The more established the business is, the further into the future you can look; otherwise, start with monthly targets. For example, to acquire 50 new trial customers within the next 6 months is a great goal to measure against whereas a goal of ‘generating more business’ is not.
Use your goal to drive the right behaviour: Use it as a focal point for your team catch ups rather than have free flowing and unstructured catch-ups about sales. With a goal, you can have sales meetings that focus predominantly on the questions of “Are we on track to meet this target?”, “What is slowing us down?” and “What can speed us up”? Without it, it is much harder to drive the conversation in the right direction. Getting this rhythm in early will help bed in new team members and allow you, as the founders, to drive a culture of continuous, incremental improvement that will compound into significant benefits later down the road.
Keep ideation for another time: In executing against your plan, your biggest challenge will be sticking to the path you’ve defined. With any new business, there will always be new things to try and incorporate, such as new go-to-market strategies and product improvements, which can impact the focus of you and your team. Manage this by keeping ideation to a single slot in the week and develop a framework to help you assess whether those ideas should be used to update the strategy; otherwise, you could run the risk of not making too much progress at all.
The most important things about setting a goal is setting it, making it public and working towards it as a team. Setting a baseline early is one of the best things you can do to help your business succeed. It provides a focus for the team, a strong narrative on your priorities for potential investors, and allows you to know whether you’ve made progress in scaling your business.
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