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21st September 2017

#B2B #Business

Whether you like it or not, setting yourself and your business SMART goals is a smart move! Without direction planning, where is your business really going? Setting SMART goals can help you to organise and prioritise to make sure you’re taking massive action towards your goals. Having a time frame when you want to achieve these goals by is one thing we do here at Sixth Story. It helps us to grow our business and help our clients to grow.

Specific

If you make your goals specific, it’s something that you can focus on and helps with discipline. When you collect all of your information, it translates into a clear list of things you need and want to do. Narrowing your focus helps you create your goals as a clear target.

If you create a vague goal, you’re not going to get it done because really, you haven’t identified what it is that you really want to achieve. Make it concrete and if it helps think about the Who?, What?, Where?, When? and Why? that will get you there. These then become goals you can actually work with.

make goals short sharp and specific

Measureable

Once you’ve clarified your end vision it obliges you to take action. But, you want to be able to see where you’re going and if what you’re doing is working, otherwise it can be easy to lose motivation. If you have a way to monitor, it helps you to measure your progress and accomplishments. For example, we track what we do on social media. By creating engaging online content we can strive to get more followers on the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn and work with the more popular posts. One thing we notice? Pictures of people and our dog do really well on social media, it’s always nice looking at a picture of our puppy Biscuit!

measure your goals

By having measures you can manage your progress, it’s a great way to identify what’s working so you can do more of that!

Achievable

If something is truly achievable, it helps to drive you forward and do your best. Completing something when you said you were going to and seeing result can help to give you fulfillment. There are some questions questions you might need to ask yourself: What do you need to make this goal a reality? Do you need more skills, experience or expertise? How important is this goal ultimately?

Being a little harsh on yourself sometimes can help you and your business to grow. The most successful entrepreneurs didn’t wake up one day with multi-million pound companies, that takes work!

generate leads

Realistic

Remind yourself of your priorities and it might give you something new to think about. If you set goals, make sure you can achieve them and that you spending time and effort on them is something that is really going to help you. Then you need to think about how relevant they are. We know, for example, that if a client has an operating capacity of 10,000 units we wouldn’t get a goal to increase sales to 20,000 units. Goals must be realistic in terms of operations as well or maybe you need to tweak your goals. Don’t trick yourself into doing unnecessary things.

make your goals matter

Timely

Time management will help you achieve your goals. Setting goals and having clear, identifiable deadlines means you do everything you can and have to by then. Time helps you to stay on target. Whatever work we do for our clients gets an amount of time. We have to be realistic with our designers and developers for when they can get things done and match with when our clients need things done. Managing expectations is key here, don’t over sell yourself or you’ll end up falling short, and that can cost you business.

monitor your progress

But remember, SMART goals are only as useful as you make them! Why not download our goals sheet to help you get started?

If you enjoyed this blog, head over here to grab our one page business plan template.