Are You Working from Right to Left?

We think linearly.  Well, at least those of us who live in the western world.  There is along history of study on thought and language that can demonstrate this.  For now, just take my word for it.  Westerners in particular are system people and we think in a linear model.

By now you have to be asking, what does that mean and why do I care?  At least you should be.  Well here’s why.  Every business is a line, a timeline or a process.  Input plus process equals output. If you are normal, you know what the output is.  The output is dollars in your pocket or in the business bank account.

But what I see too frequently is confusion among business owners over their input and the process.

A successful business model will have a product or service to sell.  That is the input.  The process will be sales, presentation, marketing, and transaction. Your job is to get people who have never heard of your service to make a transaction.  This means you have to know your process. In order to understand the process you have to have a goal.

An Example of Reaching Goals

So, lets take a model to help you understand what you need to do in your business.  Let’s imagine that company A sells hot air balloons.  They sell them for five thousand dollars each (for the record I know nothing about hot air balloons, other than that they look really cool).  They need to start at a goal.  They are going to set a goal to make 100,000 dollars in 2009.

Now they have a goal.  What do they need to do to reach that goal?  Based on previous sales experience and market research lets say they know that of every twenty sales presentations they sell one balloon.  Well, they could work on finding more leads, because they need to make 400 sales presentations this year.  That is a legitmate method of reaching the goal.  So they send some people out to hot air baloon conventions and advertise in baloon world USA magazine (all fictional I think).

They COULD look into their sales presentation and try to find ways of improving the process.  If they could find a way to convert one in fifteen sales presentations they could meet their goal faster and possibly even make more than their goal this year.

What if they raised the price of a baloon to 6,000?  If this still remains competitive, they could even be more competitive if this allowed them to offer some form of support to their buyers!  Think, now they are earning more and raising the value of their product at the same time!

They key to the equation is that they look at the goal and then they determine how they are going to reach this goal.

What you Need to do Right Now

Far too often people look at their goal and stumble around trying to figure out how to reach it.  I assure you, you will never reach your goal that way.  Instead determine an action plan and follow through on it.

This might mean you need to comment on 15 blogs a day, change your sales text on your site, and improve your metatags to increase your search traffic.

Figure out what you need to do this year and follow through on that plan.  This is how you reach your goals.

Find this helpful?  Subscribe for more tips from Jared.  And to give credit where credit is due, alot of these ideas come straight from Formula Five.

More on this topic

• Does Your Business have a Strategy?
• Success comes when you aren’t looking for it
• Amen to Darren on the Twitter Post
• Reevaluating Your Business Plan
• Most CEO’s in the US are ISTJ

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