Business Article: Supercharge your performance

If your goal was important for you – and still is – it’s not too late. We still have 6 months left to hit your target. Here are some tips on how to supercharge your performance for the rest of the year.

1. You have to change what you are doing

You can’t keep doing the same things and expect to get different results. If you want to change your performance you have to make changes to your behaviour. But this must be done strategically so that the changes have maximum impact. You need to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t work for you.

2. Break down your goals into manageable activities

When you are just focused on a future result it is often difficult to know what to do now to take the first step to achieving the goal. It helps if you break the goal down into a series of activities or steps that will lead you to the result you want. For example, if you want to achieve sales of $1 million, you could break that down to its component parts, such as 200 customers each purchase 5 times at an average of $1000 per sale.

That means you need to make roughly 1 sale each 10 weeks to your 200 customers at an average of $1,000 per sale. These numbers will depend on your buying cycles and average sale values, but you can work out your variables using your own numbers.

3. Set short term targets

When you have realistic understanding of what has to be done to achieve your goal you can set targets for what to do each day. For example, in the above scenario, you could set a target to make 4 sales per working day to achieve your yearly target of $1 million. Then break that down into activities that need to be done each day to achieve 4 sales, e.g. make contact with 10 customers each day by phone or email.

4. Monitor your results

Monitoring your results gives you control over your performance. If you just fill your day with activity, you don’t necessarily know whether that activity is effective or efficient. Don’t just monitor the end result, monitor your activities. E.g. If your weekly sales target is $20,000 and you only achieve $17,000 for the week, just measuring your sales revenue won’t tell you what went wrong.

When you can pinpoint a shortfall in your expected activity results however, you will know what to change to improve performance. If you can see that you achieved 10 contacts for each of 5 days and that activity achieved 25 sales at an average price of $680 (= $17,000), you know where to look to fix the problem. The issue is your average sale value.

You could focus on increasing your prices or on upselling to raise this variable to your target value and improve your overall results.

5. Work at improving the ratios

Once you know what you are doing and the results you are getting, there are two ways to supercharge our performance. We can be more efficient (do more activity in the same time) and be more effective (get better results from what we do). I don’t know about you, but I much prefer the second, but we can do both to achieve better results.

Being more efficient is possibly easier to achieve, but it takes more discipline. We need to eliminate time wasters and stay on task for longer. When we want to achieve supercharged results, we need to take massive action . Instead of aiming for 10 contacts per day, stay at it until you have made 20 and see what that does to your results.

Becoming more effective is usually harder because it takes more skill. We need to work on ourselves to improve skills to get better results from our activities. Imagine what you could achieve by improving conversion ratios to 5 sales from 10 contacts and increasing your average sale to $1,200. With the exactly same amount of activity you would achieve $1.5 million. See why I like the second option more? These are just some of the ways you can supercharge your performance.

It would be a good idea to review your business and your behaviours in the following areas to see how you can positively impact the results you are achieving:

What you do everyday to attract new customers.
What you do to convert leads, to get more value from leads.
Everything you do to monitor your business performance everyday.
Everything you do to nurture the relationship with your customers.
Everything you do to manage your time effectively.
Everything you do to improve your knowledge and skill.
Everything you do to improve the performance of your team. How you are affected by everybody you associate with.

Take some time to review the way you operate and make strategic changes to improve your performance. I hope you can accelerate your results for the rest of the year with these tips.