January is such an exciting time for business owners, marketers, and sales managers. The year-end cleanup is complete, and we get to wipe the slate clean with a new budget, new plan, new goals, and new agenda. It’s a refreshing, exciting, and hopeful time!
Then the first week of January passes, and we fall into the rut of daily activities that keep us from seeing our long-term goals and derail us from our vision. If you’re falling into this trap, here are a few steps to make sure this doesn’t happen to you.
The Long-Term Goal
Whether your long-term goal is hitting a year-end sales target, generating awareness for your product/service, or increasing your overall return-on-investments, the LGT is too big to take on all at once, and should be broken into more manageable steps.
Write it down somewhere prominent, where you can see it every day. Then break it down into smaller chunks, and reward yourself for each accomplishment. Develop a support team to meet with in order to check in with yourselves, or ask a business partner to meet with you regularly to track your progress. Knowing you’ll be accountable to someone else will keep you on top of your action plan.
The Meaning-To-Get-To-It List
This is that long to-do list that never gets done. Perhaps it involves setting up financial or marketing systems that will streamline your processes, developing new contracts, or restructuring your rates. Here is another one to write down, and review daily. If you can accomplish one of these tasks every day, by mid-February you’ll probably have accomplished projects that have been on hold for months or even years.
If this list involves setting up systems for marketing, go ahead and subscribe to the RSS Feed of this blog (you can choose to receive posts via email or feed reader – we like Google’s version). We will be posting tips regularly to help you streamline your marketing efforts, and implement automated systems that will keep you on track, analyze the results of your efforts, and generally help you sleep better at night.
And if that becomes overwhelming, simply give us a call at 978-912-0477 and we can do all the heavy lifting for you.
Now here’s to an amazing 2010!!
