You have a vision for your business or enterprise in 2023. And you are prepared to do whatever it takes – from hiring the right people to tapping the right customers, acquiring the right technologies to following the right processes, to make this vision real. But can the right resources work at their optimal best without the right business action plan? Here are some insightful pointers that will help you create the right action plan to hit your goals in the year ahead.
1. Begin with your Goals
A lot of businesses falter at the first stage of their success journey aka goal setting.
Some businesses hope to achieve more than they are equipped for, some want to reach their finish line a lot sooner than reasonably possible, some create goals with no mechanisms to track performance and some chase targets that are not in sync with the market. No matter what the category, the end outcome is usually the same. Disappointment. You can avoid the typical pitfalls of the goal setting stage by using strategic planning to keep your goals SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
2. Create the action plan
Let’s say your goal is to achieve a 25% growth in your business category. The next step is to create a framework of strategic planning steps that will navigate your business to this desired outcome. Let’s explain this further. What markets would you need to target for your business to move up a notch on that growth curve? What categories of clients or consumers would you need to access and get through? What would you need to communicate to these audiences and how would you do it? What problems or challenges are you likely to encounter on this path? What short term goals would you need to set in order to get to the finish line?
When you start to critically analyze your goal from diverse perspectives, you’ll be able to create a multi-tiered business action plan with help of business coaches that will further comprise sub-goals and sub-strategies with clearly defined actions required of every employee, team and function across your organization.
3. Share your plan with the team
The best way to ensure your team follows up on the action roadmap you create is to get them involved from the start. Quite often, businesses create their masterplan in the confines of the boardroom and then delegate responsibilities to individual teams in the form of isolated information caches. A better business strategy would be to share the big picture with your team/teams, so that everyone is on board with what your company is gunning its sights, energies and resources on, in the coming year. An employee who’s completely aware of their business’ vision for the year ahead, is more likely to come up with bright and innovative ideas than employees who land up with only a piece of the entire jigsaw.
4. Break down your action plan into responsibilities
Once you have ensured that the big vision for the year has percolated across your business functions and levels, follow it up by letting your teams know what they need to do, to transform this vision into reality. Create responsibility profiles for every function and team and the best way to do this is to create a go-to document that everyone from the bottom to the top of a division or vertical, can refer to at any point to discover their to-dos or if needed, refresh or reorient their steps. Creating action plans with clear responsibility profiles is one of the key areas where you’ll witness great outcomes by hiring business coaching services.
5. Create processes to track performance
If you’ve outlined the right goals, created the right strategic action plan and delegated the right responsibilities, you still need to look at one more detail. A mechanism to ensure you’re able to track and evaluate the hard work that goes in. It’s very easy for motivation levels to drop across the organization in the event of teams missing their goals or missing out on opportunities; with a performance tracking mechanism that includes regular reporting, performance reviews and feedback sharing sessions, you will be able to realign individual as well as team efforts well in time before slips and mistakes turn into bigger causes for worry.
6. Keep updating your action plan
Things around you will keep changing – economically, politically, socially and financially. Businesses that are constantly alert and ready to respond to change, have a higher possibility of staying on track to achieving their goals in comparison to those that have no system or plan to tackle contingencies. You can always turn to proven business coaching professionals for advice on how to create the right strategic action plan as well as ways to stay adaptive and responsive to the changing business environment you’re operating in.
The efficacy of your action plan pretty much determines how well, how fast and how confidently your business marches on towards its goals. We trust the steps for creating an action plan listed here will help your business chart out its success path in the smartest and smoothest way possible. If you need further assistance in creating a customized action plan for your business, visit polarisone.com to book an appointment. You could also download your free copy of ‘What Every Great Salesperson Knows - A No-nonsense Guide For Sales Success’ by Robert Arzt to gain a world of knowledge, skills and tips that will empower your business to succeed bigger, better and faster.
