How often do you dust off the old business plan and remind yourself where the business was meant to be compared to where it actually is?
Whether you're on track, way head or miles behind the problem with this is that its too late to change what's already happened. Maybe the plan needs updating and monitoring on a monthly basis, but this can be a time consuming and unwieldy task, so is there a simpler alternative?
Indeed there is! The One Page Plan (OPP).
This is a way of tracking key factors in your business to identify how you are progressing throughout the year and what you most need to focus on if you're not on track.
There are two main elements of the OPP, “Sales Drivers” and “Success Drivers”.
Sales Drivers are things that will directly affect your turnover so two of the things that will (almost) always appear here are:
- Number of New Sales Enquiries;
- Conversion Rate (how many enquiries actually turn into a sale).
An increase (or decrease) in either of these will have a direct impact on your turnover so they are key to improving business performance.
Other sales drivers may be more specific aspects of the above; if a large percentage of your new enquiries come from referrals you may wish to monitor how many “introducers” you are actively working with or how many new introducers you are engaging with. Monitoring the average value of a sale is another thing that could appear on most OPP's; are you missing opportunities to cross-sell or up-sell to customers?
Success Drivers are slightly different. These are things that keep people coming back to you and why they refer business to you. For example, if you increase your enquiry conversion rate you will increase our sales; improving your average customer satisfaction rating will not, in itself, improve sales but it does improve the chances of customers staying loyal, referring others and increasing their average spend.
Set an annual goal/target for each driver then measure and monitor progress each month. In this way you can see which areas are going well and where problems may be arising, enabling you to take action if you are falling behind your targets.
It sounds simple but the devil is in the detail; do you know what your conversion rate or average sales value is; once you identify you aren't getting enough new enquiries how do you go about addressing this?
Monitoring key measures on a monthly basis helps you spot problems early, and essentially, start to take action straight away.