Mining for gold…Goals and…

Mining for gold…Finding weaknesses

Discovering those unknown weaknesses in our quiver of skills isn’t exactly straightforward. If it was, they wouldn’t be mysteries and we’d be aware of them. The starting challenge is being open to discovering them. And maybe the best and quickest path to doing that is to ask others what they think they might be.

We might be a little surprised by the feedback we get. But we probably won’t be shocked either. We’ll likely immediately see the validity of those observations and wonder why we never recognized them on our own. Others might take us more by surprise.

Take the idea that we need to strengthen our negotiating skills. After all we’re pretty skilled at the art of selling and persuasion. But negotiation is a different animal.

When the selling ends and that new aspect begins. We’re no longer persuading. Now both our buyer and we have essentially agreed on the major point. But now we’re down to ironing out those pesky details.

Unfortunately many of our customers and prospects are skilled negotiators since they’re engaged in the buying process almost daily. We on the other hand are only occasionally exposed to it. As a result we’re kind of babes in the woods when we find ourselves entering that unfamiliar territory. And that’s an unknown we can’t afford to not fix.

Next up: The ABC’s of negotiation.

Goals and …What’s real

Given the fact that we use the term goal so often it’s kind of baffling that we so often miss the mark when establishing them. Worse yet, we like to call almost any objective a goal even when it perhaps doesn’t meet the three basic requirements to earn that moniker. Those three are: is it believable, is it achievable and most critically is it measurable?

Let’s start with measurability: If the thing we targeted isn’t something that can be quantified and measured, then it’s not a goal – or at least not one worthy of that term.

Increasing sales 10% without the date by which that’s supposed to happen is a prime example of that error. Or reducing the aging of our over 60-day receivables is great, but in the absence of the targeted number of days reduction, we can’t really know if we’ve succeeded – or at least the extent to which we accomplished that improvement.

And finally there are the first two requirements. If we can’t look at that goal objectively with a reasonable degree of confidence that it can accomplished, we’re whistling dixie. And if it’s one that we can’t realistically defend as being believable, it likewise fails to make the mark.