Measuring Goal Performance

Regular measurement of goal achievement helps you make adjustments to your plans.

Regular measurement of goal achievement helps you make adjustments to your plans. Clearly define the metrics you’ll measure, the data sources you’ll use, the measurement methods, and measurement frequency. 

One retailer I worked with had an online, a store, and a catalog channel. Each of those was considered a separate business unit. They all had goals and they all had measures. For the online business unit, they had goals around traffic, orders, revenue, and items returned. The stores had same-store sales growth, revenue, and store budgets. The catalog business had a mailing list growth goal, revenue, orders, and returns. Every metric had well-defined data sources and methods for measuring. The organization built standard reports that were generated on a regular basis. Those reports were delivered via dashboards to the executive team.

When you’re building your measurement method, build contingency plans during the goal-setting phases. This isn’t just about keeping score. You should measure for a reason. When you’re measuring, think about what could go wrong, what could go right, and what are you going to do about it? To the extent you can, put in place triggers for executing those contingency plans.

This retailer had a plan that if same-store sales growth wasn’t where they wanted it to be, they would take action. They would cut back on staffing, delaying new store openings, and launch extra marketing to hit their numbers. There were clear break points for taking action which enabled them to decide and act quickly when business performance wasn’t what they expected.

When you’re laying out your measurement plan, make sure you go through this contingency planning so when things aren’t going well, you can turn your business around quickly.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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