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Business objectives - New Year, new business goals. We’ve all been there: at the start of a new year, filled with optimism and a determination to make the coming 12 months even better than the last. So you invest some time, maybe even hiring an expert to help you with your strategy, and set about making things happen. With hindsight it’s easy to see why most resolutions fail – the problem is that most people don’t treat them as serious as they need to be. It’s not enough just to have ambitions and intentions, or even to write them down somewhere and share them with other people who are also trying to achieve their own resolutions. If you want your business goals to succeed in 2019, here are five strategies you can use this year.

Justify Your Strategy with Data

When you’re trying to solve problems and achieve goals, you always start with data. Before you can even think about what solutions you need to implement, you need to understand where your issues actually lie. You’re working with facts here, so make sure you’re looking at the right facts. Outstanding customer service is great, but how do you know how many people are dissatisfied with your service and what is causing the problem? And how do you know how customer satisfaction can be improved? Make sure that you’re collecting the right data for your industry or business. If you’re using data for marketing, focus on the metrics like sales conversion, customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost and customer retention. Understanding the data behind your business will help you justify your strategy with data.

Find the Root Cause of Problems

Once you’ve identified the issues in your strategy, you need to understand why they exist in the first place. What are the root causes of the problems you’re facing? If you hire employees but they quit after just a few months, what is causing them to leave? If you’re losing sales, what is causing customers to walk away from your business? When you understand the root cause of the problem, you can start to develop solutions that address the real issue and make a long-lasting difference. A good example of this is with hiring. Let’s say that you’ve been having problems finding great employees and retaining them. Your strategy is to hire employees at a lower rate, but you can’t find enough people to do the job. The root cause is that you are hiring for the wrong reasons – you’re not paying employees appropriately for their skills and experience. It’s the root cause of your problem.

Make a Commitment and Hold Yourself to It

In the words of Mark Twain, “A goal without a deadline is just a dream.” A goal without a deadline is just a nice idea, but it’s not a serious business goal. You need to make a commitment to yourself and your business that you follow through with your strategies, process and goals. If you want to improve your employee retention rate, make a commitment to invest in hiring and training quality employees. If you want to increase customer satisfaction, make a commitment to seek out their feedback and act on it. If you make a commitment to achieving your goals, you will have no choice but to find ways to make it happen. You will have to make time for it in your schedule, find money for it in your budget, and find the resources and people you need to make it happen. You will have to really push yourself to make it happen. That is the only way you will hold yourself to it.

Network and Communicate with Employees

This one may seem a little counterintuitive. You might be thinking, “But I want to hold myself accountable to my goals, not rely on other people!” But the reality is that successful businesses are networks of different people working together towards a common goal. The people you know, both inside and outside of your business, can help you achieve your goals. You can use these networks inside and outside of your business to help you achieve your goals. You can communicate with your employees to understand their goals and how they can help you achieve your goals. You can also use your networks to find the resources you need to get the job done. If you need more money to invest in training your employees, you can reach out to your networks to see if any of them can loan it to you. You can use your networks to find the information and support you need to solve your problems. You can use them to find ideas, feedback, and solutions to your problems and issues.

Incorporate Big Data into your Strategy

This is a great way to make sure your strategies and goals are really on track to achieve what you need them to achieve. All businesses are dealing with large amounts of data, but most don’t know what to do with it. But if you can incorporate data into your strategy and business goals, you can save yourself a lot of problems. Let’s say that you’re trying to improve your conversion rate. You want more customers to purchase your product. You’ve identified that your call to action is not converting as well as it could be. So you’re working on improving your CTA, but you want to make sure that you only invest your resources in the areas that will make the biggest difference. You can use data to understand where your visitors are coming from, how long they stay on your page, how many of them click on each button, where they exit the page and more. You can use data to understand your visitors and their behavior so you can make informed decisions.

Conclusion

If you really want your business goals to succeed in 2019, then you need to treat them like the serious, long-term commitments that they are. It’s not enough just to have ambitions and intentions. It’s not enough to write them down somewhere and share them with other people who are also trying to achieve their own goals. If you want your resolutions to succeed, then you need to do more than that. You need to justify your strategy with data, find the root cause of problems, make a commitment and hold yourself to it, network and communicate with employees, and incorporate big data into your strategy so that you can make them happen.