Success in business is about knowing where you want to go and planning ahead, to make sure that you get there. A few years ago, we got to the end of the financial year end for our business, only to discover that we hadn’t done as well as we’d have liked. The reason was that we hadn’t actually done much in the way of planning. We’d just carried on doing what we’d been doing for a while, expecting to get the same results. Things were changing in the market place, new marketing tools were being introduced and businesses were changing what they wanted and needed.

This year has been very different. At the start of the year, we set some pretty adventurous monthly sales targets. While we haven’t hit many of them – some we haven’t even got close to – we have done much better than we would have done, if we hadn’t had such high goals to aim for. They stretched us to do better than we would otherwise have done.

So now it’s the end of October 2012 as I write this, and we’ve just set our goals for 2013. We’ve still got two busy months of this year left, but already we’re planning what we want to achieve next year and how we’re going to get there. Every month we have an ‘Ideas and Innovations’ meeting and at the meeting held earlier this week, we planned one new innovation, idea or product to launch or promote for each month next year. This means that in November we?ll be working to create a stunning January offer, so that we can start telling you about it in December and then really promoting it and providing it in January. In December we’ll start work on the February offer.

Alongside our monthly objectives for products and services, we’ve also set monthly sales targets. So we know how many of the new ‘idea’ we need to sell, to reach our target, alongside the existing monthly work we do for clients.

When you know where you want your business to get to, you can create a plan to get you there. You will be more open to opportunities that crop up and you’ll be able to effectively plan your marketing and your new innovations.  Without goals, your business will just wander along, as ours did a few years ago, finding out too late what’s gone wrong. Without goals you won’t be able to set a plan to work to. Without that plan, you run the risk of missing out on opportunities as you come upon them too late to do anything about them.

If you’d like to know more about how to set objectives and goals for your business, watch the video of our SOS Marketing Workshop where I explain exactly how to do it. It’s also covered in Chapter Two of my practical book, Magnetic Marketing, which you can order from our website for just £15.99 (+p&p) and which is full of useful exercises.

What are your goals for 2013? Share them here by leaving a comment.