It’s great to give yourself a participation medal for effort. After you know that the effort gave you the business results you want!
There has been a shift towards focusing on effort rather than the outcomes when you are actively working towards a goal.
Partly this is because effort is the thing that you have most control over. It’s the low-level point that you can change. It’s helps you focus and act.
Effort is important to achieving the success of our business goals for sure. Yet tracking outcomes is a better indicator of whether that effort made a difference. It’s the only real way to know that you achieved the business results you want.
I like to say perform action and measure outcome.
First, set an objective that is high level yet complete. For example, it may be that you want to increase sales by 5% this quarter.
The temptation is that you might want to move directly to considering the efforts you need to take. But I say hang on a minute.
If you jump straight to tracking effort, then you likely would measure the things you do as sales activities and not the business results. Possibly things like sales calls made, emails sent, demos given. And while these may be important to track to motivate you to perform the actions, they don’t directly translate into an increase in sales, per se.
To know if you actually increased sales, you need to measure things like the number of sales you made, the revenue they generated, the number of customers acquired or kept. And better yet, track these as a rate of increase, or trend over time.
Look at outcomes second. Decide on the ways that you will measure progress you are making towards the goal into specific metrics tied to the outcomes that contribute to the goal.
Then, you can look at the effort as a third pass. From the perspective of how effort impacts the outcome. Doing it this way, you can make data driven decisions about the efforts you make.
Decide on changes that improve productivity and efficiency. Decide how many sales calls, emails and demos are behind making that one sale. Maybe tweak what you do. Possibly even decide if there are other efforts you can take to accomplish the outcome. Compare the results of different efforts.
First set the goal. Second decide on how you will break it down and measure it as successful. Thirdly, perform the effort it takes to get there.
Rinse and repeat.
It’s great to give yourself a participation medal for effort. After you know that the effort gave you the business results you want!
