Prologue
Are you ready to take your business or career to the next level and develop some desired improvement over the coming months? Great! Before you start to plot and plan what you want to do to make that happen, it is important to stop and look at where you are at. To be effective in taking your business or career to a higher level, you must know your status right now.
Why You Must Know Your Status Right Now?
You must know your status right now to be able to measure your growth & figure out what you should be working on to attain your desired improvements.
Business Planning Data
Business planning for future success is all about data. You can work most efficiently and spend your time and money most effectively if you know exactly what your starting point is. By recording data, you can start to see what actions are working, what is not, and what trends are starting to play out. And it all starts with knowing your status right now by recording your current position for effective business planning.
How to Record Business Planning Data
Let us take a look at some of the things you want to record. First though, you should decide how you want to record this information. You can write it down by hand in a notebook, open up a word document to do it digitally, or use a spreadsheet. I prefer a spreadsheet because I have the option to have it calculate additional useful information like weekly and monthly averages and even map it all out in graphics to help me get a clearer picture.
We Will Use Marketing Data as an example…
Traffic
To grow you need to expand your reach. That means getting more traffic, but also engaging the people that come to your site by encouraging them to click around and read more. Good things to keep track of are total visitors, unique visitors, bounce rate, and of course where the traffic is coming from.
List / Subscribers
Your next goal is always to get these people on your list. Here you want to track total number of subscribers, conversion rates for each of your opt-in forms and pages, open rates for your emails, and also unsubscribes. As you start to collect and review this data regularly, you will get a much better picture of your subscribers.
Customers
Subscribers are great, customers are better. Start by keeping track of how many total customers you have and how many purchases per day, week, and month. Other good numbers to look at are total lifetime value of your average customer, repeat purchases, and refund rates.
Income & Expenses
Last but not least, look at your bottom line. This is your typical accounting data. You want to keep track of your income as well as your expenses. With those two sets of numbers, you can easily calculate your overall profit. I find it helpful to look at profit for the month, but track income on a daily basis.
Pulling it Together
Yes, you can look at most of this data in various different places like Google Analytics, your shopping cart, and your autoresponder service for example, but it is important to have it all in one place. This makes it much easier to connect the dots and see the relationships between the different sets of numbers.
Now that you have your initial data collection set up, make it a habit to update the numbers regularly so you can see what is working, what is not, and how much you are growing as you move through the coming months of next year.
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