Larry Delaey - President, AarKel Tool & Die
This is a great question and many business owners or managers will have different answers to it. My approach with new projects and strategies is based on a few key measurements and targets.
First we establish a realistic timeline, budget and return on investment (ROI) for the project or strategy. The timeline and budget need to be comprehensive and identify all the necessary resources required.
Weekly updates, at a minimum, are critical to assessing how well the project is moving along. Meetings with the implementation team are held monthly or more frequently if necessary. During these meetings, costs, timing, roadblocks and issues are discussed and monitored against budget, timeline and ROI expectations.
Time is always money. Progress against a timeline is important for this assessment. By assessing problems and concerns, we are able to re-evaluate the expected return against the revised expected costs of the project.
Constant monitoring and reassessing the ROI of the project by assessing costs against expected return allows us to decide whether to cut our losses or be persistent. So if we have a project for the business and I see it falling behind on the timeline with no concrete plan to bring it back on track to within expected timelines and budget, I would cut our losses and develop a new plan. A compelling case with justified ROI would need to be made by the team to convince me to see the project through to the end with an extended timeline and over budget. If the team was not committed or sure of the ROI, the project would be terminated.
Joseph Thompson - Vice-president of marketing, BuildDirect
People value persistence. Don’t underestimate this; in your organization you are working against a fundamental human need to keep at it, and this may be keeping bad products and projects alive far longer than they deserve. Over the years, I’ve developed a few structural methods to counter this:
•Set an (almost) unrealistically high bar. If the product is not creating an obvious, meaningful difference to the customer, it probably won’t endure. When I was at Amazon, we would groom key products twice a year to ensure the performance justified the resources and money invested in them.
•Ask the keep or quit question a new way. Stick to first principles in your evaluation, such as, ‘If you came down from space and had to rebuild this product from scratch, would you do it this way?’ Ask the team what the single, decisive reason is for keeping this product alive. From these questions, you’ll sense the team’s confidence in the product.
•Develop a culture and a process for celebrating failures. Encourage swift, decisive action and reinforce the message that errors are expected in the process of moving fast. Create a safe environment to share, and reward honest, self-critical leaders.
The time and money your team has is precious. If you ever find yourself agonizing over data, trying to tease out a clear picture of whether a product is a winner, quit wasting your time and ditch it for something bigger. The world has lots of good products. Save your resources for the great ones. Your customers and your team will thank you.
Derek Major - Chief relationship manager, Eligeo CRM Inc.
I have a saying that I tell my customers all of the time: if you cannot see the scoreboard, how can you win the hockey game? The way I handle strategies and objectives is to ensure that they are measurable in a way that lets me reduce the amount of emotion in a decision. I do this by using numbers and statistics to measure all activities in my business. My emotional investment is countered with these numbers that help me determine if our current strategies are generating enough leads, converting enough of them into sales or reducing rework issues in our product/support delivery areas.
The numbers that you use to measure your successes and failures give you great insight into how to approach strategic decisions and to determine what next steps you need to take. If you follow along with my hockey analogy, it’s no different than determining whether or not you need to pull the goalie with two minutes left to get that last goal to take things into overtime.
If your marketing goal is to generate 150 new leads over the course of 30 days and you find that if you have 50% of the way remaining with only a week to go, you’re likely not going to pull the goalie. If you have 90% of the way left with only a week left you may be more inclined to double down to push it over the finish line or to score that tying goal-taking it into overtime.
I highly recommend identifying measurable numbers for activities in your business to help you make better strategic decisions.
