Golfers have a remarkable memory of everything that took place during a round, but typically don’t write it down or create a record that can be used for a lesson from the coach. Remember the old adage: ‘the numbers don’t lie?’It is the same for your business, whether you are a solopreneur, manage a team or are responsible for the whole organization. Tracking wins and loses is not good enough in sales or any performance area of the business for that matter. A methodical, yet meaningful tracking of results can reveal important areas of needed improvement as well as successes that need to be replicated.

Allow me to offer these scoring components that track to winning:

A. Determine the 3 most imperative performance factors to be recorded, including frequency or other relevant stats.

B. Determine targeted results for each factor.

C. Immediately at the conclusion of a meaningful period, i.e. daily, weekly, etc. do a comparative analysis e.g. target vs. actual.

Like the word discipline, we reel at the thought of routine, but that is exactly what is required. Do you think that a champion like Phil Mickelson just goes about his practice [let alone his play in a tournament], just willy-nilly, hitting bucket after bucket of balls, hoping to improve? Not only does he record his performance against established objectives, points A and B, but practice is made up of a written out routine, the results of point C, above.

Let’s look at a real world example related to sales; customer relationship and communication.

a. The performance factors may be…

1. existing customer phone calls (non-sales / relationship building)

2. provide content value to established prospects (non-sales / relationship building)

3. search and contact non-established prospects

b. The targeted results may be…

1. daily – 10 contacts

2. weekly – issue 5 connections

3. weekly – 15 contacts

c. Target vs. Actual comparative, determining what daily / weekly activity must be altered to attain targeted objective shortfall, and / or determine successful activity that must replicated and so on.

This all may look rudimentary, but it is usually the fundamentals for winning that are set aside. How many of us have said, “Oh yeah, I used to do that.” So, if you do not have a meaningful tacking method, this is a place to start. Begin here and then add, subtract and refine the detail of the factors that track to winning.

Doing business is one of the best methods of earning money. With all of the different online business opportunities available it can be very tough choosing the right one for you. If you have a product to market that’s great, your one step ahead of the game. But if you don’t, as is the case with many people, then who’s products do you sell? There are easy ways to get started. There are weight loss courses, foreign language courses, tattoo designs and everything in between to sell. The best part about these products is that you don’t even have to pay for them first! All you do is promote these products and websites online and get paid a commission when someone buys them.The Internet has opened a whole new level of business opportunity. Due to its ubiquity, the internet is popular for business transactions and e-commerce. Starting an online business can provide rapid rewards if done correctly. The great part about online marketing is that there are plenty of ways to promote your products, many of them free. The hardest part is deciding which one to use. Maybe you would like article marketing, video, blogging, press release, social networking, PPC or any of the other methods. Just don’t fall into the trap of spending all your time learning all the method and not implementing any of them. Learn a couple that you are comfortable with and master them before moving on to other methods.

Advertisers look at promotions in terms of cost per impression. CPI, also known in the business as CPM–cost per thousand–is the best measure of a marketing dollar’s true value. In 2010, the Advertising Specialty Institute looked at CPIs for various forms of advertising. This study paralleled a similar survey in 2008, providing a longitudinal look at advertising efficacy. Both surveys agreed on a few common points.

Promotional products’ CPI came out consistently lower than most other advertising forms. Only internet advertising could match the low CPI of promotional merchandise.The price of promotional merchandise stayed virtually unchanged for both surveys. The effective cost of promotional items therefore showed a slight decline–a marked difference from the cost of advertising on television, radio, or print.

Branded merchandise makes repeated impressions per month without incurring additional costs. For example, promotional pens showed an average of 437 impressions per month for the 4.6 months that clients kept and used the pens. With more than two thousand impressions on potential clients throughout the instrument’s life, branded pens offer an exceptionally low CPI.

Other strong performers were textile-based branded merchandise like shirts, caps, and promotional bags. In fact, bags had the highest number of impressions on average in the 2010 survey at 1,078 per month. This information suggests that the initially higher cost of promotional clothing and bags can be offset with a higher number of impressions.

Customers use promotional merchandise; when they have no use for it themselves, six out of ten will pass the item along to someone who can use it. Compare this to the number of newspaper circulars and mass-mailed brochures that wind up in the trash.

Neither the 2010 nor the 2008 survey addressed up-front costs of promotional merchandise directly, but prices are low enough to allow smaller businesses to give branded products to current customers as gifts, or to future customers as incentives. In increasingly competitive markets, it’s important to position a company’s name prominently in clients’ minds; the low CPI of promotional goods makes them a good choice for the small business as well as larger chains.

Another aspect of CPI that the studies approached tangentially was the longevity of branded items. A print or television advertising campaign has a limited shelf life; at some point, potential customers tune out even the most eye-catching or entertaining ad. With the exception of wall calendars, promotional items do not have an expiration date.

The advent of DVR technology has raised television advertising’s CPI, since customers can now fast-forward past the advertising blocks. Everyone needs pens, notepads, and tote bags and essential items with imprinted logos will keep their value over time.

Businesses see a proven return on their investment in promotional products. Keep CPI low and customer appreciation high with promotional merchandise.

You can’t have it both ways
If any of the meetings you attend are unproductive; what are you doing about it? Are you contributing to the late starts, lack of focused agendas or digressions that make the meeting run over? A little self-discipline and efficient time management can transform the effectiveness of meetings, improve decision making and develop powerful teamwork. But it is all about keeping the fundamental principles in mind.

There is a popular and often misquoted piece of research from the 1950s by George Miller that the maximum number of items a person can hold in their mind at once is seven. More recent findings show that actually we can only hold about 4 items or concepts in our mind at any one time. It reduces rapidly to only one if things get more complex, if we are tired or if we are over or under-stressed in any way. For example, you may find it easy to keep 4 numbers in your mind, but can you recall the four sentences in this paragraph without rereading? No wonder meetings often seem so chaotic and full of misunderstandings – no one can really understand what is going on!

Keeping you on track
There is a bewildering amount of information out there about how to run a meeting but I like to keep things very simple – the way your brain likes it! So here are the four fundamental principles of effective meetings to keep you on track.

1. Why? – Are the purpose and outcomes clear?
2. What? – Is there a clear Agenda with specific times allocated for each item?
3. Who? – Who really needs to be there? What contribution will they be expected to make?
4. When? – Is the timing appropriate? For attendees and availability of information: i.e. time of Day, Week, Month, Year?

Keeping the above in mind when planning for a meeting or considering them when you are invited to a meeting may help you decide if it will be a productive use of your precious time, or not. Can the outcome be achieved without holding a meeting? Will a phone call or brief one-to-one chat suffice?

A little more detail
Keeping to the theme of simplicity, let’s look at each of the four principles in a little more detail.

1. Why? – Are the purpose and outcomes clear?
Regularly reviewing the purpose and effectiveness of meetings is a healthy activity. Things change and evolve so the original purpose of the meeting may no longer be relevant; this is especially true in Small and Medium businesses.

2. What? – Is there a clear Agenda with specific times allocated for each item?
There are really only four key purposes for a meeting and it can be helpful to identify each item on the agenda with one of the following:

* (I) For Information
* (Di) For Discussion
* (Dc) Requires Decision
* (A) Requires Action

Some other tips for the agenda include:

* Keep it short and have stated objectives including the coding above: know what you want to accomplish.
* Put the difficult or contentious issues first. Otherwise time runs out and they get conveniently avoided or put off.
* Use a logical order of items. Check if any items require other items to be completed first.
* Give a specific amount of time to each agenda item. This is one of the most critical skills of the chair.
* Avoid allowing too many items under Any Other Business (AOB). If possible, avoid AOB altogether, if it is not on the Agenda it needs a separate discussion.

Consider what sort of record or ‘minutes’ you need from the meeting. Most meetings only require the agenda, who attended and the key action points agreed. There should also be a strict rule about when the minutes will be distributed, ideally within 24 hours of the meeting.

3. Who? – Who really needs to be there? What contribution will they be expected to make?
If you find that there are people in the meeting who are not contributing, it is important to ask why they are there. Are all people attending required to contribute? If not why not? Perhaps they only need to be there for part of the meeting.

It can be very useful to have a revolving Chair and Scribe. This means that at each meeting there is a different member of the team taking the minutes / action points and they become the chair for the next meeting. This is a great way to empower team members and give them an understanding of the challenges of running an effective meeting. It also has the added value of them respecting the Chair and Scribe roles and being a better participant.

You can also consider the costs of everyone attending, including the ‘lost opportunity’ costs. It uses a simple calculator to estimate salaries of everyone in the room and provides a running cost of the meeting as the seconds tick by.

4. When? – Is the timing appropriate: for attendees and availability of information: i.e. time of Day, Week, Month, Year?
Businesses usually have a particular rhythm including management accounts, sales and marketing activity and production / service cycles. It is good to plan the meeting on a regular basis so it becomes a deadline for the collection of relevant data, reports and actions. Most of my clients use a monthly senior management meeting to review the Key Indicators of Performance and the Actions to address specific issues. This is where they hold each other to account and identify allocation of resources to specific problems. Many also have a longer quarterly or 6-montly off-site meeting to look at specific issues in more detail and take some time to work ‘on’ the business rather than ‘in’ the business.

Continuous improvement
Making a number of minor improvements is easier and less disruptive than implementing major changes so why not review and evaluate your own meetings with our simple ‘Meeting Evaluation Form’. You can distribute it to attendees and ask them to complete it at the end of the meeting to get some instant feedback. Then simply choose one area to tweak at the next meeting and measure the impact with the same form. This is particularly useful feedback for the Chair when you implement the ‘Revolving Chair’ idea mentioned above.

A better approach is to involve people throughout the organization and start building a culture of innovation. Think of your business as an “innovation team”. People from different parts of the company and with different job functions can work together as a team for purposes of generating innovations. Everyone has creative ideas, so everyone should be involved in the process of generating innovations. By involving people in different parts of the company, you benefit from the different perspectives and experiences each individual brings to the creative process.Train everyone on the Team how to identify innovative ideas and provide examples of successful innovations (in your business or other organizations) that produced dramatic results for the company. These examples may be in different industries, but are valuable to show the basic process of applying creative ideas to any product or service.

Schedule innovation contests and structured brainstorming sessions to generate creative ideas. When conducting these types of activities, it is important not to criticize ideas. Businesses benefit from the free flow of creative ideas – there is no place for criticism in this environment. You must encourage everyone to freely share all ideas, without analyzing or evaluating the ideas at this point. Even if a particular idea is not commercially feasible, that idea may lead to another idea, which leads to another, and so forth. Think of the first idea as a “seed” that grows with additional creative input.

Celebrate successful innovations that increase revenue, reduce expenses, or strengthen the company’s competitive advantage in the marketplace.