Huh? What could we possibly mean by that?

In short, if your goals are like those of most of your peers and competitors, you're aiming too low! If you set out to achieve these goals, they will keep you from being successful!

Incremental goals are "safe" goals

Most corporate goals are incremental - they build on previous successes (and failures) and they provide only small increases in performance or capability. Incremental goals certainly are safer...you achieved last year's goals (or in many cases only missed them by 10 or 15%).

Most corporate goals are revenue based. They're easy to set and easy to measure. Everyone knows what they mean and know how to gauge performance. Did you hit your revenue goal? How far off were you?

They're even relatively easy to plan for. You probably know what it takes to achieve a goal that represents a simple 15% higher challenge than last year.

But setting out to grow your revenue by 15% won't make your company "remarkable." And an unremarkable company will be hard pressed to grow much beyond 15% a year.

The founders of your company did not set out to grow the company by 15% year over year. They probably had a much more noble mission in mind - change the world, to have a significant impact on how people do business.

When I cofounded OutOfOffice Technologies back in 1999, we set out to solve a problem that we faced every day - efficiently using computer technology to conduct business on the road. Our goal was not to make life 15% easier for the business traveler, we really wanted to solve the problem, to make it simple and productive to work on the road. We set out to make a substantive 100% difference in how efficiently the business traveler worked on the road. Incrementalism was not the path to success for this goal.

And for your established business, incrementalism is not the answer either.

Even more importantly, the revenue goal is the wrong goal!

While your revenue attainment is a useful measuring stick of how your company is doing, it is only a single measure. Profitability, customer retention, share of customer's budget, employee satisfaction, and market share also provide measures of your company's success, and the combination of all of them give you a better indication of the company's health.

The focus on revenue (or any single measure) forces you to concentrate on the mechanics of marketing and selling and to search for incremental improvements. You will end up getting lost in the minutia of hiring more sales people or mailing more direct mail pieces or running more advertisements.

Make your company "remarkable"

Instead, why not set out to make your company remarkable, to have your product or service so unusual, so useful, so profitable for your clients, that they're constantly remarking to others about it.

Here are the two initial steps necessary to begin the process of making your company remarkable, and in doing so, generate vastly higher revenue, profits, and customer satisfaction:

Start your next management meeting with the following questions:

• Are we in the right business?
• What do our customers really care about?
• What important business problem do we solve for our customers?
• How can we delight our customers?
• What must we improve to be considered trusted business partners?
• What are we particularly good at?
• If we were going to start this business today, what would we do differently?

Answer these questions by talking with enough customers, prospects and "lost opportunities" that the answers become obvious and your management team has reached consensus.

Then modify your marketing and sales plans for the coming year so that they support and deliver the answers you developed. Your business truly will become remarkable and when you do, your revenue and other metrics will dramatically improve.

For more information on making your company remarkable, read Seth Godin's excellent book "Purple Cow"

2004 survey on business health

By the way, we've heard a lot of anecdotal evidence of a business turnaround recently. We'd like to put some solid numbers to this positive sentiment and would like to invite you to participate in our fourth quarter survey on business health.

To participate, please click here. We'll share the results with you.

Thanks for reading!