Maybe you didn’t follow our guidance in Ideas for Summer Wins – now Labor Day has passed, the beach trips are over…and you have goals to achieve in the 4 short months before 2019 is over!  Don’t panic – we got you!  The year is not a loss – 4 months is a decent amount of time to make progress and begin showing results!  But you don’t have time to delay any further, so let’s get started!

Strategy:  Map out your top priorities for the remainder of the year. If the company needs to squeeze in sales, how are you going to help them achieve that? If there was an initiative to gain further insight into what’s working in Sales and Marketing, to drive budgets for next year, it’s time to dive into the report structure, logic and process.  Whatever your company’s goals are for 2019 should drive your top priorities and anything that you haven’t already received kudos on, is your direction for the next 4 months.

Planning: Once you identify your top 1-2 priorities for the rest of the year, map out how you’re going to achieve them in the next 4 months. Yes, pull out your calendar and start adding milestones. List the challenges that may prevent you from achieving each milestone. Also, list the action items you need to do (or others need to do) in order to achieve those milestones.  Once you have done the proper planning, it’s time to move onto Execution.

Execution:  Now you need to pull the people and resources together you’ll need to accomplish the action items identified in Planning.

Accountability:  This is an important piece!  Find a way to hold yourself and the others required for the project(s) accountable!  A good way to do this is a weekly meeting with follow-up report. Schedule a weekly meeting solely to check in on status of achieving milestones.  A report should come out of that meeting with the current status as well as any roadblocks/risks that may prevent on time delivery. Send that report to your higher up stakeholder.  Knowing that a higher up will see this will keep people on their toes to ensure it is a good report and no shocking news.

See how the execution is actually the easier part of the above process?  It will be worth it when, at the end of the year, you are able to report to your management how you have contributed to the company/department achieving their goals for 2019.

You’re not alone – we’re here to help. In any or all of the phases above, Definitive Results helps ensure clients are successful in the work they set out to accomplish!