The Phone Works 2011 Planning Process: Using Our Own Scorecard

This is the time of year when many companies are in planning mode. Practicing what we preach, the Phone Works management team is going through a process of assessment to identify the areas of highest growth potential for our business — which is intimately tied to increasing our clients’ results. Using an expanded version of the Sales 2.0 Scorecard framework we’ve used successfully with hundreds of clients, we are setting our priorities, deciding on investments and putting our plans in place for execution.

Here are some examples of Phone Works’ 2011 goals in various categories — and how we plan to achieve them. All goals are measurable, include a time frame and are assigned to someone. Incentive compensation is dependent on meeting individual and team revenue goals and P&L performance goals, as well as delivering assigned objectives.

Financial

Overall: Achieve aggressive, explicit growth goals for both revenue and net income (expressed as x% growth)
By segment: Grow our Global Accounts (large company) business x% and our SMB acounts y%

Customer

Make showcases of our customer successes. Highlight our customers via multimedia marketing programs that are mutually beneficial (goal is expressed as x number of customer showcases per quarter)
Articulate the before and after metrics and successes resulting from our collaboration

Product/Service

Improve existing and create new products/services that help our customers meet their goals and gain an unfair competitive advantage
Areas of consideration for new services: building integrated sales/marketing groups with “click to cash” metrics; rolling out “social selling” and internal collaboration practices and processes, and determining impact on revenue; creating customer-specific Sales 2.0 practices and tools road maps and assessments

People

Improve on-boarding and enablement tools to support our consulting-team growth
Enhance our education program to ensure our consultants are sharing proven best practices and staying up-to-date on proven innovations that increase sales
Build a virtual marketing team

Operations/Processes/Systems

Strengthen our culture of measurement, based on analytics and metrics, so we know where to focus
Continue to evaluate and streamline our processes and systems/Sales 2.0 tools to measurably improve productivity

Marketing

Launch a new www.phoneworks.com website on a new Sales 2.0 platform (stay tuned!)
Further develop our content strategy to deliver pertinent information to our executive audience via the right media at the right time; eliminate marketing activities that don’t do this

Culture

Be true to our culture, which is based on customer success, top-quality expertise and innovation
Establish ourselves as a model virtual business in the cloud, thriving with Sales 2.0 practices and technology

What are you focusing on in 2011 to improve your sales results? What is your process for determining your priorities?