For small and medium-sized companies, after the team’s business process is confirmed, managers should set reasonable goals, and gradually sort out the work process, and gradually standardize the operation process of operations such as listing and advertising, so as to ensure the continuity of long-term operation work and avoid the adverse impact of staff loss on store performance. In general, managers will use order volume, sales, profit margin and other indicators to set corresponding performance growth goals for operations. There is no problem with this idea itself, but it is often difficult to implement the goals because of the inconsistent views and positioning of managers and operators.
For large companies, the goals are often split through the company’s performance goals, and finally allocated to each store and operator to establish a complete set of KPI assessment systems. However, in this way, the short-term interests of operations are easy to deviate from the long-term interests of the team, which is mainly reflected in the following two situations.
1 Operators choose to give up the execution goals when the commission is low, resulting in a decline in the overall sales performance of the store.
2 Operators become “old hands” and are unwilling to exceed the goals in order to avoid additional tasks in the next assessment cycle.
Both situations are very common, but managers can often find the first situation, but it is difficult to find the second situation. Even if the first situation is to be found, it can only be seen after the end of an assessment quarter, when the loss has already been formed. If it happens to face special nodes such as season change, it is difficult for the store sales to grow in the next quarter, and ultimately the entire team cannot complete the established tasks.
Therefore, when setting goals, you must first follow the SMART criteria. The specific requirements are as follows:
S stands for Specific, which means that the goal setting should clearly state the behavioral standards to be achieved in specific language, and be as simple as possible and not too general;
M stands for Measurable, which means that the goal can be verified by quantity or behavior. If the set goal cannot be measured, it is impossible to judge whether the goal has been achieved;
A stands for Attainable, which means that the goal can be achieved under objective conditions, and avoid setting too high or too low goals;
R stands for Relevant, which means that the achievement of this goal must be related to the overall goal. If this goal is achieved, but it is completely unrelated to other goals, or the correlation is very low, then even if this goal is achieved, it will not be of much significance;
T stands for time-limited, which means that after the goal is determined, there must be a specific deadline to complete it to avoid delays in goals and unfair assessments.
For front-line managers, in addition to splitting indicators, more effective data tools are needed to track the specific daily sales of stores, so that target management can be implemented. Here, we will introduce a data model used in the retail industry, namely the weekly weight index.