What Will Move The Needle?

A Partner at an investment banking firm in the Midwest came to us with the following challenge. His firm was struggling with low accountability and poor communication. As a result, sales performance was crashing into the abyss—it was time to turn this situation around, and pronto. By setting corporate and departmental needle movers for quarterly and annually, utilizing accountability structures and delegating effectively his firm experienced got sales solidly back on track. Implementing these systems led to their largest pipeline in history and created more proactive sales activity across the firm—his team even recovered 20% of sales he’d feared were lost to competitors..

Are you facing similar challenges in your business? I find many of my executive coaching clients struggle to attain the necessary focus to raise their companies to the next level. The catalyst is identifying “needle movers,” business and personal benchmarks that will make a tangible, measurable, specific positive change. Needle Movers have levels, where goals are binary—you achieve them and feel great or you don’t and feel lousy.

What three accomplishments will “move the needle” in 2016? Perhaps to move your business forward you need to: generate more sales leads, close more key sales opportunities, increase employee engagement or increase accountability within your team? Now focus on the specific results you want and set a Target, Minimum and Mind Blower for each Needle Mover.

• Target = what you want
• Minimum = what you are willing to accept
• Mind Blower = what would absolutely rock your world

Remember to distill your Needle Movers to only three because each of these accomplishments will have numerous sub-tasks beneath them. Once you determine your Needle Movers for the year, break those down to Needle Movers for the quarter and Needle Movers for the month. Now only do what will drive your needle movers–this means bright shiny objects have to go b’bye. Create and follow a plan to generate momentum weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually.

It’s all about determining the key results that you want to achieve, listing all the actions that must take place to achieve that result, and assigning ownership and resources to each Needle Mover.

What are your Needle Movers?