What’s your measure for success? Is it a revenue goal? Maybe a specific number of followers? Or even to launch so many products? This week’s episode is all about how to achieve success, and I’m talking with Joe Apfelbaum, a B2B marketing strategist and owner of Ajax Union in Brooklyn, NY, to get his One Big Tip for success.
Framework
Finding success is just like finding anything else: you have to know what you’re searching for to know that you’ve found it. If you don’t take the time to set clear goals before you start the race, you’re going to end up at the wrong finish line - or worse, you’ll just run around in circles.
Great, so we know where to start: a goal. But how do you define a goal? “Take a step back and ask yourself, Why? What do you want to achieve? How will I know if I was successful? And in order to understand that, you really have to understand what you want to achieve as a business,” was Joe’s advice.
Tangible
The right goal will be a tangible goal. It should have a clearly defined measure for success, like a follower count, a revenue figure, a percent increase in sales, etc. “If you try to go for a smoke, you're not going to be able to. It's not going to be tangible.”
Bad Example: I want to earn as much money as possible this quarter.
Good Example: I want to grow revenue by 6% this quarter.
“You can't test something if you don't have an objective, you don't have a goal. If you don't know what success looks like, you'll never know if the test was successful or not.” Using the bad example, if you made 1% more money this quarter, how would you know that your strategy worked? Did you actually meet your goal? But if you aim to grow by 6%, you’ll be able to test it along the way.
Calibrate
A tangible goal gives you something solid to work towards, so that means, you can measure and test your progress along the way. According to Joe, the most important thing is to:
Understand what your goals are from a business perspective and also from a marketing perspective. And then you can apply that to the tactics that you're executing to know if you're getting closer to your goal or getting further from your goal. And if you are getting closer to your goal, then you invest more and you invest more and you keep growing. And if you're moving further from your goal, you pause and you optimize and you say, Okay, what's working? What's not working? Let's reverse engineer to figure out how we can get closer to our goal.
If you need some help with goaling or you just want to find out more about Joe and Ajax Union, you can check him out on LinkedIn where he posts tons of great, free content or visit his website.
