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What To Do When You Don't Hit Your Business Goals

It happens to all of us, probably more than anyone would like to admit. Yep, I'm talking about not hitting your business goals and projections. And rather than feeling defeated or as if something is wrong with you, I want to share my greatest lessons and discoveries when things don't go as planned.

BY MICHELLE KNIGHT

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I hope that this title really caught your attention.

I know it did on Instagram when I shared that I didn't hit my goals in business. And I was really hesitant to share that for obvious reasons, but the response that I got really reminded me how important it is to share this side of being a business owner.

Because it can always feel like everyone around you is fucking nailing it and you're over here like, "What? What did I do wrong? Why am I different?"

But the reality is nobody's nailing it.

We all have these moments where we don't necessarily hit our goals. I'm five years into running this business, which is kind of nuts to think about. There have been numerous times that I haven't hit my goals, but I've always made progress and moved forward even when I didn't hit my goals.

So, when I posted that Instagram post, it made me kind of think, "What would I share with entrepreneurs specifically about NOT hitting your goals?"

And then as fate would play out, I had a client who hosted their very first challenge and it didn't go as they had planned. We had a whole conversation about, "What does that mean? What could we have done? What do we learn from this?" And I was like, "Oh my God, I just need to share this on the damn podcast."

So that's how we got here today.

BUSINESS EXPECTATIONS

I think that there is a very thin, beautiful, kind of wiggly line between goals and expectations. I think we get the two confused quite often.

I'm a big fan of setting goals, many of you know this. It is like in every program that I'm in if you work with me one-on-one, I'm always asking you, "What are your goals?" because it's really important to reverse engineer. I think one of the best strategies that we can learn as business owners is to reverse engineer.

Thinking about where we want to go and the steps we need to take to get from point A to point B.

It breaks down the whole planning process and it makes it actually quite simple and less overwhelming.

Goals are measurable. We know this. We've learned this in school. You can actually look at a goal and say, "Yes, I'm 20% there. I'm 50% there. I've already surpassed that."

Expectations are very different. And I've found that expectations tend to be very emotional, where goals are achievable and able to analyze when we remove the emotion.

There comes a point where you have to remove the emotion and say, "What is the data telling me?"

But that doesn't change the fact that we go into a launch or putting our business out there or whatever without expectations, without the emotion behind it and why it’s important that we are paying attention to why we're setting the goal.

WHY DO YOU HAVE THIS GOAL?

The first thing you want to identify is...What is the goal?

Make sure that it's measurable; typically some sort of a number.

Then, get clear on why you have that specific goal. Ask yourself, “Why is this goal important to me? Why am I going for this goal?"

And then, and this is the hard part, strip away all the BS around what you should be doing.

I'll give you the example that I posted on Instagram. I posted on Instagram at the beginning of June that I didn't hit my goal for my Academy launch.

Now, Brandmerry Academy is a marketing membership that I host along with the Brandmerry support team where we support entrepreneurs in marketing their business without relying on social media.

I have launched the Academy three times since the doors opened. I basically put the whole thing out into the world at the beginning of 2020. As I was gearing up for this launch, I was thinking about our launch in January 2021. It was epic. It was so good. There were a lot of different reasons for that.

One of which is that I had another program that was ending, the support was ending, so a lot of those members went into the Academy. And then we brought in a lot of new members. We did the same in terms of numbers this launch as well, bringing in the same percentage of new members, but I didn't have an existing program ending, so we didn't have that kind of rollover.

I wasn't planning on that though. I wasn't planning for that. But I was planning for a giant launch.

When I say giant, like big, scary to me, not necessarily to someone else. Maybe to you listening, it might be absolutely terrifying if you've never launched anything before. But, I was essentially going for a $50,000 launch, which is not something that I have done to date.

And I felt really good about it. I felt really confident in it. Obviously, there are some scary feelings, exciting feelings as well if you're jumping up that high, which we were, almost doubling what had been done previously without spending more on ads.

So, when I didn't hit my goal, there was something that I think we all go through. There was number one, "Okay, what happened? What did I do wrong?" I think that we can all be honest with ourselves here and say that that's kind of where our mind goes right in the beginning.

But I've done this enough to know that even if you don't hit the goal, it doesn't mean that it was a complete freaking flop or a failure. That’s why it’s so important to remove the emotion because it also doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you.

WHAT DOES A FLOP TELL US?

So what does it tell us and what do we do when we don't hit those goals?

In order for anything that I'm going to share with you to work, you have to have a measurable goal. I know I've said that 16 times already. You have to have a measurable goal, or none of this is going to work.

You'll find that you aren't hitting your goals, but you can't assess why that happened.

You've got to set the goal and stick to it and stay the course. You have to have a very, very clear, measurable, specific goal and make sure that goal feels good to you.

I believe in challenging ourselves. And I shared this in that Instagram post that I could've very easily just wanted to replicate what we had done in January. That would have been fine. And that's what ended up happening.

So when we set out and challenge ourselves and it doesn’t go as planned...

It does not mean that there's anything wrong with you.
It does not mean that you are a failure or that you failed in that situation.
It does not mean that you can't do it later.
It does not mean that you will not be successful.

When we don't hit our goals, we get so freaking down on ourselves and hard on ourselves that we slip into the mindset that we’re never going to be successful!

What a detrimental feeling as a CEO.

LOOKING AT THE DATA

When I finally started looking at the data and what the data was actually telling me, as I mentioned before, allowed me to remove the emotions.

Because no matter what happened, at the end of it all you grew from that experience. If you challenged yourself with a new scary number or you set a goal that you had never achieved before, you challenged yourself. You grew.

If you plan to launch something, let's say you wanted to host a webinar or something, you grew your community through your efforts.

Maybe you just got to practice talking about your offer over and over and over again so now you feel incredibly confident.

Maybe you wrote a bunch of emails and now you get to repurpose those emails later on for your next launch.

You can have a base, you can tweak it and you can move forward. That's what all this is about.

When we don't hit our goals, we move on to this mindset of defeat.

That's not serving us.
That's not serving our businesses.
That's not serving us as the CEO.
It's not serving us as people.

We have to get into the habit of removing our worthiness from the success of our business. Whether your business succeeds or doesn't succeed, doesn't change the fact that you are worthy.

That's why I'm in love with looking at the data when we don't hit our goals.

Because we need to be invested in what we're doing, but we cannot tie the success of what we're doing to our worthiness as human beings.

I see this happen a lot with business owners, especially newer business owners, in their first year or two years of running a business, where they're constantly going through this emotional roller coaster if they don't achieve exactly what they set out to do.

So, when I was talking to my client about the particular challenge that she hosted; the first one ever, very small email list, I started to say, "Okay, let's look at the data."

WHAT DATA TO LOOK AT

Let's say your goal is to get 100 people signed up for your webinar and you got 50 people on.

What you want to do is look at first is dedicated time.

How often were you promoting the signup?
If you didn't hit your sign-up goal, then it will come down to two things.

Thing number one, were you actively promoting?
Were you putting it out there enough for people to actually sign up?

We know we have to talk about things multiple times. And sometimes people have to hear things seven times in order to take action, even on something that is free.

With the data you can sit there and assess and say with clarity, "I probably could have posted this a little bit more. I really only did it twice a week," so on and so forth.

Number two area for analysis is your messaging.

If you feel like you promoted it consistently across all platforms; you were talking about it quite often, you were just doing the damn thing, but sign-ups were lacking, then you can start to look at your messaging.

Was my messaging clear?
Could I have created a better title for this?
Is it a timing thing?

If you have a landing page for people to sign up on, you can see how many people landed on the sign-up page (or landing page) and how many people signed up. Maybe your conversion rate was 20%, then we know that needs to be higher and we can adjust your messaging.

If you got great traffic but few sign-ups, we know it’s a messaging issue on the sign-up page.

Do you see how powerful this data is for moving forward?

Then the next thing we look at is engagement.

If you're hosting a webinar, it's important to know that in your mind you might have this expectation that 100% of the people who sign up are going to attend your webinar (there are those sneaky expectations again).

But data shows that that's not true. In fact, a solid goal is 50%. Of the people who sign up, we want a minimum of 50% of those people to attend the webinar.

That is a marker for us. So if you're going in with this crazy expectation that it's supposed to be 100%, you're already setting yourself up.

Now that doesn't mean you can't have more than that, but that is what you want to shoot for, for your minimum.

So, you can assess the situation and say, "Oh, hey, 50% actually did show up. Maybe it wasn't necessarily the number of people that we imagined on a webinar or on a live video, but based on our sign-ups, we hit the 50% mark."

So if you hit the engagement rate, but 50% equaled a low number, then we know we need more people to sign up and can circle back to number one.

If you didn't hit the engagement marker, then you get to look at your numbers and say, "Well, were people opening the emails where I was reminding them about it, did people know where to go? Was I doing a good job with the CTA on the video? Was I doing a good job of keeping people engaged on the webinar?"

That's the thing that I love about marketing.

MY LAUNCH ANALYSIS: CASE STUDY

Your data is there, you just need to analyze it.

Look at your data through a lens of no emotion. It's a non-emotional lens if you will.

Just read the data and see what the numbers are telling you. It's going to improve your marketing.

For the launch that I had done for the Academy, I started to look at the information. Sometimes when I’m launching, I'll do a webinar, or sometimes I will do a challenge. With each of my programs, I've fluctuated between the two because I really want to find what works best.

So this most recent launch we did a four-day challenge. And when we were looking at the numbers and comparing to the previous one, we noticed that sign-ups and engagement were lower for the challenge.

What that tells me, by looking at the data, is that my audience is busy and they have a really hard time committing to showing up consistently over the course of four or five days. But by inviting them to a single workshop or session that they can just block off an hour and a half on their calendar, it's much easier.

We know this because when we host one-day workshops for The Academy launch, the sign-up and show-up rate is higher.

We also then started to dissect the emails. On the back end of this challenge, I opened the doors to The Academy Now, one of the things that we've been playing with from time to time has been creating shorter launches. When I first started my business, I would launch for two to three weeks.

The first time I launched Roadmap to Freedom I launched for an entire month. I was so tired. But I was just starting so I didn't have a huge community and I wanted to get on the phone with as many people as possible and I was testing everything.

As we've launched more and more, we've played with shortening that time span.

But this launch was still a little long. We realized when people were actually signing up. And most of the people sign up on the webinar or the challenge and then at the very end. So we can shorten that quite a bit and that's some data that we can take moving forward. We felt like this one was just a little bit long and drawn out.

One of the things that showed us this information, was looking at the open rates and looking at the click-through rates and how they steadily declined and then peaked.

That really kind of confirmed for us over here at Brandmerry that we wanted to shorten our launches. And that's a strategy that we're going to use moving forward. It also saves me time and energy as well.

The final thing that I always look at for a launch specifically if not hitting my goals is the messaging.

That's that last piece. "Were people opening my emails?"

We keep a spreadsheet where we input all that data from ConvertKit, which is the platform that we use for email marketing. And then we can say with clarity which emails had better open rates and click-through rates.

The open rate data telling us which subject lines worked and the click-through rate telling us more about the body of the email.

This is a normal conversation when we’re assessing the date, "Wow, this email had a huge open rate. Great. We'll probably keep that subject line when we launch again. This one did not have a great open rate. We need to change that subject line. This had a great click-through rate. Fantastic. The body of the email, the email itself is awesome. We don't need to mess with that."

And that allows us to look at the information and repurpose pieces that worked for the next launch - we don’t need to recreate the wheel.

Do you see how powerful it is when we take time to assess our goals?

CONCLUSION

The assessment stage is the most important stage for moving forward.

How do you know what to improve upon?
How do you know what to change?
How do you know what to keep constant?

...if you don't take the time to look at what actually happened?

Remove your worth and your emotion from the assessment stage while you look at the data.

After you’ve assessed the data you can then ask yourself, “How do I feel?”

What do these feelings tell me about the work?
Do I enjoy what I’m doing?
How do I feel about the process?

You will become a better business owner if you let your data drive your decisions, and then swoop in at the end and say, "How do I feel about this? How do I feel about the data? Do I want to give it another go and switch it up and see what happens? Do I just say, 'Nope, data shows that this isn't working? I fucking hate it. Let's just do something different?"

You get to make those decisions and I think it empowers us!

It gives us back the power as the CEO to make those decisions. And that's incredibly important.

Be grateful for what did happen.
Celebrate what did happen.

Don't get so obsessed with what didn't work out that you forget to celebrate what did.

That's how you are going to move your business forward.

That's what I did after this launch. I celebrated the amazing new members inside of The Academy. I also celebrated what I learned as a business owner.

Be open to adapting, and celebrate no matter what.