Businesses often fail at establishing goals. This is a serious mistake because setting goals is critical for knowing if a process, product or service is succeeding.
Enter the 100 mojitos.
I love Cuban food. My favorite restaurant is the world famous Victor’s Cafe in New York City. Needless to say, they make a mean mojito. But how many mojitos does it take to make a successful day? As it turns out, 100. On any given weekday, Victor’s goal is to sell a minimum of 100 mojitos. Full disclosure: I’ll admit that last week during a visit, my wife and I did our part in helping them hit that goal.
Anyway, I digress.
At the end of the day, when someone asks “how many mojitos did we make”, not only will there be a metric, but a goal to measure against. Therefore, 80 mojitos is bad and 125 mojitos is great. So why does this matter to your business?
You should be applying the mojito theory to almost all of your business processes. When you set up a Facebook page, a Twitter account or a landing page, you and your marketing department or consultant (hint, hint) should decide up front what numbers you want to hit and why. This will help you sculpt your sales and marketing programs accordingly.
No one has a crystal ball. The numbers you set need to be adjusted according to factors like, well…reality. Everyone wants a million Facebook fans, but reality will settle in and teach you that for your particular industry, maybe the magic number is 1,000. Maybe less. A lot less. But maybe that is the magic number that drives sales.
And while we’re talking numbers, do yourself a favor and don’t artificially inflate your numbers by having all of your friends and family join your business page or mailing list. Artificial spikes will only obfuscate your analytics. And since I know you’re going to ignore me on this one, make a decision to make your goal formula (x + friends). So if your target number of fans/sign ups/etc. is 100 and you have 25 friends who have liked/registered/signed up, then your actual goal should be 125.
The marketing rule of diversification applies here as well. Establishing a Facebook fan count should be coupled with a newsletter subscriber goal and an ad impression goal, etc. And they all need to converge into the most important number; sales.
Victor’s knows that not everyone will like their (totally delicious) mojito, so they offer about a dozen different varieties. That makes hitting 100 mojitos a lot easier by broadening the audience.
If you set up all of your goals and hit them, great. Set new goals, recharge and move forward. If you don’t; don’t consider your program a failure, because it wasn’t. There is an incredible amount of intelligence to be gathered from failed programs. Use that information to fuel the next campaign.
Of course, if you are starting up a business, figuring out goal numbers can be a challenge, but that’s a topic for another article…
