Monitor Your Progress Toward Objectives

“What gets measured gets done.” Good advice for retailing management. Still, one big difficulty is that monitoring requires focusing on the here-and-now, and the here-and-now includes all the incoming demands on our resources. Getting the shelves stocked now, paying the pressing bills before the mail pickup, resolving the argument before things get really ugly. This pulls our thinking away from the longer-term perspective.
     There’s also something else: When a retailer carefully monitors results toward achieving long-term goals they’ve set, one consequence is that time seems to pass more slowly for the retailer. And that, in turn, makes the goal seem more distant. Ironically, then, monitoring our achievements so far can actually interfere with what gets measured ending up getting done.
     A hint about how to unscramble this riddle comes from a classic study which itself produced another puzzling riddle: In an article titled “Obesity, food deprivation, and supermarket shopping behavior,” which appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology more than forty years ago, R.E. Nisbett and D.E. Kanouse reported something quite surprising: People on a diet buy less when they are hungry than when they have eaten recently.
     It certainly would seem that hungry dieters would buy more, not less. What’s going on here? The answer is that the hunger became a reminder to the dieters that they were in the process of making real progress. They could sense how far they’d come toward the payoff of taking it off.
     The hint for you: Avoid continuous monitoring of how far you need to go to achieve long-term, somewhat fuzzy goals. Instead, regularly monitor how far you’ve already progressed toward each clearly defined business objective.

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers