How do you measure success?

Quite often as a business owner your targets may reflect the number of sales you want to achieve or the turnover of the business or net profit you want to expect.

But does that reflect what your clients think about you when they talk about success?

Probably not, when we talk to clients they want to know how quickly we will recover their outstanding invoices or when it comes to credit management it will be the promptness of their clients settling their invoices.

Our clients are not interested in the number of sales we hit or how many phone calls we make on their behalf as it is always about how quickly we collect their outstanding monies. So should we all be setting our target to our clients needs and not ours.

Well, obviously not completely but it is worth thinking about. If you can fulfil your clients needs customer satisfaction can mean a lot in the digital world we live in where it is very easy to receive a bad review on Google or Trip Advisor.

Better still a great review can also mean a lot so always give a client the option to praise you and from a debt recovery point of view a happy client is one that normally pays their invoices quickly. Not good for our debt collections side of the business, but makes our life easier when we provide our credit management service of our business to our clients.

It is so much easier when speaking to our client’s customers when they are happy with the service they have received and they are more than happy to pay their invoices within the agreed time.

Therefore, when writing your mission statement will it take into account your clients expectations and not necessarily your own?