Critical Success Factors

What are critical success factors and why are they important?

Critical success factors are indicators and measurements of the overall vitality of the business enterprise. Positive critical factor activity is required for ensuring the success of any business, and the absence of any one of them, even for a brief period of time can lead to business failure and loss.

1.    Sustainability: Problem solving, quick decision making and business management capabilities. Your personal ability to successfully manage affairs, or your own position, in the short-term and long run

2.    Strong brand image and awareness: Distinguishing yourself or your company from competition.

3.    Employee attraction and retention: Your ability to find, train or mentor and retain employees, as well as your ability to disqualify applicants or let go of employees that are not a good fit.

4.    Intellectual Capital: Create assets using technology and automations to run your business.

5.    Quality: Creating value. How good is your back office, your website navigation, your product line, your sponsoring skills to train others?

6.    Viewer or Consumer Satisfaction: How happy are your viewers or customers? What comments do they leave behind that indicates their level or lack of satisfaction?

7.    Your future: How steadily are you acquiring new leads, new applicants, converting sales, building your team of representatives and distributors?

8.    Product line development: What’s new that will increase business with existing members of your team and attract new distributors, or customers?

9.    Income: generating a positive cash flow every month, revenue growth and profit margins.

Your Company

The application of critical success factors can often target the problem areas quickly. For example, you may need to determine if your sales force has been poorly trained or not trained at all. Sometimes, by focusing on a particular critical success factor such as sales training can double or even triple the sales of the business.

Identify the critical success factors of the key people in your organization. What are their strengths that are responsible for their success to date? Their weaknesses, especially personal weaknesses, usually lie at the root of most of your problems.

Home Based Internet Marketer

Each home based internet marketer has personal critical success factors as well which determines his or her internet marketing success. A weakness or failure in any one of your key skills can undermine your overall effectiveness and weaken your ability to do your job effectively.  To perform at your best, you must identify the critical success factors of your own marketing campaign, productivity levels, core competencies, then measure your strengths in each one, and develop a plan to become excellent in the areas that can help you the most.

For example, in marketing online, a weakness may be a marketer’s knowledge of their own product line, causing the person to present only a small part of what he or she is capable of selling. Another example is a person with weak closing skills that is not completely trained or thoroughly prepared to effectively respond to common objections.   

Move Forward

Your personal strengths and core competencies are what you have brought to where you are today.  They are the foundation of your current position and the determinants of your income.  Your weaknesses form a glass ceiling on your ability to achieve your goals. Your weakest critical success factors set the limits on how far you can reach and how fast you can go.  They act like an invisible holding pattern on actualizing your full potential.

To move ahead, you must be brutally honest with yourself in seeking out and facing your areas of weakness.  What are they? What one skill, if you developed and mastered it, would have the greatest positive impact on your career? Whatever the answer to this question, this is where you should begin to work on yourself.  This is where you can get the biggest payoff in terms of increased competence. What are the critical success factors of your business? The areas of activity where you absolutely, positively have be excellent at in order to be the best.

What are your personal critical success factors, and what is your plan to become absolutely excellent in one area that can help you most of the time? Whatever it is, begin immediately to work on yourself in that area, and don’t stop until you have mastered this key skill. Begin today.