With the end of the year quickly approaching, it’s the perfect time to reflect on your pharmacy and the goals you can set for 2022. Reflecting on how your pharmacy performed in 2021 can help you gauge the upcoming year, organize your thoughts around business, and figure out how you can be more successful.
Reflections as 2021 Comes to a Close
It’s common practice to review the year as it ends - for all aspects of life. In regards to business, though, you can ask yourself a few questions surrounding how well your pharmacy did this year in relation to your accomplishments, challenges, and the lessons that you learned. Coming up with answers for these questions will help you and your pharmacy grow as 2021 ends and 2022 begins.
If you’re looking for a place to start, begin with asking yourself these six questions:
1. Out of the goals that my business achieved this year, what was the most important one?
2. What mistakes did my business make, and how did I respond?
3. What did I learn when overcoming my biggest obstacles this year, and how did I overcome them?
4. What do I want to see more of in the next year?
5. What do I want to see less of in the next year?
6. If I could go back to January 2021, what would I tell myself about how this year would go?
Annual Success
Measuring results is a great way that you can reflect over your business’s performance and the goals that you set. Metrics will show you where you succeeded and where you succumbed to business mistakes, and from there they can offer insight into what works for your pharmacy and what doesn’t - and that’s valuable advice that you can use for the upcoming year.
Metrics that you can track throughout the year include:
● Annual revenue
● Most/least popular products sold
● Most/least profitable patient care services
● In-person/phone/IVR prescription refills
● Digital prescription refills
● Inbound calls
Keeping track of marketing metrics is also important. These types of metrics can tell you what strategies are the most profitable for your pharmacy - and these are also the ones that can save you money and help you invest wisely.
Some marketing metrics to keep track of are:
● New social media/website leads
● New referrals/leads via review sites
● Activity/engagement of social media ads
● Unique website visitors and their session length
● Website traffic sources
These metrics should be tracked every quarter, half-year, and full year. To keep your data organized, make sure to track the data from each differing campaign separately so you can determine what works best for your pharmacy and what you can continue to make use of.
Setting Goals for the New Year
After you get the idea of where you want your business to be in 2022, it’s time to make a plan to turn those ideas into a reality. The system we like to use to define goals that you can measure and commit to is called the SMART system, and it looks like this:
Specific: What exactly do you want to accomplish, and what steps will you take to get there?
Measurable: How will you measure the success that you see, and what metrics will you use?
Achievable: Is your goal realistic? Do you have all it takes to accomplish it in the way of time, skills, and resources?
Relevant: How does this goal help your pharmacy achieve big business goals, and where does it fit into your overall, big-picture plan?
Time-bound: What does the timeline look like for this goal?
The new year is a time for starting fresh with new plans in mind. The way that you begin 2022 sets the framework for how you perform throughout the 12 months, so create realistic goals, come up with plans on how to see them through, and achieve the results that you want.
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