Peak month is a month at the high point of the year, when work or deadlines are more concentrated than in regular months. It is also commonly called the "busy season" (a peak in the seasonal fluctuation of demand, or seasonality). There are two types: those decided from last year's order records, and those fixed in advance by the calendar or by regulations. Pages are not rebuilt in a peak month.
What This Book Means by "Rethinking How You Attract Customers"
When you hear "DX" (digital transformation), it may sound like a matter of large-scale systems. Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), in its "Guidelines for Promoting Digital Transformation," describes it as transforming products and services and the business model itself. This book brings that much closer to home by translating it into three things—how you are found, how you make proposals, and how relationships continue (repeat business)—and applies them to peak months.
These three correspond to three places on your website. "How you are found" is where a prospect finds your website and realizes "this is about our project"; the Line on the homepage is responsible for it. "How you make proposals" is where you show a prospect who has read the page the next step; the Closing is responsible for it. "How relationships continue" is where business with clients who meet your conditions keeps going; the Entrance is responsible for it. This is covered in detail in Chapter 5.
In this book, "rethinking how you attract customers" means that, in the few peak months each year, one of these three becomes the same Line shared by every employee. An employee starting to use a new tool on their own, or rebuilding pages when it isn't a peak month, does not count as rethinking here.
Decide Your Peak Months
At the start of the year, the top executive lays out last year's order records from January to December. The months when work piled up are this year's peak months. A few a year is enough. For work in which the busy months are fixed in advance by the calendar or by regulations, simply make those months your peak months (Chapter 4).
Then, for each peak month, write one line in the Internal Memo stating what kind of work you will go after that month and how many orders there were in the same month last year.
Set Goals by Multiplier
The number of orders targeted in a peak month (the quota) uses the number of orders in the same peak month last year as its yardstick (baseline). Depending on how many times a regular month's volume that number was, the peak months are called 2x, 3x, or 4x peak months. Don't suddenly set this year's goal at a multiplier you didn't have last year. A month that didn't reach that multiplier last year is treated as a regular month.
For a short while from here, the discussion turns to numbers. Why look at surveys on how goals are set? Because the 2x, 3x, and 4x goals in this book can collide with a company's performance-review system.
A row of numbers might make you a little wary. That's fine. You don't need to memorize all of them. As you follow them one at a time, only the important parts will naturally stay with you.
Ambitious Goals and the Contradiction in Evaluation
How are goals handled at Japanese companies? Let's take a look at two surveys.
In a 2022 survey by the kaonavi HR Technology Research Institute, the preliminary survey (8,698 company employees aged 20 to 59) found that 36.2 percent said their employer uses MBO (management by objectives; in Japan, it is often run with 100 percent achievement as the standard). Another 49.3 percent said their employer does no goal management at all.
A 2024 survey by Agile HR covered 1,124 employees of companies with 500 or more employees. Of the 933 who said their company had goal management, 6.6 percent said it used OKRs (a method that manages a goal together with the key results used to measure its achievement).
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