4 Keys To Creating Smarter Sales Goals

One of the most important practices in business is accurately forecasting your sales, then meeting or exceeding your sales forecast. Setting smart sales goals is critically important to your business success. If you’re currently hitting your sales numbers, that’s great, but if you don’t take the time to plan out your work, you create an issue for your delivery team, which is not great. If you find that generating sales and leads is difficult, then you cannot sustain your success. In my experience, there are four keys to creating smarter sales goals that you can plan against and reach.

Know Your Capacity

You want to understand how much you can actually deliver. You cannot set a sales goal that significantly exceeds how much work you can actually do. Think about a few examples:

If you’re in the landscaping business, you can’t cut 50 lawns a week by yourself – there are only so many hours in a week.

If you are an attorney, you can only take on so many cases by yourself.

If you are a stylist, you can only service so many clients by yourself.

It doesn’t matter what service you provide or what industry you’re in, you have a limit to your capacity. That capacity is the top line of your goals when you are building your business.

Ask For Referrals

Once you know your capacity, you can look at how many customers you already have. Typically, you start a business with a few customers. Asking for referrals is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to achieve your top line goals.

How many people do you know that understand the quality of your services and are willing to tell others about it on your behalf? Multiply that number by what you charge for your service and that gives you a ballpark of revenue from referrals.

You might ask yourself, “how can I get more and better referrals?” Offering incentives is the quickest route to this. If you are a stylist and you give clients 25% off when their referral becomes a client, trust me, you’ll get more referrals.

Keep in mind, estimating revenue from referrals does not tell you how fast you can grow your business, but simply by how much.

Plan To Generate Leads

The next thing that you want to start considering in your smart goals is how you are going to generate leads yourself. I recommend you attend business mixers, ensure your website is designed to generate leads, and create content to inform or educate potential leads and prospects.

Determine other avenues you can use for lead generation and then define a goal in terms of the number of deals that will come to you from your lead generation activities.

Drive Repeat Business

Finally, you should be planning for past customers to buy from you again. The best way to grow your business is by incentivizing your current customers to do more business with you by doing a great job. Remember that it’s usually cheaper and faster to obtain new business from an existing customer than to acquire a new customer.

If you look at these four keys, you should have enough information to create your initial sales goals. When starting out with a new business, you shouldn’t need a huge marketing budget to meet these goals.