My Process
Today I want to share my thinking process for setting S.M.A.R.T. business goals with you. I like to work backwards from a financial goal to daily to-do lists. Here is how to work backwards to set your business goals.
If you are not sure how to create S.M.A.R.T. goals, check out our post with accompanying workbook by clicking here.
Start with a Money Goal
It always starts with a money goal. It helps if that goal has a meaning beyond the monetary value. For example, let us say that I want to buy a new car. The payment will be around R4,000. To account for things like taxes and just to be safe, I’ll bump the goal up to R6,000. In other words, I need to add an extra R6,000 (or more… more is always better) to my monthly bottom line. Once that is done and I see that level of income on a regular basis, I’m ready to order my new car.
Brainstorm Different Ways To Achieve The Goal
Once I know how much money I have to make, I can start to think about different ways to achieve the goal. I could find more customers for one or several of my existing products. For example, if I have a R100 eBook, I would have to make an extra 60 sales per month.
Work Backwards
From there I can work backwards. If I know that on average one out of 10 email subscribers buy the book within the first month of signing up, I need to add 600 new subscribers to my list, which in turn takes 4,000 new visitors to my site. If that is my plan, I know that my daily to-do list needs to include plenty of action steps to ramp up my traffic by an extra 4,000 people per month.
Other Options
Of course that is not my only option. I could also create another information product or eBook each month and sell it to both my existing and new subscribers. I could create a higher priced item so I need to make a lot fewer monthly sales to reach my R6,000 goal. For example, if I create a nice R1,000 product, it would only take 6 sales per month to pay for the car.
Recurring Options
Since the car payment will be an ongoing thing, it also makes sense to look into recurring payments. This could be my own membership, or I could look into affiliate offers with recurring commissions. Depending on your market, there are a lot out there that you can promote.
For me, one option could be to create some content around content marketing and promote a Membership to it. It could be a R300 per month subscription. I would only need 20 members to pay for my car. Once I reach that number, I only need to add the occasional new member to balance out cancellations. Getting one or two more members in each month going forward should more than cover any future cancellations.
Action Plan
Now I have a concrete goal to work towards which is convincing 20 people to sign up for the membership. My daily tasks will include things like creating content that includes an offer to the membership, a short report about marketing to build targeted sub lists of people interested in marketing in general. Then I need to start driving traffic to the content and the opt-in offer and start mailing regularly about the Marketing Membership. I may even craft a short autoresponder sequence to create an evergreen funnel.
Of course that is just the tip of the iceberg. I could approach leaders in the industry to see if they would be interested in writing some guest blog posts, answering some questions for an interview style post, or even do a webinar, all of which would of course promote the membership. By thinking outside the box and putting in some time and effort initially, it won’t take me long to get those 20 signups that pay for my new car payment.
Motivation
Because I really want that new car, I am going to be super motivated to get it done and grow my business by an extra R6,000 per month. In fact, the chances are high that I will overshoot the goal by several hundred rand and I have a marketing avenue I can continue to grow month after month.
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