How to Set A Sales Goal (Also Why You Should)

Making a plan for your life and your business might not be the sexiest. It’s not exactly something to look forward to like increasing conversions, boosting traffic, or more subscribers.

The topic can be a bit boring, BUT it’s important.

Do you plan for the growth of your business? How much? How do you plan to bring more revenue? A very important step in increasing your business is creating a growth plan for the year. The first step in creating your growth plan is setting a GOAL.

This post is meant to help you take time to develop and design your plan fundamentals.

How to Set a Growth Goal for Your Business

There are 2 questions we’re trying to answer at this time:

1. What variable in your business would you like to impact in 12 months?
2. How much would you like to grow, and what’s the target?

When we think about ‘growth’, sometimes we think about revenue. Just like life is not all about money neither is a business! Revenue might not be the best variable here. It’s important to set a target that’s realistic. There are more ways to grow other than money.

What EXACTLY Are You Trying To Grow?

1. Units: Customers, Sales, Members, Contacts, Trials. This might be important to your business if you’re selling something with a lower price. Increasing the unit quantity might be important for your business. People in the retail industry have to sell a LOT of units.
2. Revenue: Sales. Pretty straight forward. You want to make more money and therefore how will you increase the revenue of your business?
3. Subscriptions: Members. Also pretty straight forward. If your business model has an important component of subscribers or members then how will you retain your current base and reach out to new subscribers? This particular type of goal should be crucial for content creators.

How MUCH Are You Trying To Grow?

What’s your growth target? More specifically, what percentage of growth are you targeting?

Depending on your business, doubling the growth of your company could be a weak target. Don’t undershoot your target. On the flip side, doubling from where you are currently in one year could be a dream come true.

How To Decide On Your Goal

Here’s the formula:

“Increase [variable] from BENCHMARK to TARGET (% increase) by DATE.”

The most important things to consider here are the variable and the percentage. What do you want to increase and how much? Take a guess right now. Later, once you’ve come to some sort of validating variable, sit down and write your goal.

Here’s an example of the formula:

“Increase subscribers from 1,000 to 75% by December 2019.”

There are a lot of people who don’t know how much they’ve made in the last year, and that’s a major problem. This is a simple and essential topic for the success of every business in general.

Take some time to do this in order to help you aim your business growth moving forward. It will help you to push toward a TANGIBLE goal. Nothing boring about that right?