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Today I want to talk about how you can plan to hit your revenue targets next year.
We’re already into December, so chances are, you've already set your revenue targets for next year, or at least thought about them quite a bit. I hope that’s the case! The real questions, though, are these: how are you going to achieve those targets next year? What metrics can you look during the course of the year to make sure you're on track?
Good for you if you are already using a CRM and can measure how successful your company was this year at converting prospects through the various stages in your pipeline. If you kept up with your sales opportunities this year, you can see which opportunities turned into proposals and which ones made it all the way to the finish line.
Knowing how many opportunities drop out at each step in your sales funnel is really helpful to predicting how many opportunities you'll need to hit your revenue targets next year.
Some companies we analyze have a base or recurring revenue which can be impacted by churn if customers cancel service. Go ahead and write down your base revenue for next year, then subtract the anticipated churn based on your historical churn numbers.
Then you can subtract this number from your revenue target to determine how much new business you'll need to develop to achieve your goal.
If you know how much new business you need, just work backwards to determine how many proposals you will need to write and how many leads you will need.
Our clients rely heavily on their websites to generate the volume of leads that they’ll need to close enough new business to hit their goals. If you're currently tracking how many leads you're getting from your website on a monthly basis and how many visits your website gets, then you'll know if you need to improve your lead generation or if you'll need to get leads from other sources.
And, if you're curious to see if your website is generating as many leads as it should, you can visit our website and there, you'll find a calculator where you can type in the number of visits your website gets and the number of leads your website gets, and it will tell you how well your website is performing.
It's not enough to just set revenue targets. You have to plan how you're going to achieve these numbers, and use data to tell you how to hit your goals.
So I’ll leave you with this thought. Are you measuring your success at each step in the sales process? Do you know how many sales opportunities you’ll need next year to hit your revenue targets? Do you know how many leads you’ll need?
Thanks for listening, and if you have questions, let me know and I’ll try to answer them. I wish you much success next year, and have a great day!
