Rocket Fuel - annual planning: you need to look at your numbers!
A few weeks ago it was the first of my quarterly sales planning sessions and I had a lovely company come and join me. We were looking at planning for them - not just for the quarter but for the year: something they not actually done before and was relatively new to them, but because of what they wanted to achieve in their business, they felt this was important.
Hi everybody, Julie here, the Sales Ace, bringing you another tip to help skyrocket your business.
So, a few weeks ago it was the first of my quarterly sales planning sessions and I had a lovely company come and join me. We were looking at planning for them - not just for the quarter but for the year: something they not actually done before and was relatively new to them, but because of what they wanted to achieve in their business, they felt this was important.
So we put in place the sales plan (and those of you who follow me regularly know what a sales plan is). But one of the things that I started to get them to think about was actually getting a real deep dive into some of the numbers to show them how revenue was achievable.
Let me give you an example: for this company, their goals were to increase the number of customers and we also had a revenue goal.
So first of all, we started with revenue goals:
- What do you want to achieve?
- What do you need in order to achieve that?
And that was important for them because they needed to start planning for getting salaries themselves within the business, planning for breakevens, that sort of thing.
And then what I got them to think about was how many customers but before I did that, what we did as a little bit of analysis over the previous quarter, over what revenue they’d actually taken and how many customers they had sold to in order to actually generate that revenue. In other words, what we tried to get down there was sort of like an average customer spend.
Now what that enabled us to do was to create these lovely revenue goals.
I was then able to take an average customer spend and then through working through my little sums, actually say to them if this is your revenue goal and average customer spend, then this is how many customers you are going to need to generate in order to reach your revenue goal.
And this was quite a revelation to them because they'd never planned anything like that.
They'd have these goals and sales goals, but just getting into their heads actually how many customers that means made it less scary for them.
So here's my sales tip for this week: you know when you're planning your goals this is very important: you may have revenue goals, but let's just cut down some of the numbers.
You know, for me, for example, when I look at my revenue goals it’s about how many days of training or products do I want to sell? That means, how many Sales Club members do I need? How many workshops do I need to sell?
Breaking that down, giving me those little goals has helped me achieve the bigger goal.
So for some of you out there who may be a little bit reticent about putting a revenue goal on this: let's start actually by looking at numbers of certain elements of your business that you want to achieve, and then that will transfer out as a revenue goal.
I hope that's helped! If you want any help with your sales planning, let me know, drop me an email, and just check out the website for that quarterly planning workshop.
It's not until (funnily enough) next quarter, hence the “quarterly planning session”, but it's a great little workshop, which will help me to help you with that.
I'll leave you to it and I'll see you guys next week!
