It’s a New Year, many people rush to make resolutions, only to see them fall apart within the first few weeks. Annual planning is one of the most important things that businesses do. Defining your business and personal goals will help sustain the long-term vision you have for both your personal life and your business or job. Planning the actions and finances needed to achieve your goals will help you stay focused. Ask yourself to be clear about how much money you need to make, how much time you need to invest, and which people you need to connect with to make your goals happen. Breaking down goals into yearly, quarterly, and monthly action steps will help you accomplish all your dreams.
To have the best possible year, plan it. You will be most likely to succeed when you write detailed business plans, pre-plan business trips, and maybe even meal plans to keep your health and personal life at a high functioning level to support your productivity. High-performing sales professionals understand that filling their funnel is crucial to make sales goals, and know how to focus on the importance of planning four quarters. It’s not hard to do; it just takes a bit of extra time. We also get a big picture view of our strategy when planning, and we typically identify areas for improvement, or find challenges for which we will need to be prepared.
This year, I’m planning my personal life and business goals, my budget, and my calendar. Sure, it’s not all going to work out according to plan 100% of the time, but planning gives us a map, a direction, and a starting point, and it’s amendable. When things go wrong, having a plan will help us get back on course because we know in advance how to move in the right direction according to our overall plan.
Some Tips Before Getting Started
– Make time for yourself to write and think about your yearly plan. This should be time that’s quiet and focused without distractions.
– Create separate personal and professional plans.
– Review your past year.
– Brainstorm some rewards for celebrating wins to reinforce good behavior.
– Allow for flexibility. None of this needs to be perfect.
– Think about how you spend your time, and identify the areas where you waste time which could be rerouted to more productivity.
– If you journal, review what you have noticed to help determine where improvements can be made. If you don’t journal, instead create a routine where you can use time blocks, or scheduling tools for time management.
Financial Goals
In sales, we divide our goals and plans into monthly, quarterly, and yearly objectives. We fill our funnels with “sure thing” opportunities we know will close, “maybe” opportunities which are up for bid against our competition, and then after we have a good number of both of these types of customers, we need to develop more casual contact opportunities for the next 30, 60, and 90 days to keep the pipeline flowing.
The we focus on these leads in the following manner:
30 days – “sure thing” clients
60 days – “maybe” opportunities and “sure thing” opportunities that are 60 days out
90 days – “maybe” opportunities, “sure thing” opportunities that are 90 days out and new prospect opportunities that we are still working on ironing out
First, ask yourself: if a yearly goal is $100,000 in new revenue for this year, that’s $25,000 per quarter. Using this formula, for 30 days, what’s the revenue goal? Divide by 3 months for a total business sales goal of $8,333 per month. This gives you a specific target to aim for.
Next, what needs to be done to meet that goal? If the average sale is $3200, we would need 2.6 closed deals per month. If the closing ratio is quite high, we would need to make sure to have 1.5x the monthly expected in our 30-day funnel, 2x in 60, and 3x in our 90-day funnel, just in case we lose some of our more “sure thing” and “maybe” sales along the way due to unexpected circumstances.
Top 5 Goals
What are the top five goals that your business needs to set per quarter? Once you have these identified and detailed, arrange the action steps needed in order to achieve these goals.
Next, plan your top 5 goals for the year, and write down the actions you will take to meet those goals.
Next, break those down into a quarterly plan. Identify your top 2-5 goals per quarter that will lead to reaching your yearly top 5. Make sure you don’t overwhelm yourself, keep it reasonable and add a bit of a challenge or “stretch goal” in case things go well, and then make a plan to keep yourself accountable to making things happen. Create a monthly plan to complete the actions and meet deadlines to achieve those top goals.
To have the best shot at success, plan your business finances, taking the time to forecast and budget per month and day. You should be planning 30, 60 and 90 days in sales for the cashflow and income portion of your budget. If you don’t have a business, then you should be planning the same way using your job’s salary. What projects will you finish in the first quarter? What’s your goal for each quarter, and how will you break those goals into 30, 60, and 90 day plans? When you know what you need to complete in each timeframe, then you can determine what you need to do in order to achieve those goals.
Personal Saving and Investing Goals
Create a budget and stick to it. There are a number of tools out there to help you decide how to tackle this area of your personal financial goals. In order to build savings, some advocate the “pay yourself first” method, which means you always put your decided percentage into savings first before paying any other bills or expenses. There are some extreme budgeting methods and more life budget balanced ones out there; figure out where you are at, and try out an application which can help you stay on track to meet your goals.
Dollar cost average your investing, and stay consistent. If your investment is your business or side hustle you’re starting, then forecast how much you’ll need to earn to break even, or if you aren’t making profit yet, then figure out how much you can afford to invest to continue forward.
Determine the date you need to make money by, and how much money you will need to make in order to keep that business profitable.
Tools
I use CRM (customer relationship management) tools for my company. I keep track of sales forecasting in my funnel with 30 day, 60 day, and 90 day projections. I also keep tabs on customer care and customer service issues via projects in the same place with dedicated deadlines and assigned tasks. This way, I have everything organized within my calendar. I’ve used Salesforce in the past, but since I’m a sales solopreneur, I now use lessannoyingcrm.com because it’s easy, really reasonably priced, and has good customer support.
For FinancingSarah and SightingSarah, the team uses Asana as a project management organization tool for projects that are assigned to contractors and partners. Assignments, goals, and deadlines are organized on the Asana dashboard. Each contributor or decision maker is assigned to each project until it’s marked completed by the marketing company that publishes the blog posts and social media content. For more details and tips on how to manage projects for your own company, read The Step by Step Guide to Setting up a Team Project with Asana.
For our property rental concept Cozy Land, we use Trello to organize tasks and assign decision makers assignments there. We also use physical bulletin boards and white boards to keep track of our next steps. We are at the property acquisition stage of development, so it’s mostly a list of lawyer contacts, realtors, and a long list of properties we are considering purchasing. As we bring on more team members, there may be a whole new set of tools needed to keep track of goals, finances, and deadlines. Read How to Use Trello. Both Asana and Trello have free options that are customizable.
It is also helpful to use budgeting software to keep track of expenses. Forecasting expenses can be consistent, so commit to automating these tasks when you can. Knowing what you’re expecting to spend will help keep you on track. It’s also important to know what projects or deadlines are approaching, so you can be financially prepared. When things go wrong, it’s easier to adjust and organize to make sure you keep on track and keep pressing forward for those goals.
Overall, the key to having your most successful New Year this year in 2022 is planning, planning, tweaking, and planning. Once you have goals, break action items down into quarterly, 60 day, and monthly goals. Don’t get overwhelmed, and take one step at a time. Slow, steady, and methodical, with a great plan of course, wins the race. You’ll be thrilled to see how far you’ve come by this time next year.
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