Are You on Track to Reach Your 2017 Revenue Goals?

“Do you believe it’s July already? My gosh…the year is half over. I’m nowhere near where I wanted to be this year. I feel like I’ve wasted another whole year. It seems like I’m always working on creating my business but never making money.”

This is frustration at its worst level. I know, because I’ve been there. When I started my business years ago, it felt like I was always working on creating this business but never felt like I got to the point of generating a consistent income from it. In fact, I remember a time when my husband wouldn’t even include my income into our household budget, because he couldn’t rely on its consistency. In other words, my income was usually eaten up by expenses. As my business advisor, Lisa Larter, would say…” you’re trading four quarters for a dollar. That’s not a real business!”

There are many reasons why this happens…but one of the first questions you should ask yourself is, “What is getting in my way?” Start by looking at your sales goals. Without sales and marketing…you’re not operating a real business.

Sales Goals

Are you actively managing your monthly sales goals? Managing your sales doesn’t mean that you’re patiently waiting for sales to come your way. Managing your sales, means you have active revenue generating programs, services, or products that you are marketing in a consistent way, to bring business your way.

I constantly get referrals, and the work can keep me extremely busy. In the past, I would have been busy working away on my incoming client work, without worrying too much about generating new clients. They seemed to always drop in my lap. The problem with that type of marketing is that it felt as if I were either drinking from a fire hose…or dying of thirst! So overly busy one week, then frantically trying to generate income when the hose slowed down.

But, there’s a better way…and it’s directly linked to managing your sales goals more effectively, through strategy and marketing goals.

Manage Your Sales Goals

To keep marketing consistent in your business, you must adequately plan. This means building strategies around what you’re selling, how you’re selling it, and when you’re selling it. When building your strategy, you should always include revenue / financial goals, a content plan, a lead generation plan, a revenue generating plan, and your marketing plan, to name a few.

Once I started creating my quarterly business and marketing goals and implementing the systems I put in place, business became more regulated and consistent for me. Not only did it become more consistent, but my income levels started to increase.

Course Correct

If you haven’t planned the first part of your year too well, don’t worry…there is time to course correct. You may have lost ground in the first part of the year, but that doesn’t mean you should leave the second part of the year to chance, as well.