How to achieve your goals - every time

Yesterday I spoke about realistic goals. There's not much more demotivating than a target that you know you're never going to hit.

So once you've set yourself a goal that is achievable, and you know when you have to complete it by, how do you get there?

Let's say you want to go from 100 to 200 customers in three months. It's going to be tough, but you know you can do it.

Take a look at your conversion rate. For every 100 leads that comes in, how many become actual customers? Let's say it's 20%. That means to gain an extra 100 customers, you need 500 extra leads.

Take a look at the length of your sales cycle. After you gain a new lead, how long does it take, on average, for them to become a customer? Let's say it's 2 weeks. That means, in three months, you've actually got 10 weeks to bring in those new leads.

Which, in turn, means 50 leads per week.

How can you get 50 leads per week? Would a Facebook advertising campaign work?

You know from your previous targeted campaigns that you get a click-through rate of 10% and a sign-up rate of 50% from those - 5% in total. So for 50 new leads each week, you need to show your advert to 1000 people each week.

Now you know how many people to target, you can use that to set the budget on your Facebook campaign - giving you an idea of if your goal is worth it financially.

And if it is, we've worked backwards from our goal to a series of concrete steps we can take, and more importantly, things we can measure each week to make sure we achieve it.

Take action: Work backwards from your goal and figure out how you're going to get there. What numbers will let you know if you're making progress? Then get started and make sure you test and measure.