You need to boost your business. You want extra sales, new customers, more revenue.

So you set yourself a realistic goal.

You work out a backwards plan to get you to that goal.

And then each week, you check your numbers from last week, revise your plan if you're heading off course, then work on the simple actions needed for this week.

Traditionally, a sales person would be given a target - something like "£25,000 in sales this month". That's actually quite meaningless. What do you need to do to hit that target?

When you build a backwards plan you break it down into actual steps, the individual activities that will get you to that goal. This is known as activity based selling and it's a fantastic way to make sure you're staying on track to grow your business.

You don't control how much people are going to spend with you. You do control how many phone calls and meetings you make this week.

Take action: Give yourself a break from hard-to-hit goals. Figure out what individual activities will help you get to where you want to be, then set yourself a weekly goal to do those activities. And that way, the larger goal will take care of itself.