Last week involved a lot of happy dancing on my behalf (it’s always great to celebrate with a happy dance).
At the beginning of August I had a meeting with my operations manager and set a very clear sales target for the month… and I didn’t just hit it, I fucking smashed it. I achieved 180% of my sales target!!
Since my little happy dance moment, I’ve had a lot of people asking me how I did it… so here is my kick ass how to smash your sales target guide.
Step 1: Set a target!
Sounds stupid I know, but I’m always constantly surprised by the number of business owners who I work with who say things like “I want to make more money next month”…. That’s lovely and all – but how much?!!
Set a really clear dollar figure and write it down. Our sales target for August was on our huge office white board, in my diary, in our Trello jobs board…. everywhere.
Step 2: Be accountable
I’m all for positive thinking and everything, but you can’t just write down a goal and wait for the universe to make it happen for you… you need to step up and take some action.
I sat down and wrote down all the things I could do to increase sales over the month so that we could hit our target… my list looked a little like this (*note: you may have lots of other ideas, this was just my limited little list on the day!)
- Google Ad words
- SEO (you can’t fix this in one week – we’ve been working on this for a while)
- Facebook promotion
- Face to Face networking
There are lots of other ways to get your business out there – but these are the ones that worked for me this time!
Step 3: Make sales!
I see a lot of business owners at the moment promoting “how to make millions without selling” (that’s not a word for word quote – but hell, it could be).
I’m sorry, but if you want to make money at some point you are going to have to “sell” something. For me, phone works the best. Contact incoming leads while they are still “hot” – it doesn’t matter if it’s a Saturday afternoon, if they opted in that means they are keen right now and actively looking, so now is the time to call.
Go through your old data base of leads too – re-connect, see if you can help and what you can do for them.
Step 4: Keep going
A month is a long time and you are going to have shit days!
I broke our sales target down into weekly targets and I actually missed the targets in week 1 and week 2… but I kept pushing, and caught up in weeks 3 and 4.
And honestly, that’s it…!
Over the coming weeks we’ll look at getting clear on what you offer (most of our sales were between $1,250 and $1,600 for courses) and how to be more productive (honestly… most of us really aren’t very productive at all!!)
Your tough love specialist and ass kicking training buddy
-Sam