If you want to set your yearly revenue goals, you need a clear picture of your business’s performance.
Unless you have a way of tracking your business goals, you risk winging it with no direction. Operating under this method stunts your growth and keeps you from reaching your full potential as an entrepreneur.
Here’s the thing – growth is a mathematical equation. It’s that simple. When you track your numbers, you will see where your strengths and opportunities are. Using this information, you can enhance your marketing efforts and course correct, creating the growth you want to see in your business.
In this episode of Shop Talk, “Your Entrepreneurial Scoreboard,” I’m going to share a tool that is easy to use and will create “done for you” yearly revenue goals.
Here’s a snapshot of this episode:
- 0:03 – The Lifeblood Of Your Business Growth
- 1:57 – Getting Focused With A Proven System
- 5:52 – Our Content Creation Strategy In Action
- 8:17 – Tracking The Numbers
- 12:08 – Your Entrepreneurial Scoreboard
- 17:19 – Supporting You In All Of Your Marketing Efforts
Links mentioned:
I mentioned this last week, but it’s worth sharing again.
The reality is that most entrepreneurs wing it. They rarely set goals. And even if they have, they don’t track their progress diligently.
When it comes to the numbers in our business, we often don’t want to track them because we really don’t want to know the truth. Speaking from my personal experience, I went for years without setting and tracking goals as an entrepreneur. I always had an idea of what I wanted my business growth strategies to be, but reaching my goals was more of a hope or a wish.
I’ve learned that ignoring your numbers does not improve your chances of hitting them. The key is to be intentional by setting goals and tracking them. Even if you’re off target, at least you’ll know so that you can make adjustments as necessary. But if you completely ignore them, there’s a good probability you’ll miss the mark.
The good news is that growth is a mathematical equation; you just need to know your numbers. And that’s what we are going to talk about today.
What numbers should you be tracking in your business?
Before I begin, I would like to start with a quick review of Lifecycle Marketing (LCM).
The Lifeblood Of Your Business Growth
LCM is a mix of strategies a company uses to communicate and move its target audience from being a prospect to becoming a customer, an ambassador, and eventually a life-long customer. We all want those people who can’t help but to tell others about us.
There are 7 stages in the LCM process:
- Awareness: This is where you are advertising your business. You are looking for ways to get your business out in front of your perfect ideal customer.
- Capture: In this stage, you are getting that person’s contact information so that you can have a way to communicate with them.
- Nurture: You want to nurture these new relationships so that you can build trust and rapport. So eventually…
- Convert: You can turn this person into a customer. This is the stage where they make an investment with you. You’ll want to have sales processes in place, follow-ups, and all of those good things that happen in the sales cycle.
- Delight: This is where you will delight and wow your customer. You want to be intentional about giving them a positive experience so that they turn into an ambassador.
- Ambassador: These are the people who can’t help but tell everyone about you. They help spread the word, give you referrals, and help grow your business.
- Upsell: In the final stage, your goal is to maintain lifelong customers. You’re looking for an opportunity to work with this individual and support them in their journey with you.
When we work with clients, we turn to the LCM model to determine where challenges and opportunities lie so we know where we can help. I love sharing this because it gives you a crystal clear picture of how easy marketing can actually be.
Getting Focused With A Proven System
Often, entrepreneurs are given business growth strategies without any real understanding of where they fit into their business and how they will help them reach their goals.
That leads me to the strategy I will share with you today. It is one that actually tackles a couple of the stages of the LCM model: awareness, capture, and nurture.
I’m sharing this because our Extraordinary Entrepreneur (EE) Facebook Group Members are implementing the content strategy we teach. Many of our EE group members have come to us because they signed up for The Content Creation Lab. In this program, you will get in-depth training on doing all these things.
This is the high level of what the Content Creation Lab teaches. We recommend that you:
1) Set up a Facebook Group where you can invite your perfect ideal customer to join, and you have an opportunity to nurture the relationship with them by delivering weekly live training (we call this core content).
The core content can be pre-recorded – but we’ve found that doing the calls live helps with the energy and engagement of the group members. When you have people listening live, actively engaged, and asking questions, there’s a completely different dynamic than when you have pre-recorded your video.
2) Once you have the video recording from the live training, you can slice and dice the video up into micro-content. This becomes the content you share on your social media profiles to gain awareness for your brand.
One of the biggest challenges I’ve seen for entrepreneurs is taking that first step into creating video content for social media. This system solves that problem because we can take that one 30-minute video and slice and dice it into multiple pieces of micro-content that can be shared on social media. This allows you to get anywhere from a week to a month’s worth of content from a single video. That’s how powerful this strategy is!
3) You can also use live training recordings to produce lead magnets. Those are things that you can give away for free so that you can grow your email marketing list. We call this Gated Content. That means your audience can only gain access to the lead magnet if they provide you with their contact information.
Our Content Creation Strategy In Action
This is the content strategy we teach clients, as well as the method we use in our business. I’d like to give you a snapshot of our exact sales funnel so you can see what it looks like.
The funnel starts with our Facebook ad and social media posts. This is where we offer our ideal customers the opportunity to learn how to turn their social media into an ATM by learning and following our content creation system.
When they click our ad or the link in my video post, they are sent to the sales page. Here they will learn more about the course we are offering.
Once they sign up for the course, we send them to a thank you page where we:
- Invite them to join our free private Facebook group
- And invite them to schedule a “Big Picture Social Media Strategy Call” with one of our team members
There’s a reason why I’m sharing all this with you (I promise). Stick with me…
I’m first showing you how our funnel looks, then I’ll show you how we’re tracking the numbers through this funnel.
So, this is the flow of our funnel: our Facebook ads and social posts send them to a sales page where we present the offer. Once they sign up for the offer, we invite them to our group and ask them to schedule a “Big Picture Social Media Strategy Call.”
We hope they end up in our group because even if they don’t schedule a call with us right away, we want to get to know them more, nurture the relationship with them, and deliver more value. This may be the first time they are hearing from us, so the group is a great way. Not only are we talking to them through our email marketing list, but we can also communicate with them inside our group. Which again is what we are doing right now, with you today.
Tracking The Numbers
You’ll notice that what we track takes our customers through each stage of the LCM. We set up our sales funnel (and the sales funnels of all of our clients) pretty much the same way. We track our Facebook group members at the top of the funnel because we consider that to be the highest level – the widest part. Then everything else filters down from there.
Within our sales funnel, here’s how we track our progress:
- We track the number of people who join our private Facebook group
- Our leads, which are the people who join the private Facebook group but don’t join the email marketing list
- Opportunities (the number of people who scheduled a “Big Picture Social Media Strategy Call” or a “Discovery Call”)
- On the Strategy Call, our goal is to:
- Deliver value and insight into what they should do to get results with their social media marketing efforts.
- Qualify them to see if they would be a good fit for our Content Creation Machine services.
It’s on the call that we immediately determine if they are qualified – if they aren’t, we don’t present the offer.
If they are qualified (meaning they are ready, willing, and able to move forward), then we present our offer. How do we know if they are ready? They recognize they have a problem. They are willing, if they want to make the change, to do the things that they need to do to get a better result in their business. Able means they have the funds to do it.
So, when you’re doing your discovery call, thinking about your perfect ideal customer, those are the things you are looking for. Sometimes we determine they are not ready, willing, and able. In that case, we will not present the offer because there’s no sense in extending an offer to someone who can’t move forward. We don’t want to waste anyone’s time.
- If we determine that they are qualified, they will move into one of these three buckets:
- Presented Offer/Negotiation, meaning they have seen the offer but haven’t moved forward yet
- Won, meaning they purchased our product or service
- Lost, meaning they said, “Nope. I’m not interested,” and decided not to move forward
Your Entrepreneurial Scoreboard
Now, let’s take a look inside what we call Your Entrepreneurial Scoreboard. Now that we’ve laid the foundation for the sales funnel, the Entrepreneurial Scoreboard should come together really well.
This scoreboard will allow you to set your yearly revenue goal for your business growth strategies, then show you if you are on track to hit that goal.
To pull this information, most entrepreneurs have to run several reports and then do the math to see where they’re at, if they are on track, and where they need to course correct to hit their goals for the year.
This scoreboard pulls all the data into one simple dashboard so that you have a clear view of your business growth. It shows you the pulse of your business and what you need to do to reach your goals.
Here is a hypothetical example of an entrepreneurial scoreboard, giving you an idea of how to use these numbers. Let’s take a look at what’s going on here…
Take a look at the group member goal. With a target of 200 new members a week, the yearly goal is set at 10,400 members.
We want half of those members to sign up for our email marketing list. (Side note: when we offer something for free in exchange for someone’s contact information, we don’t ask for only their email address. We also ask for their phone number so that we can follow up through a phone call or via text.)
If 5% schedule a “Big Picture” call, they move into the opportunities stage. So that goal is 5% of the 100 captured leads or 5 per week. This gives an annual target of 260 calls.
Think about how different your business might look if you had 5 discovery calls a week – 5 opportunities to convert someone into a customer. Now, here’s what we know. Realistically, 50% of the people who schedule a call with us are not going to be qualified – meaning they are not ready, willing, or able to move forward.
That means we have 130 calls that are qualified and good candidates to present our offer to.
Out of 130 calls, we strive for a 60% closing ratio. That means out of every 10 calls we have, 6 people will be good candidates and will move forward with the offer we’ve presented to them.
If our average customer value is $6,410, then (in this example) we would generate $500,000 in gross revenue by selling 78 customers a year.
Remember I said, “growth is a mathematical equation”? But you have to know AND track your numbers.
Supporting You In All Of Your Marketing Efforts
I don’t know about you, but how exciting would it be to have access to something like this? A system where you could actually calculate how many customers you need to bring on this year to reach your revenue goal. And every month, you’ll know if you are on track. I’ll be honest, if you don’t track and measure, months will go by, and you will wonder what happened.
Right now, it may not be on your radar yet, because, as I said, I’ve found that many entrepreneurs are just winging it! They’re just hoping that at the end of the year, they will be profitable and be able to pay their bills. But it’s never too late to create your goals.
Today I want to plant the seed because we are working on some very exciting things behind the scenes of our business. We have taken the last 10 years of work, dedication, learning, experiences, and working with thousands of small business owners and entrepreneurs.
We are putting together the ultimate membership!
Not only will we be teaching our members the strategies we have seen work time and time again, but we’re also giving you the tools, resources, campaigns, landing pages, sales pages, funnels, and everything! We’re giving you as much as we can inside this membership so that we can set you up for success.
Because you’ve got one of two choices. You can take the road of learning – I call it the road of hard knocks. Or you can step into a system that we’ve already built. Your Entrepreneurial Scoreboard is one of the tools that we’re actually including in our membership. Now, we’re not ready to fully release that, but I wanted to start planting that seed so you know what’s to come in the upcoming weeks.
Here’s my plea to you. Don’t keep winging it in your business. I say all the time, “You can’t hit a target you haven’t set.”
Your successful business growth strategies will be a combination of tested strategies that push you toward that target. And that’s what I’m here to support you in.
