Discover the ultimate goal setting secret

In working with my clients we spend a lot of time on goal setting. Or actually: goal accomplishing. Because in spite of how easy – or for some: boring goal setting may sound, it’s one skill we need to master if we want to go beyond the 6-figure mark in our business.

And here’s the thing: There’s more to it than just saying: I earn 200K by the end of 2018.

The problem with goal setting to earn a certain amount of money is that the process of making money is kind of intangible.

We feel we don’t have full control of that goal, because it’s not totally clear what needs to be done. And we feel we must rely on so many outside factors that are out of our hands.

And because of that, many entrepreneurs don’t feel comfortable setting goals. Or when they do set it, they’re having this thought in the back of their head that it probably won’t happen anyway…

But don’t get discouraged! Let’s change all that.

From a Marketing perspective there are two things we can do, to get more in control of accomplishing our goals. I’d be happy to share it with you.

First: I always teach my clients that a goal should be measurable. 

Measurable means that it has to be crystal clear if we accomplished our goal or not. “More clients” is not a measurable goal. 30 new clients is. “an increase in revenue of at least 50% compared to last month” is also a measurable goal. Because we either hit it or not.

Second: a goal must be made actionable.

Actionable means that you have to know exactly what specific action you can take today, tomorrow and every day of the month to be certain that you will hit your target.

Those are the things on your Marketing to-do list that really matter!

This is actually the biggest obstacle women entrepreneur face in accomplishing goals: They don’t know EXACTLY how to make goals actionable. They’re always asking me: well what Marketing things should I do then to get there?

Because they can think of a 1.000 things that they can do. And that explains why we’re always soooo busy, and have a piled up to-do list every day. Right?

But I suspect that not everything on that to-do list is actually important to do to accomplish your goals. So we’re waisting pretty much a  lot of time, all the time.

Here’s how to reverse that.

I’m going to give you the exact steps I teach my clients and that help them to actually accomplish their goals.

The steps I like to take are :

1. Identify the core projects that you need to work on to hit your year goal
2. Choose the most important project to work on
3. Create three monetary goals:
   • your ‘BEST’: the amount you want to make really – and which would make you really proud
   • your ‘BETTER’: a reasonable, respectable amount
   • your ‘GOOD’: an easily achievable amount
4. Set a very specific deadline
5. Replace the goal with specific Marketing actions or tasks – so you’re not focusing on the money but on your actions

“Financial goals set us off on the right track. It really feels good to have your end goal in mind, right? But then there’s this little voice bugging us all time: how, how, how? And we immediately feel bad or insecure and we block ourselves in finding the answer.”

A financial goal can cause us to get stuck and lose motivation. So, step number 5 is crucial. I’ts all about the most important questions to think about, instead of focusing on the money. We deliberately sit down and pay attention to the HOW.

This is what we ask:

• How will I achieve this goal?

and

• Assuming I already accomplished this goal, what steps DID I take? Reverse engineer!

For example, if your goal is to make 10,000 EUR and you have a program or product of 1.000 EUR, you’d need to sell 10 units to reach your target.

So far so good.

But go on. Ask yourself, how am I going to sell it?

A typical answer might be that you would use Facebook advertising to promote your  program. Then, you need to calculate how much you need to spend on Facebook ads to make a sale. If the cost per sale is 10 EUR, you’ll need to spend around 1.000 EUR to make 10.000 EUR. Therefore, if you want to make 10.000 EUR by the end of the month, your goal should be to spend at least 1.000 EUR on Facebook ads by the end of the month!

NOW your goal is actionable, i.e. you transformed it to “spending at least EUR 1.000 on FB ads”.

See what I’m getting at? Because that’s a totally different picture than the 100 EUR you had in mind as your FB ad marketing budget, right? Normally we say: “hmm OK I’ll try FB ads. Let’s spend 100 bucks and see what the outcome is.”

And that’s why you don’t hit your goals! Either you get stuck on the ‘how do I make 10.000 EUR’ or ‘the FB ads didn’t work’.

So the key is to really reverse engineer. And by the way, you can apply this to all your Marketing strategies.

E.g. if you decide to use networking as your Marketing strategy, and you know you close 1 out of 5 people you speak at least 10 minutes with, you can calculate how many people you have to speak for at least 10 minutes to hit your 10.000 EUR goal, right? And based on that amount of people you can simple calculate how many networking events you have to attend that months.

So either you do that and you’ll know you’ll hit your target, or you don’t do it and you’ll know why it is that you didn’t accomplish your goal.

So this is how to really dig in and come up with the Marketing actions that matter, combined with very clear monetary values. Because you then will have far more control of hitting your goals or not.

Do it this way and the route to achieving your goal will be completely clear.

There you go. I shared with you my ultimate goal setting secret. That is to take it to step 5 and remove the money from the equation and sit down and identify the key Marketing action-oriented goals that will get to your desired outcome…

Your turn…

Share below what your biggest take away is from this goal setting strategy…