Out for a walk on a cool May morning, I saw a pickup truck pull alongside. It was Ray from up the street.
“Are you around May 31st?” he asked. “I’m having a 99th birthday party.”
That’s funny, I thought, Ray can’t be much over 70.
“Yep, this one is my 99th. Last year’s party was my 100th. Figured there’s no way I’d ever live to be 100, and I really wanted to have a 100th birthday party. So I did!
“It was so much fun, my wife and I decided to have a 99th this year and keep working back each year from 100.”
A fun party, as it turned out!
Stephen Covey’s late 1980’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, sold over 20 million copies.
The second of the habits, “Begin with the end in mind” was both blindingly obvious and a valuable reminder, because it’s so easy to forget the objective and get caught up in the How.
In marketing and sales management, too, there’s huge value in defining the end (what success will look like) and working back from there.
When my colleagues and I engage with a new client, we want to jointly figure out:
Do we need to attract 3 new customers? 30? 300? How many will achieve the growth goal?
Most often I am working with companies where each transaction (or cumulative purchases over time) involves six- and seven-figure numbers. So it’s not unusual for us to be targeting a small number of new customers, or penetrating a handful of current customers more deeply.
Let’s say the leadership team has committed to adding an annualized $5,000,000 in organic sales growth within 18 months. If the average new customer buys $500,000 a year, then we’ll need ten new accounts (fewer if penetration of existing customers can contribute a meaningful part of the goal).
To land 10 new accounts, how many proposals will we need? If it’s 15 proposals, then we ask how many meetings we would need…
Then how many exploratory calls to get that many meetings…
And how many people would need to be reading and engaging with our emails, online content, ads, etc. to get those calls.
We then design a marketing program and investment needed to produce that set of intermediate events and ultimate outcomes. We check the investment against the expected revenue and margin results to evaluate the time to payback and ultimate return on investment.
Interested in seeing what the time to payback and ROI might look like for your company? Let’s talk.