Est. Read Time: 2.5 mins
Most people set vague goals, and then make their best guess about what it will take to achieve them.
Example: “I want to get 1,000+ people to sign up for a product launch waitlist. To reach the goal, I’ll post a lot on social media about it.”
When you read it, it sounds silly doesn’t it?
Yet, people do it every dang day (even really smart people).
When I’m helping a client grow their business, I don’t have the luxury of being vague with goals or guessing what it’ll take to achieve them.
Here’s how I approach goal setting to hit them as often as possible, with a reasonable amount of predictability:
1. Know the timeline
Some things have actual deadlines like a product launch or a promotion of some kind. Other things are up to you to decide, like hitting a certain revenue amount.
Whatever goal you have, make sure you know the timeline you have to work toward it (and if there isn’t a deadline, create one).
2. Work backward toward the goal
Once you know the timeline/deadline for your goal, work backward to the current day, breaking the goal down into smaller projects and tasks.
All business goals should be trackable with a metric, so use math to your advantage. What activities need to happen between now and the deadline to guarantee success?
I'll give you an actual example...
Recently I set a goal to get 1,000+ people to sign up for a product launch waitlist.
The first thing I did was “model” what it would take to achieve it.
If I could get 2,000 people to the waitlist landing page, and 25% of those people converted onto the list, that would give me 500 waitlist signups…clearly not enough.
So I kept modeling it out until the numbers made sense: 3,000 landing page views at a 40% conversion rate = 1,200 signups. Great.
Then, I asked a very important question:
”With the assets, resources, and timeline I have—what actions do I need to take to make success inevitable?”
After thoughtful consideration, I decided that if I sent 3 emails to the email list of 130,000 people, with a 30% open rate and a 2% click through rate on the emails, that should drive a little over 3,000 page views.
And as long as the waitlist landing page was well written and designed, it should convert at 35-40% and hit the goal.
As you can see in the image above, I actually overestimated how much traffic the 3 emails would bring, and with the click through rate only being about 2%, it drove 2,108 landing page views. But the conversion rate was higher than expected, so I hit the goal with 1,096 signups.
Make sense?
Ineffective goal setting—“I want to get 1,000+ people to sign up for a product launch waitlist. To reach the goal, I’ll post a lot on social media about it.”
Effective goal setting—“I want to get 1,000+ people to sign up for a product launch waitlist before the end of the month. To reach the goal, I’ll need to send 3 emails with a 30% open rate, 3% click through rate, and the waitlist landing page will need to convert at 40%.”
Criteria for effective goal setting:
Set your goal, be specific, and work backward asking yourself “How do I make achieving this goal inevitable?”
Happy growing 🙂
-Dustin
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