The Strategic Planning Process

Practical Tips for Creating a Strategy That Eliminates the Worry of “What’s Next?”

Who should listen: Small business owners who want guidance in developing a complete 2023 strategic plan that will set them up for success.

Key idea: Strategic planning is about getting clarity on the goals you want to achieve and how to achieve them.

Confusion is never a good thing. This is especially true when devising strategies to move your business forward. If you don’t have a plan for where you want to be and how you’re going to get there, chances are you’re going to get lost.

In this Silver Dollar episode, we share a reliable process you can use to develop a tactical plan that answers a basic question: “How are you going to achieve your goals in a specified span of time?”

1. Set your goals
2. Reverse engineer your goals
3. Set initiatives
4. Track progress

Set your goals

When setting your goals, we recommend that you make them SMART goals; that is, they need to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Reverse engineer your goals

Once you know how much revenue you want to pull in, what you want to pocket, and how much your business expenses are, figuring out what you need to do to reach your goals is a matter of doing the math:

Divide your revenue per sale by your revenue goal to arrive at a number. Take that number and divide it by your win percentage to get the number of leads you’ll need to hit your revenue goal.

Revenue per sale ÷ Revenue goal = X

X ÷ Win percentage = The number of leads you need

We talk about parsing out your leads across the year, accounting for any seasonality to your business, and the possible choices you can make (and their consequences) if you want to increase your revenue but don’t have the resources to do it.

Set initiatives

Now you can determine which steps to take to reach your revenue goal—and the time frame to reach it. You’ll eventually get very specific, but start with high-level initiatives that have beginning and end dates to give structure to your year. For example, you may determine that to hit a revenue goal, you’ll need to augment your marketing strategy, so you make that an initiative.

Track your progress

As we say during the podcast, the best predictor of future success is past success.

The only way to know if what you’re doing is contributing to meeting your goal is to track what’s happening. If you haven’t track your numbers this year—how many contact points you need to get a lead, how many leads convert, where your leads are coming from, revenue per transaction, etc.—then make a commitment to do it in the upcoming year. Better late than never, right?

We talk about each of these steps in more detail during the episode, and while we may speak in terms of real estate, it’s easy to apply the same principles and steps to your particular industry and business.

Connect | Resources

FREE e-book: How 5 Top Producers Generate Referrals

FREE webinar: Your 2022 Marketing Plan: A Step-by-Step Approach to Success

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