If you’re a tech founder and you’re struggling to break down your sales goals into smaller achievable steps then read on. 

What I want to share with you is a bit of a framework that we use at Selfstarters that allows us to take a 3-year vision and break it down into smaller chunks. 

One of the hardest things for teams and founders is breaking down their big hairy audacious goals into actionable steps. We have this HUGE vision of what we want to achieve, but where do we start? 

Especially when it comes to sales, the good news is there is a simple way to break down your big goal into small, achievable and most importantly, realistic goals.

(Actually, even better watch the video as I show you the break down of what I’m covering here)

So here is how it works.

The first thing we want to focus on is the vision of where we want to end up in the next three years time. 

Think about visualizing the kind of lifestyle you want to have, the people you want to have on your team and the income you need to sustain your lifestyle. 

For this example, let’s say you need to make three million dollars as a business to sustain your vision, which would include the type of office, the staff, etc. It seems like a very long journey from today, so let’s break it into Milestones.

Next, we want to chunk it into a two-year and one year and 90-day timeline. We can now take our 3 million dollar goal and break it into how many customers we need to acquire to reach our sales goal. 

So if you’re selling a product that costs three thousand dollars, we would need to acquire one thousand customers. 

(NOTE: For the ease of this example we’re not taking into account recurring revenue, but this is relatively straight forward to calculate)

To translate the number into our present targets, we apply what’s called the 10X principle (10X based on the fact that startups can produce significant growth in bursts. We may do things that aren’t scalable today but that we can 10x over the next 12 months).

As a SaaS startup, you look to 10x your numbers every year. So imagine that one thousand customers in three years will be one hundred the year prior, and then the year before that (talking about numbers can get a little confusing. I show you how I break this down in the video).

So if we need a thousand customers in three years time, then in two years, all we’re looking for is a hundred customers. In 12 months, we’re looking for ten customers, and in the next 90 days, we want to find one or two customers that can help us on our journey.

Projecting those numbers that we’ve calculated back into the future, we’re looking to take three to six thousand dollars in the next 12 months we look to make $30- 60k. In two years, we’ll aim for $300 to 600 thousand.

Achieving the above numbers will set us up well for making our three-year vision of reaching $3million in year 3. 

We can now break our sales goal into quarterly break downs that then feed into the larger annual goal. In turn, we create smaller, digestible sales and marketing goals that we can achieve as a business.

You can use this process if you’re already doing high turnover but also when you’re just starting. 

It’s a natural process that we apply with our clients and can break down your vision into milestones for 2020. 

This process doesn’t require excel whizz skills and can easily be created on the back of a napkin and can quickly tell you whether you’re charging too little or whether you’ve got a bit of leeway. 

I hope this process helps. Feel free to reach out or send me an email with your thoughts to hello@selfstarters.academy