title: Setting Your Business & Marketing Goals – **1PMP Series**
Guest: Chris Goldman
Peter: Today I’m joined by Chris Goldman. Chris is a marketing strategist and business coach with bizmktg.com. That’s the firm that produces this show Chris is going to actually interview me. We are starting on a little journey of talking about one-page marketing plan, and Chris and I are both one-page marketing plan coaches along with Emily Cadel
Chris: it’s real exciting cuz in the coming weeks we’re gonna start unpacking with you in the podcast some of the key principles that you need to understand to make your business grow. But before we talk about how we help your business grow, we need to talk about your business goals. So a lot of people talk about business goals and marketing goals and what comes first.
Peter: Business goals are always going to trump marketing goals. Your marketing goals should be driven by the overall goals of the business. So just to frame the conversation a little bit the one page marketing plan is actually nine sections of marketing tactics. And we are gonna be presenting over the next several weeks, the first five tactics that are in the one page marketing plan or the strategies and the tactics associated with each. This is a bonus round that they didn’t really talk about in their one page marketing plan, which is before you do any of the marketing plan, what are you trying to do from a business standpoint?
So that’s the context of why we’re starting today with business goals and marketing.
Chris: Yeah. And so even when I began a conversation with a company or a business owner, it’s about messaging and those messages have to flow out of what are you wanting to do? How are you trying to impact the world around you? What are your core goals? Not just your core values? Where are you trying to go with your business?
So let’s talk a little bit Pete, about numbers, cuz people always wanna talk about numbers. What are the key numbers in growth goals that a business needs to be thinking about?
Peter: That’s a good question. First of all, some businesses may say, why do I have to grow? Why should I grow? I’m happy with where I’m at. One of the things I’ve learned over the course of 40 years in business is that if you are not growing, you’re
Chris: That’s right.
Peter: And the reason for that is there’s just natural attrition that happens in the business.
You’ll lose a certain number of customers. Competition will come along, people will move away. Companies, for example, we work with companies that get purchased by other companies. There’s this natural attrition that happens in business that people don’t account for, that could be anywhere from. Three to 10% or more of your annualized sales are gonna go away each year just due to attrition. So one of the rules that I’ve heard from being in business for a long time in corporate settings and in small business settings is that double digit growth is a really good target. So if you are targeting double digit growth, that means 10% or more is a good baseline, strong growth mindset to have for your business. And the other that we want to think about this in terms of growth and why you want to grow is it forces you to always be looking at things with a growth mindset in your business. So it’s not just growing business, also wanting to do things better
Chris: Yeah, it’s like you’re. What are you thinking about? Where are you wanting to take the business? I like to think of it as business, especially in the digital world, is not like a two-lane country road. It’s like an eight lane freeway, and if you’re just standing still in the middle of a freeway, you’re gonna get run over.
So you want to keep moving at a pretty good pace. So that you’re outpacing a little bit your competitors, if not significantly. Okay. So if we look at the double digit growth, what are some kinds of growth goals that you hear business owners reflect to you that you think now that’s really smart because when we think about growth, it’s not just about money.
What are some of the broader growth?
Peter: When we talk about growth and you of dig into the accounting side of the equation, you’re looking at and foremost, the obvious one is top line revenue, right? That just means grow your revenue, but there’s many ways to grow your revenue. You can add new customers and sell your existing product. to those new customers. That’s one way to grow. But another way to grow is to add new services sell it to your existing customer base. A third way to grow top line revenue is raise your prices. And of course we see a lot of companies doing that these days. In my mind that’s cheating, unless you have significant cost increases. I question the motives of companies that are doing that, but just raising their prices just for the sake of raising prices so they’ll make more money. But that is one way to increase top line revenue. So top line revenue is where it all begins. like to think about it in terms of a mix of increasing sales to Customers, so you’re actually getting more of the share of their wallet, is one way you think about it. And also adding new customers. I always want to be adding new customers at a pretty good clip because it is reinforcing the fact that we are providing value and we’re actually proving it to a new customer set every time we go out there and talk to folks, right?
So it’s, we’re not just sitting on our, resting on our laurels, not really offering anything new. We have to constantly prove our worth the marketplace.
Chris: If you think about your customer base, one mistake a lot of companies make is they get a big customer. Maybe they have services they sell, they get a huge customer, and they’re like, man, we are rocking and rolling. Now, when you have a significant customer providing a significant portion of your revenue, you have to remember when that customer leaves you have a significant loss. So there is this balance of building your clientele with a wide spectrum of kinds of customers to help have some stability in your income. It’s great to have huge customers. You wanna have that. You wanna have those great customers that really provide a chunk, but you also want to have a whole bunch of regular everyday customers that are coming along. And by the way, they, the regular customers, they’ll help you keep it real. They always help you keep it real.
Peter: Absolutely. One, one, this reminds me of a I had with a mutual friend of ours. I was explaining the business model for biz marketing. and this guy was a banker, formerly a banker, and he said, oh yeah, I know that your business model, it’s squirrels and buffalos. squirrels and buffalos.
And I’m like what do you mean by that? He’s you’ve got some buffalos, you’ve got some big clients, but you sounds like you’ve really managed to get a lot of squirrels too, which are smaller customers that are very loyal relatively easy to serve. And you can provide a lot of value to them. And that’s a great mix. And as a banker, we actually like businesses like yours that have that mix
Chris: Yeah.
Peter: buffalos and squirrels. So you may look at your business and go, we don’t have enough squirrels right now. We need just some everyday customers that can really help us fill out our customer list.
And what that does is helps you cover your fixed costs and, Again, it’s it’s really good when you have those customers because you may lose one or two squirrels
Chris: Yeah.
Peter: and sure every customer counts, but it’s not gonna kill your business.
Chris: Exactly. So if you’re looking at as a business owner, we want to grow by do double digit growth, you wanna look at that in terms of the kinds of customers you’re trying to grow into, your current customers by providing more services for them or better improved services. New customers you
Peter: Yep,
Chris: don’t know yet.
Both buffalos and squirrels, big and little, and this drives you into. Marketing goals. So when we think about marketing, Pete, what are the kinds of numbers that really tell the story about marketing? You’ve worked in this a long time.
Peter: Yeah, the first I, I’ll tell you a little story here. So I remember meeting a dentist and they were very interesting growing. their practice. And I said they, what does that mean to you? What does growing mean to you? And they said we haven’t really thought about it.
And I said so how many new patients a month do you want to see? They said, oh, 30, 40, 50, we could probably handle 50 new patients a month. And I said, where are you at today? We’re about 10 new patients a month, so now I’ve got something to work with. So I’ve got this gap. I’ve got 40, up to 40 new patients a month now. One thing I know about dentistry is at least, in the past it was about $200, like the ADA publishes numbers. What’s the cost per new patient acquisition? Obviously that’s gonna vary from state to state and region to region, but generally it was $200. So I said to this dentist, great, 40 new patients a month, net. you’re already at 10, so you want to get to 50. So when you need 40 new, so at $200 per new patient, you should be ready to spend about $8,000 a month to generate those 40 new patients. And know, eyes got really big
Chris: During the headlight. Here we go.
Peter: Yeah. Tearing the headlines like. Never thought of it that way. That’s where we start is, we need to look at numbers.
So let’s just carry on with that example. So if you’re looking at we focus on digital marketing primarily. We’ve got other marketing products, but primarily digital. are going to want to figure out. Let’s say you do want 40 new patients or 40 new customers a month in whatever your business is. That one thing you need to know then as it relates to marketing, because marketing is generating demand for your products and getting people to actually call you, contact you, raise their hand, say they’re interested in your business, so you can work your way back from there and you can say, okay, 40 new customers, how many new leads do we have to generate to turn into 40 new customers now? that’s my next question. How many leads does it take to generate 40 customers? A lot of times I’ll say, okay, what is your current close rate? on, the current lead activity that you’re getting. And if it’s, if they’re not doing much marketing, the close rate’s gonna be high.
Chris: Sure.
Peter: it’s probably all word of mouth referrals, but as you increase number of leads coming into a business, the close rate is going to go down. biggest thing I’ve seen in a lot of businesses, they can’t even begin to tell you what their close rate is. They guess.
Chris: Yeah. I think we like for every 10 that come in the door, we get one or two new customers. and you’re, you wanna know, no. How many actual new customers are you getting out of those?
Peter: exactly. So if you’re 10 to one, that’s 10%. Okay. I can work with that number. If it’s two, that’s 20%. Okay, I can work with that number. So then we have to take you want, right? So if you want 40 new customers a month, this is the cocktail napkin math that I was talking about to you
Chris: Yep.
Peter: So,
Chris: down and put it on a napkin. Here’s what it looks like.
Peter: 40 divided by your close rate of 0.2, that means to generate. 40 new customers, you’re gonna need 200 leads a month
new leads, and that. Now we’re getting to, things that a marketer can work with
Chris: right.
Peter: marketing goals. So now we’ve got this goal of generating 200 customer leads a month. Now we have something that we can work with in terms of figuring out. what are the strategies that are going to support that? So we may be doing paid search campaign on Google ads,
Somebody types in dentist near me and your ad pops up and they click on your ad. And then they fill out a form on your website or they call you.
So that’s generating leads. we can actually then say if we have a number, like 200. So if a customer, if we figure out that we think a customer needs 200 leads a month, we can now figure out how we’re gonna generate 200 leads a month, if that’s even
Chris: Yeah.
Peter: are the strategies and tactics needed to produce? And of course all of that feeds into the one page marketing plan, but if you don’t do this step, it’s difficult to do everything else in your marketing plan.
Chris: Exactly. The last couple years we have gone fishing out on the Puget Sound quite a bit during salmon season, and there’s a machine that all great boat owners have, they give you, what is that machine called? And it shows you those little dots for where the fish.
Peter: Oh yeah. It’s a depth
Chris: depth sounder
So you’ve asked me to look at that sometimes from route on the Puget Sound and what’s happening below. If you think about marketing and building your business in terms of fishing, for example, you want to go to where the fish are. You want to have the right line to bring the fish in.
You want to have the right bait on the end of the line to attract their attention and pull them in. And you have to know your limit. All of that comes into play with a good business strategy and a good marketing strategy. You have those goals, you have your limits, you have your needs, and you’re putting all of that together.
Now, why wouldn’t a person just say, wow, if I have to spend a thousand bucks to get two new customers why would I do that? Pete, tell me about the value of repeat customers and loyal customers, or what some people call your fan.
Peter: First thing you have to look at is the type of business you have. So if you have a one and done business ability to take that one sale and turn it into multiple sales may be limited. not saying it’s completely limited, but it may be limited. So what you wanna look at is the type of product you have. obviously it’s better to have a subscription model if you’re trying to build a lifetime value of a customer, which is because we do have some customers in the H V A C heating and air side of things are actually, they’ll sell a furnace seven, 10, $15,000. But what they’re doing is they’re also selling a subscription model routine mainten.
On that. So they’re creating a lifetime of income from a a customer where in the past they hadn’t thought about that revenue stream. The business had not thought about that revenue stream. That’s when it starts to make more sense to spend more to get those new customers, especially if you have this ongoing. Business that you’re generating directly. Now, there’s also indirect benefit though from a new customer because if you really provide a what, what Alan Dib and the one page marketing plan calls delivering a world-class experience. This is after they purchased your customer. you can orchestrate and stimulate
if you do a great job with a customer, You should count on getting a word of mouth referral and not just expect it to happen. There’s obviously a lot of steps you can take to make sure it happens, and if you are really providing great service and you are running a program that is stimulating then you know the thousand dollars you’re talking about to generate two new customers could be a drop in the bucket
Chris: Exactly.
Peter: think about it.
Chris: Yeah. So if you’re back to the dentist illustration that you have, you spend the money to bring in that one customer, a lot of times that customer’s, not just a customer, it’s a family of four. So now we have four new patients that get into our system and we can invite them to become part of our fan base that we serve them annually for years and years to come.
So three years, five years down the. The dentist looks back and says, look, I spent a thousand bucks to get that family to come in. Over those 10 years, that return on investment has been huge. And by the way, they’ve talked to their friends and their neighbors about where they go to for dentistry. And so this is true and business owners know this, but this is why before we jump into marketing, we wanna.
With the question, what are your business goals? Where do you wanna go? Let’s not just spend money randomly, let’s strategically place it. And then you get into your strategic messaging, your strategic marketing, your strategic support. Your drip campaigns, all of that flows out of great goals and authentic marketing.
Pete, if I were to ask you one last thing to say to our business owners today that are listening in, what would you tell ’em about setting up your goals for your company?
Peter: I would say, know, here’s a great exercise. Pull out a sheet of paper and write down, where you were. Month to month, top line revenue each month and then second row down, know, add 5% to that. What does that number look like? Add 10%. So come up with a couple different scenarios. You’ve got what you did last year and then you’ve got a five or a 10% line, and then you’ve got just do a stretch. Look 20%. And what would it take, what do you think it would take to get to that? 20% and when you actually start breaking it down into monthly numbers. The reason I don’t like doing this on an annualized basis is it doesn’t really make sense.
Most business owners run their businesses on a monthly financial calendar and. Really makes it more realistic and you can also, there’s certain seasonality in your business that you can take account for well. So I’d say first step is get out your numbers from your most recent 12 months. And obviously we’re, we’re into 2023, so don’t go all the way back to December. Go, go back up to last month and plan out. 12 months ahead and come up with some realistic goals that are they’re gonna make you think, they’re gonna stretch you a little bit. And the nice thing is once you start looking at those numbers and you start contemplating you’re gonna get there, it’s amazing. How things happen and, you actually, it actually starts happening. Obviously, it’s not magic. We do need to go through some steps to get there for growth, but, the first step is just committing it to paper. Let’s look at what does it mean, and don’t just think of a number in your head, actually get out a sheet of paper, write it down, or get out a spreadsheet. And map it out. Maybe work with your bookkeeper, your accountant as well, and really take a hard look at least what a double digit growth is gonna look like, and maybe even double that too. So that’s my encouragement to everybody who’s listening today. You’re going to see how this makes a lot of sense as we go forward. And talk about the One Page Marketing Plan by Alan Dib. by the way I did wanna mention Chris, that we do have some copies of the one page marketing plan and the first 10 people that shoot us an email and shoot an email to one page biz mktg.com. So that’s the number one. And then Page spelled out@bizmarketing.com. Send me your address and we will send you a free copy of Alan Dibs book, the One Page Marketing Plan.
Chris: What a great opportunity.
Peter: You’re gonna hear a lot more about this book in the coming weeks. But again, the number one and 1Page@bizmktg.com. Just send us your address and we’ll get a copy of the mail first 10 people copy of the book.
Chris: Thanks Pete and thanks for joining us. All of our listeners out there is Biz Marketing Team is here to help you win online cuz that’s what we love to do. We help businesses. online and we hope that you have a profitable year, a profitable day, and a profitable life.
Peter: Thanks, Chris. Talk soon.
