Goals To Launch Your Business

Our view at Stack - ClickFunnels was founded by an online marketing legend Russell Brunson and it offers several benefits for online businesses and marketers:

• Time and Cost Savings: Efficiently create sales funnels without extensive development efforts.
• Maximized Conversions: Test offers, copy, and images to enhance conversions.
• Specific Landing Pages: Generate highly targeted landing pages.
• Predictable Pipeline: Create consistent, predictable sales paths.
• Increased Sales: On average, it boosts sales of lesser products by 15%

The post Goals To Launch Your Business appeared first on ClickFunnels.

Founders of new businesses always have too much on their plates.

And when your to-do list is seemingly endless, it’s easy to get lost in the busywork and lose sight what actually drives your business forward.

Goal setting can help you escape this tactical hell. It encourages you to think strategically, focus on the most important tasks, and measure your progress against objective benchmarks.

That’s why today we want to share a proven 4-step goal-setting framework and discuss seven goals that you might want to set for your new business!

Proven 4-Step Framework for Setting Business Goals

There’s a lot of fluff out there related to goal setting that might sound good but isn’t really actionable.

That’s why we want to share this 4-step goal-setting framework that was developed by our friend Alex Hormozi, a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of the private equity firm acquisition.com:

Step #1: What Problem are You Solving?

Any goal that you set for your business should be tied to one of the following three objectives:

1. It should help you get more customers
2. It should help you make the customers worth more
3. It should increase the enterprise value of the company

If you want to improve something but cannot articulate how that will result in more customers, higher customer lifetime value, or higher enterprise value, the chances are that you have fallen into the trap of chasing vanity metrics. 

In that case, you need to take a step back, look at what you are doing, and reorient yourself towards those three key objectives.

Remember, as the legendary management consultant Peter Drucker has put it, there’s nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all!

Step #2: What is Your Hypothesis?

When business owners set goals, they have implicit hypotheses: they hope that doing something will lead to an outcome that they want.

You should make your hypothesis explicit by breaking it down into two parts:

1. The input – What change do you want to make?
2. The output – What do you hope will happen as a result of that change?

For example, here’s a simple hypothesis:

“If I bring in twice as many leads, I’ll make twice as many sales”.

In this case, doubling the number of leads is the input, and doubling the number of sales is the output.

The input should be the goal because you can’t control the output!

Step #3: What are You Going to do?

Now you need to figure out what actions you will have to take in order to create the input of your hypothesis.

For example, if your primary lead generation method is cold email, the simplest way to generate twice as many leads would probably be to send twice as many cold emails. 

Once you are clear on what actions you need to take, you want to break them down into daily, weekly, and monthly targets so that you could measure your progress against objective benchmarks. 

This is especially important for annual goals because without these benchmarks, it can be difficult to stay on track!

Step #4: Was Your Hypothesis Correct?

Once you have achieved your goal in terms of input, you can look at the output to see if your hypothesis is correct.

For example, if you brought in twice as many leads, did it result in twice as many sales? Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t.

Entrepreneurship is so unpredictable that you might feel that something is a sure bet and then it just doesn’t go the way you expected for whatever reason. 

That’s why it’s so important to think in terms of hypotheses, put them to the test, and then use what you learn to calibrate your business strategy.

Now let’s discuss seven goals that you might want to consider setting for your new business…

Goal #1: Spend More Time Working on Your Business

If you want to make more money, the easiest way to do that is to simply work more!

We recommend installing time tracking software on your computer and using it for three months to see how much time you are actually spending on various business tasks on an average day, an average week, and an average month.

It will probably turn out to be significantly less than you think. Often, what we categorize as “work time” in our minds is actually riddled with distractions like YouTube, social media, going down random Internet rabbit holes, etc.

If you simply increase the amount of time you spend working on your business and don’t change anything else, the chances are that you will see a corresponding increase in sales, revenue, and profit. 

Goal #2: Spend 50% of Your Time on Customer Acquisition

As Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, put it: almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don’t have are enough customers.

This applies not just to startups but to businesses in general: if you can’t get enough customers, your company won’t survive. 

One potential solution to this problem that Weinberg proposes in his book “Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth” is what he calls the 50% Rule.

Simply put, you should spend half of your time on product development and the other half of your time on customer acquisition. 

This is excellent advice for startup founders who have a tendency to endlessly tinker with their products while their businesses wither due to lack of traction. 

Following the 50% rule can also make sense for e-commerce businesses and info product businesses.

It may be more tricky for service businesses that need to balance client work and client acquisition, but you can always modify it in a way that works for you!

Goal #3: Take 100 Primary Actions Every Day for 100 Days Straight

One of the most common reasons why new businesses fail is simply a lack of consistency: getting them off the ground is difficult and takes time so people often give up too early. 

This is especially true when it comes to businesses that don’t require a large upfront investment: providing online services, selling info products, bootstrapping software, etc. In those cases, failure may not be that big of a deal financially so it’s more tempting to quit when the going gets tough.

A concept that can be helpful here is the “Law of 100” where you commit to doing something 100 times or for 100 days and focus on that goal to stay consistent no matter what.

Here’s how Noah Kagan, the founder of AppSumo and Sumo, explains it:

Our aforementioned friend Alex Hormozi takes it to the next level with something he calls the “Rule of 100” where you commit to taking 100 primary actions for 100 days straight. 

A primary action is something that is directly tied to the three key business objectives that we discussed earlier: getting more customers, increasing customer value and increasing enterprise value.

For example, if your main lead generation method is cold email, you can commit to sending 100 cold emails per day for 100 days straight.

That’s going to add up to 10,000 emails in total in a little bit more than 3 months. It’s probably safe to say that this much outreach in such a short period of time should be enough to jump-start the vast majority of new businesses. 

It’s also worth noting that following the Rule of 100 has the additional benefit of accelerating your speed of learning. If you send 10,000 cold emails in three months, you’ll probably see a drastic improvement in your cold outreach, follow-up, and sales skills.

This applies to anything: the higher the repetition volume, the faster you will learn. You just need to figure out how to make it sustainable so that you won’t burn out!

Goal #4: Drive More Traffic to Your Sales Funnel

A sales funnel is a system designed to convert visitors into leads, leads into customers, and customers into repeat customers.

For example, we used the Value Ladder sales funnel created by our co-founder Russell Brunson to grow our software company to nine-figures. 

Here’s what the Value Ladder sales funnel looks like:

(If you want to learn more about sales funnels, consider reading Russell’s best-selling book “DotCom Secrets”!)

Generally speaking, if you have a sales funnel that converts, the more traffic you drive to it, the more sales you are going to make. So you might want to set a goal of increasing your sales funnel traffic. 

Of course, it’s important to remember that traffic quality matters: you want to direct your dream customers to your sales funnel, not random people who have no use for your product or service!

Goal #5: Increase Your Sales Funnel Conversion Rates

You can also make more sales with the same amount of traffic by increasing conversion rates across your entire sales funnel:

1. Visitor-to-lead conversion rate
2. Lead-to-customer conversion rate
3. Customer-to-repeat-customer conversion rate

This will require experimenting with design, copy, and offers. 

Sometimes, small tweaks like changing the headlines or adding more social proof can drastically increase the conversion rates of your landing pages and sales pages.

Of course, it’s important to A/B test everything by creating two variations of the same page, driving an equal amount of traffic to them, and then comparing them in terms of conversion rates. 

If you don’t know where to start, we recommend watching this video where Russell shares seven simple hacks that you can implement in your funnel:

Goal #6: Improve Your CLV:CAC Ratio

First-time entrepreneurs often don’t pay enough attention to the math behind their businesses, perhaps because it can be kind of boring or even intimidating if you are not a numbers person.

However, as the best-selling author Dan Kennedy put it, math is the gravity of the direct marketing business. Nothing overcomes bad economics. 

Arguably, the single most important business metric is the ratio between customer lifetime value (CLV) and customer acquisition cost (CAC). It shows how much money you get out for every 1$ you put in and is the main indicator of the health of your business. 

(Note that sometimes, customer lifetime value is referred to as simply “lifetime value” and abbreviated as “LTV” instead of “CLV”). 

For example, if your CLV is $2 and your CAC is $1, your CLV:CAC ratio is 2, meaning that you get out $2 for every $1 that you put into customer acquisition. Sounds pretty good!

However, if your CLV is $0.50 and your CAC is $1, your CLV:CAC ratio is 0.5, which means that you only get out $0.50 for every $1 that you put into customer acquisition. You need to fix that math ASAP because you are losing money!

One look at this number can immediately tell you whether your business is sustainable. That’s why you want to calculate it and then always keep track of it.

You can improve your CLV:CAC ratio in two ways:

1. By increasing your CLV
2. By reducing your CAC

We recommend reading our complete guide to customer acquisition if you want to learn more about these metrics and the relationship between them, as well as how to maximize your CLV. 

Also, Alex Hormozi explains the CLV:CAC ratio in detail in this video:

Goal #7: Do 10X More of What’s Already Working

Entrepreneurs are notorious for their susceptibility to the Shiny Object Syndrome where they keep chasing new opportunities instead of maximizing what they already have.

New business owners often do this by adding more customer acquisition channels when they haven’t squeezed everything out of their first one yet. Sure, there’s a lot to be said for diversification, but that stuff is further down the line.

If you have been in business for less than a year, the fastest way to grow your company is probably doing more of what’s already working.

Alex Hormozi encourages entrepreneurs to ask themselves: what’s stopping you from doing 10x more of what’s already working? It often turns out that nothing is stopping them!

Of course, doing 10x more may not always be possible, but in that case, you can probably do at least 2x more, right?

Want to Learn How to Build Sales Funnels That CONVERT? 

Our co-founder Russell Brunson used sales funnels to take ClickFunnels from zero to $100M+ in annual revenue in less than a decade.

He is now widely considered to be one of the top sales funnel experts in the world. Want to learn from him?

His best-selling book “DotCom Secrets” is the best place to start because it covers everything you need to know in order to build sales funnels that convert.

This book is available on Amazon where it has over 2,500 global ratings and a 4.7-star overall rating.

But you can also get it directly from us for free…

All we ask is that you pay for shipping!

So what are you waiting for? 🧐

Get “DotCom Secrets” for FREE!

P.S. Here’s What Readers Say About “DotCom Secrets”…

What Readers Say About “DotCom Secrets”

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