Annabelle Geerdink
For business owners, it is essential to reflect each year on the commercial goals for the coming year. These can range from increasing conversion rates to attracting new customer relationships. As 2024 draws to a close, it is a good time to set the course for 2025. In this blog, we share practical steps to set your commercial goals in a concrete and actionable way for the coming year.
SMART Method
The SMART method (specific, measurable, acceptable, realistic and time-bound) is one of the best-known ways to clearly define the goals for the coming year. As the name suggests, it focuses first on specificity and measurability (Randstad, 2024). Here it is important to translate the goals into numbers or percentages. That way you know concretely what kind of growth you are talking about and make it concrete for yourself. For example, ‘ample growth’ is less clear than ‘an increase of 5% over last year. So to make a clear goal, you also need a starting point (such as last year) to make the targeted growth measurable and comparable. This also allows you to make predictions based on the starting point and the growth curve for this period.
Looking back on 2024
To set goals for the coming year, it is essential to first look at how the past year went. By defining a clear starting point, you can set goals for 2025 based on what has already been achieved. It is also important to evaluate which goals were and were not achieved in the past year, and examine how this can be improved. With these insights, you can make your goals for the coming year even more focused and concrete. Some questions that can help you with this evaluation are:
- How many leads did we have in 2024?
- Through which channels did these leads come, and what were the differences between them?
- How was the conversion?
- With how many customers have you been able to upsell/cross-sell?
- How many customers quit?
- How much have you invested in lead generation and ultimately more importantly:
- Do you see a business case emerging from this?
With the answers to these questions, you can make sense of the current state of affairs. Then, once the plans are made concrete, you can look at what can still be invested in.
New Business
To attract new customers, it is important to first clearly define who your ideal customer is and what criteria this customer must fulfill. Then you can evaluate which sales channels you are currently using and the extent to which they are being used consistently and effectively. If you deploy many automated channels, such as LinkedIn Automation, it may be valuable to also invest in more personally targeted sales methods. Telephone acquisition, for example, is an effective and personal way to make contact. Many sales managers say they appreciate this personal contact and often schedule a follow-up appointment after an average of five calls. The follow-up after the first call is therefore crucial for success (see also ‘Telephone acquisition anno 2025, old-fashioned or not?’).
Responding to digitization
In fact, as more and more processes are digitized, it can be valuable to also invest in more personalized sales channels. These approaches are not mutually exclusive, but can reinforce each other. With the increasing amount of data about your target market (such as sector, location and number of employees), you can better predict which prospects you can best approach when (see also: ‘Telephone acquisition anno 2025, old-fashioned or not?‘). It is important to realize that lead generation, and especially online marketing and telephone acquisition, are processes in which you must first invest (sow) before you can reap. If you have a streamlined lead process a year from now or want to scale up, it is certainly not too early to start as early as early 2025.
Resources
SMART goals: explanation of the method with examples. (s.d.). Randstad. https://www.randstad.nl/ontwikkelen/persoonlijke-ontwikkeling/smart-doelen