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Today’s talking points:

When it comes to achieving your income goals in business, it really comes down to doing the maths. Working out your conversion rate and how many people you need to get in front of with your offer is how to take the pressure off hitting your income goals.

I’ll show you exactly how (and why) you can do this.

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Have you ever thought to yourself, okay, I set an income goal. Now what? How do I actually make that happen?

If that’s you, you're going to love this one.

We are diving deeper into the numbers of your business and the actual map behind hitting your income goal.

The topic is based on conversations I’ve been having with my mastermind clients recently and I can’t wait to “spill the tea” on what it ACTUALLY takes to map out how you’re going to reach your income goals…

Plus why I’m against good, better, best goals.

It’s a juicy one… can’t wait to hear what you think!

what do you need to do to hit your income goals?

This is a tricky topic because, to be honest, there is a lot of talk out there that makes it seem as if it's easier than it actually is. If you have been around for any length of time, you know that I am here to pop the hype bubble and tell you what it really takes to hit your income goals.

So, I want us to look at the math, as that’s what it really comes down to.

To keep it really simple, we are going to look at an example goal of hitting revenue of 100,000 pounds a year, a six-figure business. (I know this is a number that many people focus on, or get wound up by, but this is an example only, one that’s easy to follow along with).

Okay, so how do you figure out how to get to six figures in your business?

Well, we have to make sure that the math adds up, we have to look at the product programme or service that you are offering, the price point of each offer, and then how many sales you need to make at each offer in order to reach that income goal.

Now, a lot of coaches out there advise people to start their businesses by offering a low price point product/offer. The goal is that over time, you build a series of products or programmes where you slowly increase the price point. This is called an ascension model.

I’m a huge fan of the ascension model for product suites and this is what I teach my clients, however, I don’t think we should start small and create offers in order from lowest to highest.

Why? Because most often we don’t have the resources to do that. Most of the business owners I work with don’t have the time, energy, or funding to spend as much energy as needed to get that volume to work out there.

Let’s look at it this way. If your income goal is £100,000 and you start off with a £50 product, you need to sell 2,000 of that product to reach that goal. This means you have to get your product in front of multiple thousands of people to buy. You will likely need an audience of 100,000 people to make that £50 product a £100,000 revenue stream.

This is where the ascension model starts to fall apart.

Now as I said already, I think an ascension model is the best way to structure your offer suite, however, what I don't believe in is creating it in that order, especially if you’re just starting out.

We need to remember that just because we might have 1,000 people in our audience, it doesn’t mean 1,000 people are going to buy. Instead, we need to understand our sales conversation rate.

sales conversion rate

This is figuring out how many people you need to get in front of with your offer, to get the sales you are looking for.

So let's take our first product, a one-to-one offer that costs £10,000 pounds. Your goal is to sell 10 of them in order to hit your £100,000 income goal.

Figure out:

How many people do you need to tell about this offer to get those 10 sales?
How many people need to check out this offer or engage with you about this offer?

Your sales conversion rate is also going to vary based on how you sell what you're selling, who you're selling it to and how you’re selling it.

All of those different sales mechanisms convert differently. For example, if you plan on using sales calls you will find that because of the high-touch nature of the calls, you will convert pretty highly on them. That means you don't actually have to get in front of that many people, so if you only need 10 clients at £10,000 each to hit your £100,000 income goal. If you're doing sales calls, and one in four is converting. That means over the course of the year, you need to talk to 40 people. That then means you really only need to talk to 10 people every three months - which is way more manageable.

If your conversion rates are even higher, maybe as your reputation gets stronger and you're getting really warm referrals, then you might find you don't even need to talk to 40 people, maybe you only need to talk to 20 people in order to get 10 sales.

So working out how many people you need to get in front of to make the sale is super important.

a much-needed reminder

When we listen to all the hype out there, we start to feel that we have to start with that small £50 offer before we get to the £1000 offer (or higher).

I want to tell you that that is a rule that somebody made and it is not necessarily based on any real data.

I know that this is true because I myself did not start off in this way. I knew that to get started in my business, I had a very real timeline in which I needed to be profitable in order to pay myself.

Instead of trying to sell many low-ticket offers, I decided to focus on a high-ticket coaching offer - my private one-to-one. This was before I had really any intellectual property created, I didn't have a course or a product, but I did have my expertise.

In 2019 when I did my first launch for my private coaching, I knew that if I got 10 people in I'd have hit my income goal. At this point in 2019 I did not have a big audience or a big email list but I knew that I could go out there, launch, build relationships and get people on a call with me so I could share how I could support them.

Once you've got your first chunk of clients in the calendar, it gives you time to work on your marketing, it gives you time to start building your email list, and it gives you time to get in front of more people. So the next time you open spots for coaching, you have more people who are actively ready and interested in working with you, that is something that we really need to think about.

If you’re thinking you can’t charge £2,500 and it feels so high, I totally get that. This feels especially tough if you have only been charging hourly. The biggest problem I see with this is that you are constantly trying to resell and rebook your clients and you’re exchanging your time for money.

So for a lot of the clients that I work with long containers are a win-win, they do better for the client, and they do better for you. So thinking of these price points, suddenly then don't become as high because you're committing to bringing real results for your clients.

What about passive income?

When I am looking at the math behind how to get people to their desired income, I rarely look at passive income first.

The exception is if that client happens to have a large audience that they've already built, and they can already tap into the numbers.

For example, one of my previous one-to-one clients is a YouTuber and an influencer. It made sense for us to create a course for her and that does really well because she had the audience for it.

However, for a lot of us, the higher price point is what is going to get us to where we need to go in order to bring in the income we need in order to pay ourselves what we actually want to pay ourselves.

let’s recap

I hope that explains why looking at the numbers is incredibly important.

If we don't make sure that all the math works out, we might find ourselves underselling and not realising actually how many people we need to get these offers in front of.

Another great thing to remember is that for each offer that you create for your business, you have three systems behind the scenes that you have to create for it as well.

The marketing system
The sales system
The delivery & customer experience system

So each time you add a new offer, you're not just adding one system, you're adding three. So the more offers you create, the more complexity is going on behind the scenes of your business.

I tend to see that a lot of businesses spend time creating and not editing and this is where we can actually sabotage ourselves from hitting our income goals. We start focusing on creating more and more but it actually dilutes our efforts because it takes so much effort to market sell and deliver each offer.

So, as you punch these numbers in I really want you to think about whether you can realistically serve this many clients and get in front of this many people to make all the numbers work. If you start to feel like this is a lot more than you thought it would be, how can we play with this? Does it mean we need to look at a different price point, does it mean we need to simplify and let go of a couple of offers, and really just double down on one or two? Those are usually going to be the top recommendations that I give my clients when they're going through this process.

Having clarity about your numbers and about what actually needs to happen truly is a game changer.