The Fierce Business Babe Podcast Ep 276: My Q1 Sales Plan
Today, I am diving into my sales plan for quarter one of 2024. We are going to be chatting about what exactly we’re going to be selling in my business and how we decided what to do. I’ll also be sharing some tips to help you start mapping out your quarter one sales plan in your own business.
MY Q1 SALES PLAN
By: Melissa Lin
Welcome back to another episode of The Fierce Business Babe Podcast. It's already been such an amazing month. We're getting close to wrapping up the year, I’m so excited. Something that I have been working on with my clients for the past few weeks is prepping for next year. The new year is right around the corner, which means it's time to start planning for the next year. Something that I love to teach my clients and support them with is prepping ahead in your business. It's not fun to be working hour by hour and day by day for the majority of your business. If you're still only a few days ahead in your business, it's okay. I've been there too and we can definitely get you to the point of working months ahead like my clients and myself. You may be sitting there asking yourself, why would you even want to think about next year? My answer to you is that things just simply feel more doable with a plan in place. Can you pivot and adjust? Yes, always. Typically, we will make adjustments here and there to our plans. We don't always stick to the plan 100%. We may adjust things based on how our programs are filling. If we fill our programs quicker than we had planned, we may pivot and add a new course sale or something along those lines. We're going to get into some fun things today. We're going to get into mapping out your goals for 2024, what we're going to be selling, how we decided that, how to plan out your quarter one sales plan, and so much more.
Mapping Out Your Business Goals
We’re going to start by chatting about mapping out your 2024 goals. When you are working day to day in your business sometimes you may feel like things aren’t really working and put together yet and so there’s no point in planning. You may want to have a better grasp and be able to stand on your own two feet before you plan next year. This is what a lot of entrepreneurs in the early phases think and feel. I was definitely one of those entrepreneurs when I first started my business back in 2014. A few years ago at an institute in Germany, I believe it was the Max Planck Institute, they did a research experiment on this. They dropped off 30-60 people in the middle of the forest and gave them an hour to get back to their initial location. After a few minutes, people ended up walking in full circles thinking they were walking in a straight line. That would be very similar to me and you standing on one end of a football field and putting a blindfold on and trying to walk across it. It's nearly impossible because we don't have any indicators of what direction to be going as we start walking. Eventually, we will make a turn or start to walk in circles.
In the absence of clear markers of distance and direction, we as humans are going to make micro adjustments, we're constantly changing our sense of direction. The same thing goes in your business. You can overcome this with a certain landmark, right? Maybe you have a flag that you put up in a tree. I was watching a show the other night and there was a kid who got lost in the forest and he had dropped little gummy bears along his trail. You have different things that you can put in so that you can get back to that destination faster or get to your goal faster. So, why does this matter? The business that doesn't devote time to determine where it wants to go starts to seek ways to get there, but then starts to spin in circles. They may be chasing a shiny object that they see or start to experiment with new things in their business. Experimenting is amazing and I fully believe in it, however, there's a difference between experimentation and just getting distracted with things. Without some type of GPS or goal in your business, getting where you want to go is nearly impossible. We want to create a plan so we have an idea of where we're headed. Part of being a CEO is spending time each week, each month, and each quarter on some of these bigger projects to help you move your business forward, and today's episode is one of those moments for you. We are going to be spending the next 15-20 minutes or so working on this.
As we look into 2024 and you're wondering what to sell, when to sell, and how to sell, it might feel overwhelming. Today I want to help break that down for you so that it's easier. If you have that plan in place it isn't so scary and it feels more doable. The first thing that we are going to do today is think about your income goals for next year. Think about the number that you would like to hit, and if it's not a number goal it may be an impact goal. The way that I like to look at certain metrics in my business is by the number of people we’re impacting. We know that as we impact more people the income number is going to go up naturally. Whatever works better for you, or even do both, but pick some type of goal and then also some type of personal goal for yourself. Think about the number you’d like to hit for 2024. So, how much do you want to bring into your business next year? What does that impact look like for you? Is it six figures? Is it $100K? Is it $200K?
As I'm saying some of these numbers, if you start to tell yourself the story of that’s too much, there is just no way that I can do that, I want to share with you that you can achieve anything in life that you want. I've created the evidence that you can do it. My clients have created evidence that it is possible. Things can shift so quickly for you. I also want you to start thinking bigger and playing bigger. The coaching industry, the service industry, and the online space is growing so much. It is incredible what you can do in the online space, so let's play bigger. I want you to stretch your goals even more than what you originally wrote down. The year of 2024 is going to be your biggest year yet. If you're wanting to reach six figures next year, amazing, let’s stretch some more; Let's go for $125K or $150K. If you're wanting to hit a quarter-million, amazing, let's stretch that to $300 or $400 thousand. I do also recommend creating your impact goals along with the income goals. This could be the number of people you want to enroll into your programs or the impact that you want to create.
My Quarter One Sales Plan
As you're starting to think about what that's going to look like for you, I do want to share with you what my sales plan for quarter one next year is going to look like to help you get some ideas. We have our 2024 quarter one sales plan all mapped out and it's going to be such a fun and exciting start to the year. What I like to focus on is typically one of my core programs per month in terms of what we're actually advertising and selling to our audience publicly, so front facing. Behind the scenes we may be filling spots in multiple programs based off of our different funnels we have, as well as other things going on behind the scenes not so front-facing to social media. We have systems that support both, not just social media. We have other ways that we are also bringing in additional sales on top of that, so we sell behind the scenes as well. This is something that I talked about in some of my evergreen topic podcast episodes, so if you want to learn about those send me a message and I can definitely direct you to those. This is something else that I support my clients with, so if it's something you would like to l have more hands-on support with send me a message on Instagram and we can definitely chat about that.
Each January I like to start the year with my signature program, The Fierce Business Academy, because it is such a great program for anyone wanting to kick off the year and start their online business. If you've had your eye on this program, I highly recommend hopping in now before the end of the year because we will be increasing all of our prices for all of our programs company-wide at the end of the year. We usually do one or two price increases throughout the year and we are doing one at the end of this year. So, hop in before we get into 2024 and then we can also kick off the New Year together and get you going now. There is no better day to get going in your business than today. If you’ve had your eye on it send me a message, I have details for you. In case you've never heard about this program, you'll learn the step by step to starting your online coaching business. If you aren't sure what your niche is going to be yet, we support you with that. We brainstorm with you and help you create your irresistible offer for your audience. We also cover how to turn your audience into a loyal community that buys from you, how to sign clients, and how to sell simply and effectively in a way that feels good to you and actually works. There are also three months of high-level coaching with us, weekly group calls with support coaches, and two group calls with me per month. We also have an incredible training library with over 25 hours of training that you get lifetime access to, as well as all future updates. The program includes incredible worksheets, templates, and scripts that you can use for your business. There is daily Slack support with myself and our support coaches. You can ask questions every single day and receive precise feedback on all of your content for your business, as well as other things in your business. It's literally mind-blowing everything that's included in this program. So that's my plan for January, The Fierce Business Academy.
Then what I like to do is usually a natural upsell or downsell from whatever we're selling that month. A natural upsell from our Academy is my Six-Figure Fierce Business Mastermind, so that is what we will be selling in February. It's a natural upsell because anyone who is a bit more advanced than what we teach in my Academy would be a great fit for the Six-Figure Mastermind. In this program we really support our clients with expanding their product suite, launching group programs, passive items, hiring their first few team members, how to hire, what that looks like, streamlining and automating your business, creating funnels, expanding MRR, and so much more. We also provide daily Slack support and personalized feedback. You get email sequences, monthly calls with support coaches, and private calls with me. You will also receive access to my courses, The Academy, Five-Figure Launch, The Six-Figure Fierce Business Mastermind Library, and so much more. It's absolutely incredible. So, that's what we’re doing in February. In March we are selling two different things, one is going to be a coaching program and one is a course. I can’t share the details yet, but keep an eye out. Details will be released in the new year as we get closer.
It's going to be such a fun and exciting quarter one. Something I always recommend to my clients is to sell the things that excite you the most. Your audience can feel how excited you are, and if you're not excited to sell your offers your audience will not be excited by your offers. You want to really be focusing on the things that you love selling and things that you love teaching and guiding your clients with. Tap into your audience. What is it that they want to learn? What is it that they are looking for? Find a good balance between the two.
Creating Your Quarter One Sales Plan
Now let's get into how to map out your quarter one sales plan. The goal here is for you to decide on your offer and when you want to sell your offers. What I recommend is if you have your product suite already and you know what your capacity is, have those in front of you somewhere as were mapping out your quarter one sales plan. It's really important to know what your capacity is. I'll also give you a good idea of what the income can look like that quarter for your business to see how close you are to your goal. If you're not as close as you thought you were going to be, you can start to add things to bump up your income or grow your program. You can open more seats and make tweaks to your programs so that you're available to support more clients in that program.
I want you to start to think about when you're going to sell your offers. That's the first thing to think about. You want to determine how frequently you will launch or enroll people into an offer and schedule that into your sales calendar. For example, if you have a signature program that you like to launch three times a year, put that in when you typically launch it. Get the bigger things you tend to launch throughout the year down into your calendar first. Something else you can do, as I had mentioned, is knowing the capacity. For example, let's say that your private coaching package is six months long and you can hold and support ten people at a time. You have an annual capacity of 20 people for your one-on-one coaching package, and you might consider doing big launches for it. Maybe that's once in January and then once in July. Maybe you have a three-month coaching program every three months, so four times per year. This is something that you can then add into February. Start to add your offers into your sales calendar based on your capacity and how many times you like to launch that offer.
It's almost like a little game of Tetris where you're trying to get your programs to fit into your calendar and to what makes the most sense for you and your lifestyle. If you know that you like to take a month off in the summertime, maybe you're not going to be doing a huge launch for a brand new program. You are going to be pushing an evergreen program that is already running for you, so keep that in mind as well. Create a game plan for how you're going to promote and sell your offers. You may have a mix of evergreen offers and live offers that launch throughout the year, similar to what we have in our business. Let’s also place that into your sales calendar. Maybe have some coaching programs that are live launches a few times throughout the year and a course that you sell passively. Set a goal for how many of those you want to sell each month. As you continue to grow your business, it is natural that you'll continue to add more systems and automation to increase those sales over time with continued marketing strategies. We've chatted through how to start to map out your sales plan for quarter one and I would love to see them. If you're mapping them out, please please share them with me on Instagram. I would love to see your plans coming together from this episode.
I want to leave you with a few more tips for when you're making your sales plan calendar for quarter one. After you make your plan you are going to have a really good understanding of your income potential. You're going to know that in January you want to launch an offer and its capacity is X amount of people and the price point is going to be this amount. You have all of the numbers to figure out what your income potential is. Something I want to share is that just because your sales plan doesn't make you half a million dollars, doesn't make it a bad plan. If you want more, shoot for more, but be careful of not falling into that trap of thinking you should be doing more. Make choices for you that feel good to you.
The second thing I want to say is that sales plans are clarifiers for you. Something that I want you to ask yourself as you're mapping out your sales calendar is, what are your most profitable products in your business right now? Put more focus on those things. This is something that we do every single year. We extract all of our sales numbers for each of our programs and we also take a look at how much time we spend coaching for those programs. We take a look at how much of our energy each program takes and if it makes sense based on the income coming in for those programs and the excitement that we have for the programs as well. Start there if you're not sure what to sell first. Sales plans can change. It is totally okay to change your sales plan. I want you to have something in place to guide your actions. We want to have some type of plan to go from to make everything feel so much more doable.
Then, my favorite part, once we map out our sales plan I love adding it into my Google Calendar. I think if you've been part of my community for a while you know I have such a strong love for Google Calendar. Get it somewhere that you know you're always going to be. We also place our entire sales calendar inside of Asana so my team knows exactly what's happening and when things are launching. We have lots more details about each of those launches and launch templates and things like that inside of Asana. Our clients have access to that too. If you're wondering about next steps to actually start to map out a launch, that is something we are very hands-on with for our clients and how to continue to grow your business as well.
Send me a message on Instagram. I would love to hear any takeaways from today's episode. If you're looking for more hands-on support, we will definitely support you inside of our paid containers in terms of some of the things that we mentioned in today's episode and so much more. We have covered mapping out your 2024 goals, my quarter one sales plan for my business, how to start to map out your quarter, when sales plan, and so much more. We are already getting ready for next week’s episode and we cannot wait to share it with you. We will see you next week in another episode of The Fierce Business Babe Podcast bright and early Monday morning.
Topics we cover include:
Mapping out your business goals
My quarter one sales plan
Creating your quarter one sales plan
And so much more!
Times to check out:
(07:27) How to map out your 2024 goals
(11:52) Income goals for next year
(20:25) How to map out Quarter 1 sales plan
(24:25) Tips for sales plan
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