8 Steps for Setting Your Firm’s Revenue Goals

If your firm is not thinking through revenue goals for each of your service lines before setting them, it can be challenging to hit them.

More importantly, if you’re looking for a process your accounting firm can use to set smarter, more achievable revenue goals, this eight-step process is a great start.

1. Understand Where You Are

To set revenue goals for each service line, you need to know what you’ve brought in per service line in the last year. What quarter was the busiest per service line? When did you see slowdowns? Start with as much information as you can and gather the financials you have available for the last year to determine what will mathematically make sense as a revenue goal for the following year.

2. Determine Where You Want to Be in 3-5 Years

Looking too far into the future can be a guessing game, but looking three to five years out can help determine what the next year should look like. What are your goals for the next three to five years in terms of revenue, lead generation and overall growth?

You don’t need a detailed plan for three and five years from now, but you should have a defined idea of where you want the firm to be.

3. Determine Where You Need to Be in a Year

Now that you have your three- to five-year plan, you can determine what the next year needs to look like. Your one-year plan should be detailed and include revenue goals for each service line.

4. Break Your One-Year Goal Into Quarterly Goals

Now that you have a one-year goal (and plan), it’s time to turn it into quarterly goals. Don’t simply take a service line’s goal and divide it by four to come up with your quarterly goal.

Use the historical information you gathered in step one to help you better understand what quarters you can expect new business to come in and what quarters you should be focused on existing business. 

5. Determine How Many New Clients You Need

Now that these goals are broken down into quarterly and annual revenue goals, you can determine how many clients you need per service line to reach those revenue goals effectively. Remember, those clients can come from selling new services to existing clients and clients that are new to the firm.

6. Predict How Many Leads You’ll Need

Now that you know how many clients you need to generate your yearly revenue goals, you can use that information to inform how many leads you’ll need to develop. Your historical information in step one should help you with this, but other numbers like the length of your selling cycle and your close rate will help you predict this number accurately.

7. Create a Marketing and Business Development Plan

Your marketing needs to happen before you start actively selling. This ensures that when you start selling, prospects are warmed to the idea of you selling to them.

When you begin having business development conversations, your leads trust you and are prepared to buy. Your marketing and business development plans should take this into account – they should also account for the whole marketing and sales funnels. 

8. Get to Work!

Now you have all the steps you need to start, and it’s time to get started. You may find that your plan needs iteration, or you need to account for new firm members as time goes on, but you should essentially be able to stick to the plan you’ve created. 

With these steps in place, you’ll be able to create more intelligent and attainable revenue goals for your firm. While it may seem like a time-consuming process up-front, it will save you the time and energy of having to figure out your revenue goals on the fly, help you identify the marketing and business development activities to reach those goals, and make your goals more realistic and attainable.

The original article appeared on the Boomer Consulting website.