June has flown by and Q2 ends tomorrow.  Did you meet your quarterly goals?  And are you on track to meet your annual goals?

If you’re falling short, why not spend next week (minus the holiday, of course) planning the rest of your year?  Even if you’re ahead of schedule, it’s still the perfect time to assess your progress and make sure you’ll meet and beat your annual numbers.

If you’re looking for new strategies and tactics, this free guidebook offers 96 pages of sales & marketing tips, examples and instructions.

How to Stay on Course

Here are the key issues to address when you plot your course.

1.  Set or revise your high-level goals: Revenue, profit, # of new customers, units sold, revenue to existing customers, etc.

2.  Drill down. Break out your goals by product, channel, customer segment, etc.

3.  Calculate the value of your pipeline. Review the accounts in your current pipeline, then estimate how many will close by end of year.  Then identify any campaigns or resources you’ll need to help move those prospects through your sales process.  Also, evaluate how much time your sales reps will need to spend to close these prospects — you need to make sure your company has the resources to get the job done.

4.  Figure out how many new leads you need. If it typically takes four months to close a new qualified lead, you need to generate the rest of this year’s leads in the next two months.  How many new qualified leads will you need in that time?  Build your marketing campaigns around these numbers.

5.  Plan your campaigns: Media, goals, offers, materials, resources needed & budgets.

6.  Think about partnerships. Other companies have relationships with your potential customers.  Who are those companies?  Could you run a joint promotion or establish a more substantial partnership to generate more leads & customers for both organizations?

7.  Make sure you’re delivering on your value proposition & brand promise. If you don’t have a defined value proposition and brand strategy, look at these critical issues.  (You can learn more about B to B branding in these previous posts.)

8.  Mobilize. It’s important for your team to know the goals, share your vision and work together toward that common end.

Have a terrific 4th of July and best of luck in the second half of the year!