Every consulting firm sets a revenue target for the new year.
But if you were to ask what that target means for their marketing each month, you’d get a blank stare.
There’s a simple exercise we do with our clients to make it concrete.
We start at the end and work backwards.
Imagine the goal is to grow the firm by $2 million (in booked revenue) from marketing next year.
And let’s say this firm’s average yearly revenue per client is $100k.
Great.
So to book $2 million in new revenue, we need 20 new clients.
If the average close rate for leads who book a discovery call is 25%, we need 80 qualified leads to book a call to win those 20 new clients.
80 leads a year is around 7 leads a month.
So we just need 7 qualified leads a month to reach that $2 million.*
And we can use our current metrics to work out what it takes to achieve that:
- If we currently get one qualified lead per 50,000 impressions on social media, we need 350,000 impressions a month.
- If we currently get one qualified lead per 5,000 newsletter impressions, we need 35,000 impressions a month.
- If our cost per qualified lead through advertising is $3k, we need to invest $21k a month.
Obviously, you can combine these options and adjust the targets per channel accordingly.
But you can see how starting at the end and working backwards makes what we have to do each month clear.
A $2 million booked revenue target = 7 qualified leads a month.
And I’d like to stress the word “qualified” here.
Because that’s where positioning and thought leadership pay off.
If the firm tries to serve everyone with every service, the content and ads get generic.
Qualified buyers have to work harder to tell if the firm is for them.
So the cost per qualified lead through advertising could jump from $3k to $7k.
Now, for the same $2 million target, you’d need to invest $49k a month.
You could still achieve it, but in a much less profitable way.
But the moral of the story?
You probably have a revenue target for 2027.
Don’t let it sit on a slide all year.
Start with that number and work backwards.
With solid positioning and thought leadership, you can turn that goal into a numbers game.
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Footnotes
* To keep the example simple, I’ve left out the sales cycle impact. Some deals will close from last year’s leads, and some of this year’s leads will close next year. Here, you can assume it evens out.
