In today’s edition, we explore why hitting targets requires a clear plan and I outline how I am going to hit my revenue targets for 2026. No BS, no fluff, just clear details on how I am going to achieve my company’s revenue goal for this year. Let’s get to it.

Hello Reader,

Last week I told you that hope is not a strategy to achieve the 2026 goals you have. Just relying on people coming to you naturally is a highly unlikely route to bring in the leads you need to then turn into customers.

So, rather than just tell you how it should be done, I thought I would show you.

Today, I am going to share with you how I am going to achieve the revenue target which I set for myself at the start of this year. I shared a LinkedIn post about how this year I created only one business goal that I wanted to achieve.

If you haven’t seen the post, the goal was clear: To bring in £750,000 of revenue for my business in the calendar year of 2026.

So how am I going to do that? Here’s the breakdown.

Warning – This email is a bit longer than normal, but its full of good stuff on how we will do it!
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The Starting Point

A few things to mention as a starting point for this. My business has been going for a good few years now, and I have already established a strong team to deliver results, and I have an existing customer base for whom we are already delivering results.

If you don’t know what I do then put simply,

You can see an example of how we have done this for other companies in the video below. We are good at what we do and what we do works.

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💡Quick Tip – Testimonial videos and quotes like this are key to winning new customers.

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In 2025, we achieved just under £400,000 of revenue and so adding a further £350,000 of revenue is going to be a tough target, but it's one I know we can hit.

The starting point of the plan this year is to protect the existing business. This means working with the customers we have at the moment and ensuring we continue to deliver results for them.

• We have 6 customers at the moment who pay us a monthly fee for us to deliver sales and marketing campaigns for them.
• Our job is to help them generate leads (through inbound and outbound campaigns), which we then help them and their team close.
• At the moment we generate around £30,000 of recurring monthly income from these customers.
• Additionally, I run specific sales training programs for people I know. In the last year, these generated an additional £90k of revenue.
• Lastly, some sponsorship, mentoring and payments from my YouTube channel make up the rest of the current income.

Happy customers who get results continue to pay, and so my 3 team leaders (Monya, Abi and Nisha) and I work to ensure these customers are happy and are seeing results. They are. We recently helped one of our customers close a deal worth £4800 a month of business for 3 years and so their investment in working with us has already provided them with a significant return, and there is more to follow.

I won’t get complacent about this number and the team, and I meet with these customers every week to ensure we are on track to achieve the KPI’s we have. But I feel good about this revenue.

It’s finding the other £350k that we have to work hard on.

So, what are we doing to achieve this?
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The Target

Firstly, we have a clear target and breakdown of HOW we will bring that revenue in. In the image below. You can see that we have confirmed income at the top, and then we have identified we need between 6 to 8 new customers spread out at different times over the year to achieve the £750k revenue target.

The revenue has been split out over months because, whilst I would love to sign up and work with 8 new customers tomorrow, I know that won’t happen.

One of the BIG mistakes companies make in achieving targets is underestimating how long the ‘Sales Cycle’ is. This is the time it takes from the moment someone meets and engages with you for the first time, through to buying from you. In our world, that period can be a minimum of 3 months and often longer.

We are planning to bring some business in month-to-month, but the business we are targeting to achieve in February, March and April are from prospects we have already been engaging with.

In order to hit our targets, we do need to find new customers. So what are we doing to achieve this?
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The Hunt

As I shared last week, the starting point is knowing your audience and building a prospect list of 200 of these people. We have been busy over the past few weeks building this list. We have done this through some research on our ideal persona (I paid someone to do this for me) plus being active in looking at the list. The team and I spend time daily on LinkedIn, I go to networking events, I actively look for referrals, and I actively look for companies that might fit our target audience (and then add the CEO to a prospect list).

💡Quick tip – I always focus on the CEO or MD as they ultimately make the decision. I could go to the next level in the organisation (an Influencer).

Whilst the list is never completed (people are always leaving and new prospects are being added to it), we have said to ourselves that we need at least 150 of this list to be in a good place by the end of January.

Serve Before You Sell

The next step on my list was having some content and value to share with this audience, and this is where I have already done much of the work.

Over time, I have created 700+ videos, 200+ podcasts, 400+ articles and 30+ guides to share with this group. That said, we are always looking to create new materials. I know that one of the big problems my audience faces is the lack of a ‘Sales System that Delivers Consistent Results’. I am creating this as a new piece of content to share with these prospects.

Outreach

With a clear target audience, a list of who they are and then good content to share with them, the next stage is outreach.

I am really busy and have a lot on but I (and my team) have to make time for both outreach and inbound campaigns. My Head of Marketing, Abi, is working on an outbound campaign to make our prospect list aware of us, and my Head of Sales, Nisha, is working on a ‘Sales Playbook’ to engage with this audience.

💡Quick tip – We will be using Direct Mail (and lumpy mail) to create attention with our audience. We know it is highly effective (we have used it with customers), and when this media is used with other outreach media (calls, emails, videos and social messages), we increase our chances of getting results.

Our plan will be to create a ‘Sales Outreach Sheet’ which has all of our targets and then a set of dates at the top with materials to engage with this target group. We know that not all of these CEO’s will engage with us, but we don’t need all of the 200 to do that.

Our sales process and numbers are clear, and we work backwards.

We know we need 8 customers and we know we have 5 steps in our sales process:

1. Initial Meeting
2. Follow-up call/meeting/mini workshop
3. Initial Audit/Planning Workshop
4. Proposal
5. Customer or loss

In this process, we don’t take any money from a prospect until stage 3, and so, we give quite a bit initially.

We also know that if we need 6 at stage 5, we will need around 10 at the proposal stage (we are good at ensuring we don’t share proposals with people we don’t think we will work with) and then around 20 at the initial audit stage as we are again good at converting 50% of those we do audits with to get a proposal. Mainly because in this session, we outline the plan on how to get the results they want, and most of them don’t want to try and achieve this plan on their own.

We don’t get everyone we engage with to an audit, and we convert around 1/3 of those we do a mini workshop with to a larger workshop, which means we know we need 60 prospects to have that initial meeting with.

We also know that from our outreach, we will get maybe 1 in 4 to a meeting, and so this means we need 240 prospects in our funnel to get this amount of meetings. Here's what that looks like visually:

I haven’t in the outline above taken into account referrals that we will bring in (because happy customers refer us all the time), but I would rather see these as a bonus than expect them to be part of our numbers. If we hit a higher number than £750k, I won’t be complaining 😀

💡 Quick tip – The more specific we are with the audience, the higher these % rise. Hence why we have focused on IT businesses with technical led CEO’s with a specific amount of revenue and aspirations. We are in the shoes of our target customer.

So, with clarity around these numbers, the focus is on doing the campaigns (inbound and outbound) to generate initial attention and interest in what we do and offer. I have an outbound sales person who will be doing this engagement along with Nisha and myself. I always want to be on the front line and do some of this work. It keeps me sharp and shows my team how it's done as well! More to follow on this in an email in a few weeks time.

These campaigns are always being tweaked, but I will be sharing the exact elements of what we will use in these campaigns within my Online training session on 5 February 2026 at 7pm. Why not come along and see how I am achieving goals for my own business and learn the tips and methods to generate new opportunities in your business?

So that is how we are going to achieve our numbers.

I know the revenue target is tough, but it certainly won’t be achieved without a clear plan and us taking action.

So what do you think? Is this what you expected? Did you think I had some miracle way to generate new business? I don’t, and the same methods have to apply to me as to anyone else.

I am just not prepared to let hope be a strategy, and I hope you aren’t either.

If you want to know how to make your targets happen, register for the online training. It’s free, but I won’t be sharing a recording of it. It will be a ‘be there and get the value’ or nothing at all, and so register and put the time in place to ensure you can hit your 2026 targets.

Have a brilliant week ahead and see you next Saturday.

Remember, you have a choice. Eat or be Eaten.

James

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