Setting Goals For Your Pay Per Lead Agency

Out of every single awesome idea in the world, how many manage to become a reality?

It’s way, way less than you think.

Take an average weekday. You wake up and decide that TODAY IS THE DAY.

You’re going to get into work early and SMASH it
You’re gonna go to the gym and pump that iron
You’ll make a healthy dinner – salmon, baby new potatoes, broccoli and green beans.

You get halfway to work and realise you’ve forgotten your gym kit. By the time you turn back and get it, you’re late.

OH, and you forgot about that looming deadline. You’ll have to stay behind a few hours to get it done.

By the time you crash through your front door again, it’s 9:00 pm, and you haven’t been to the shops. Weakly, you speed-dial your favourite pizza place and get a large stuffed-crust with extra toppings.

(If you think you’ve never done anything like this, you’re lying to yourself).

And what could have prevented all this disaster?

PROPER PLANNING.

It’s the same setting goals for your Pay Per Lead agency.

Anyone can float along with moderate success. But setting a few goals for yourself can be the difference between a 5-figure agency and a 7-figure one.

A Pay Per Lead agency without set goals doesn’t only affect you. It also affects your staff.

They sit in the office, day in and day out, doing the same tasks, hitting the same targets, talking to the same clients.

After a few months, it dawns on them that they’re treading water.

Nothing seems to be going anywhere. If they don’t do more and prove themselves, how are they going to get that promotion? Or that pay rise?

Left without direction for long enough, a directionless employee will start looking for other jobs. Leaving you in the lurch.

What You Need To Do

I’m not going to lie, setting goals for your Pay Per Lead agency can be difficult.

We all have a vague idea of what we want to achieve, but the vision can be so momentous, it seems easier to leave it as it is – just a dream.

Take the comic strip at the top of this blog. The dream was to have a 7-figure agency over the next five years.

Sounds great, but how do set about actually achieving that?

Short (and boring) answer: you need to set goals with an iron fist.

That’s right. There’s no “plug and play” way to set and achieve goals for your Pay Per Lead agency. You need to sit down, think and make an actionable plan.

This post contains the four levels of goal setting success.

Before You Start

As soon as I start asking people to make plans, some of them freak out.

They get so obsessed with making the perfect plan, they just sit on their hopes and dreams for months and never get anything done.

(I know this because my copywriter does it 😜).

Dreamers get stuck in their own heads – and the longer they spend trying to make things perfect the first time around, the more they’re paralysed by the idea of failure.

I need you guys to be action-takers. That means making plans and getting started on them ASAP.

It doesn’t matter if they’re not perfect.

It doesn’t even matter if, three months down the line, things go completely off the rails. The beauty about setting goals for your Pay Per Lead agency is the ability to evolve and adapt to your circumstances. The world won’t burn if you need to move the goalposts a bit!

Now, let’s get started.

Setting Goals For Your Pay Per Lead Agency #1: Set SPECIFIC Goals

So, you want a 7-figure agency. Cool.

Let’s narrow that down a bit. How about, “I want to build a 7-figure agency through the car finance niche”?

Great! So, to become the world’s best lead generator in the car finance industry, you’re going to need some clients in that niche.

But instead of just saying “get clients in the car finance industry”, break down what you’ll need to do to achieve that.

For example, a specific goal could be: “I need to build a client-closing funnel for the car finance niche. Part of that funnel includes a Facebook ad campaign, reaching out to clients specifically in that sector. We’ll start by targeting cold traffic, four ads per set.”

Being as specific as possible when you’re setting your Pay Per Lead agency goals will help you keep your focus. All goals can be split into step-by-step chunks that will shed light on what needs to be done and when.

Setting Goals For Your Pay Per Lead Agency #2: Keep to a TIMELINE

So, you’ve set specific goals for your Pay Per Lead agency. Without proper timelines, those goals are useless.

Give someone a week to write a paragraph, and they’ll spend a whole week agonising over it. Give someone a day to write 2000 words, and you can bet they’ll get it done.

Guess what? The 2000 words and the paragraph probably don’t differ too much in terms of quality. The person tasked with just a few lines will have spent so long writing and rewriting, trying to hit perfection, the paragraph probably won’t make much sense by Friday.

If you give yourself infinite time to do anything, you can bet your bottom dollar you won’t get it done.

Setting a (reasonable!) timeline will help you take accountability for completing your goals.

Timelines also help:

Provide you with a solid structure for what needs to be done and how (breaking goals into specifics)
Make a connection between each task. For example, you can’t send a direct mail letter to 100 prospects if the letter hasn’t been written yet
Establish markers in your quest. Say something happens and you need to move the goalposts. You could resume from “Goalpost Two” (six months) rather than “Goalpost Zero” (the very beginning)

No timeline is too short. Many agencies think in months or years when it comes to setting their Pay Per Lead goals.

I make sure my staff and I have weekly goals for specific tasks. If something needs to get done, sometimes I’ll make a goal just for that day.

It’s not about unnecessary pressure – it’s about getting things done the best you can, then improving on it later if needs be.

Setting Goals For Your Pay Per Lead Agency #3: Be REALISTIC

Off the back of unnecessary pressure – I never set goals for my team if I know they’re unachievable.

Yes, I want things done, and I have faith in their abilities. But if I set a task due in a week when it should take two or three, all it’s going to do is make them feel stressed and resentful. Plus, I’ll probably be angry if it doesn’t get done.

That said, “when you get around to it” never achieves anything.

When setting goals for your Pay Per Lead agency, keep these tips in mind:

Goals should be non-negotiable. Make it clear to yourself and your staff that they need to hit that deadline. If you need to, sit down and break the task into chunks. Deadlines are an obligation – if someone misses a task, multiple goals could be thrown out of whack.
Make yourself and your staff accountable. I always put my staff’s weekly tasks on a whiteboard, for everyone to see. Every Monday, I hold a team meeting, and we discuss what’s been done and what’s ongoing. If someone hasn’t completed their weekly tasks, I ask why, and we keep it on the board. Having a visible reminder keeps everyone on the right track.
Ask for help. If you don’t think you’ll get something done on time, ask for help. Somebody on your team may be struggling for time, while someone else may have completed their weekly tasks by Wednesday. It doesn’t matter how the job gets done, as long as it’s completed to a good standard.
Reward people. If your staff are hitting their set goals, reward them. That could be a voucher, a bonus, a nice team lunch (or even taking them to Ibiza!). When someone feels validated, they’re much more likely to pull out all the stops for you.

Remember – your team are with you for a reason. They want to see your agency succeed as much as you do.

Setting Goals For Your Pay Per Lead Agency #3: Be AMBITIOUS

Everyone prefers success to failure – we’re not lunatics.

But we often forget that success and self-confidence come from many, many failures. It’s in failure that we truly learn about ourselves; how we handle certain situations, how much we can deal with, and how easily we spring back up.

If you’ve achieved all your weak-ass goals for that year, but you’re still on 5-figures, is that a mark of success?

Think more of yourself. Stoke the flames of your ambition. If you’re struggling to achieve a certain goal, just ask yourself why you’re doing it.

“I’m writing a 24-email nurture sequence for warm car finance prospects.”

Why?

“Because I’m highly experienced in the car finance niche, and I have what it takes to dominate the market.”

Once you’ve made your purpose clear, burning ambition is sure to follow.

Conclusion

These are just some of the super-handy steps for setting goals within your Pay Per Lead agency.

Once you’ve settled on a vision, tell your team, your partner, your friends… as many people as you can. Get excited. Shout it from the rooftops.

Then sit down and work out how you’re going to do it. If you have a mentor (and I highly recommend you do), ask them for clarity if things look a bit muddy. Reach out to other business owners on Facebook or LinkedIn and pick their brains.

If you need to adjust your goals later on, that’s not a negative. Circumstances change, things happen. The most important thing is to keep moving forward.

Go get ‘em!