When most companies plan their sales and revenue targets for the next year they tend to look back on past performance as a guide to how they'll do in the future. If they have some growth aspirations in mind they'll then typically raise their targets by say 5 - 10% in order to create some stretch objectives.
And if by the end of the following year they've managed to hit this increased target then they'll pat themselves on the back and say it was a job well done. Plus they might load the next years targets by a little bit more in order to try and continue the trend.
The basic limitation with this strategy is that it doesn't fundamentally change either the company or the market it operates in. It supports whatever business model the industry is used to. It drives complacency around an assumption that slow progress is the way ahead and is the key to long term business success or survival.
But what is someone did things differently? What if instead of increasing sales targets by 10 %, they were increased by 100%? Or 1000%? And what if they set these new targets with no or little additional budget in place than was available to previous year? And what if these targets were planned to increase by just as much again the following year? And the year after that?
Now traditional marketing via mail shots, press adverts, and cross sell phone calls can often be tweaked to generate a small increase in sales in the short-term. Price can be flexed to make the product more attractive. But such tactics don't create long term value. They just drive commoditisation, switching, and ever more frantic attempts at interruption marketing.
And there's no way that tweaking these traditional marketing tools could produce a ten-fold increase in sales. So the company would have to do something completely different. It would have to come up with some really creative ideas of how to connect with customers. Of how to deliver something that has genuine and sustainable value for them.
The chances are that the company would have to undergo some pretty radical changes in order to build the kind of capabilities needed to support all this. And in doing so there's a pretty good chance that it would also change the market in which it operates. The old model would become irrelevant. This would create opportunities to capture much larger market share and to open new value opportunities which previously did not exist.
And all because they gave themselves some targets which may have seemed impossible.
Ask people to do the possible and they'll usually just do it how they've done it in the past.
Ask them to do the impossible and you could be astonished by what they achieve.
