The Truth About Targets

Do we really need them?

There’s a particular difficulty that anyone who carries a revenue target knows intimately.

You’re handed a number. Maybe it came from a spreadsheet in head office. Maybe it came from a board meeting you weren’t invited to. Maybe it came from a conversation between people who have never made a cold call in their lives.

And now you’re supposed to make it happen.

The question sits there, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly: Where did this target even come from?

It can feel arbitrary. Disconnected from what’s actually possible on the ground. Like someone in an ivory tower picked a number, and now you’re left to somehow conjure it into existence through sheer will and magic.

I’ve felt this. If you’ve ever carried a number, you’ve felt it too.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand after years as a rainmaker, and then more years building my own company: the tension is real, but the framing is wrong. And getting this right has everything to do with Power Listening.

Where targets actually come from

Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth.

In business, your targets are largely decided for you. Not by a boss. Not by a board. By something more fundamental: fixed costs.

The moment you sign a lease, you’ve made a promise. You’re committing to monthly payments for the next five years, whether revenue shows up or not.

The moment you hire an employee, you’ve made a promise. You’re committing to paying that person every month, whether the pipeline closes or not.

The moment you take on any recurring obligation, you’ve created a target. You may not have written it on a whiteboard, but it exists. It’s the minimum revenue required to keep the lights on and the promises kept.

This is the part that employed salespeople and marketers often don’t see. When you work for someone else, the target can feel like an imposition from above. When you run your own company, you realise the target is always there. It’s baked into the business the moment you make a future commitment.

The rainmaker’s paradox

Here’s what I think sits at the heart of the rainmaking spirit:

We make promises we intend to keep, even when we don’t know how we’re going to keep them.

When you sign a five-year lease, you don’t have five years of cash set aside. When you hire your tenth employee, you don’t have their salary guaranteed for the next decade. You sign because you believe your business model works. You believe that, even if cash flow dips, you’ll figure it out.

That’s not recklessness. That’s the essential bet of commerce.

Yes, there are companies with years of runway in the bank. They exist. But the vast majority of businesses operate on something closer to “faith backed by evidence.” You’ve seen the model work. You believe it will continue to work. And so you commit.

The target, then, is not some arbitrary number invented to torture you. It’s the financial expression of the promises you’ve already made.

Why not just go organic?

Some people push back on this. They ask: why don’t we just do our best and let revenue land where it lands? Why impose artificial targets? Why not let things happen organically?

It’s a fair question. And I think the answer comes down to one observation:

Without a target, almost nothing gets organised.

Think about how target-setting actually works when done properly. You start with the number. Then you work backwards. You ask: what are the activities, the channels, the campaigns, the conversations that could get us there? You map out the “how.”

The target determines the how.

If you need to make ten million this year, you will choose actions that could plausibly lead to ten million. Equally, if you need to make one million this year, you will choose actions that could plausibly lead to attaining a smaller target. If you’re just “doing your best,” you have no basis for choosing one path over another. You’re not working backwards from anything. You’re just kinda doing what you do - and what happens happens.

Organic activity, left to itself, tends to produce organic results. Which is another way of saying: not much beyond the status quo.

The target gives you something to organise around. It shapes decisions. It creates urgency. It forces you to confront the gap between where you are and where you need to be.

The psychology of the number

There’s another layer here, beyond fixed costs and financial planning.

A target is also a management tool. A psychological instrument.

Without a target, you have no chance of exceeding expectations, because there are no expectations. You’re just floating.

With a target, something shifts. You might hit it. You might exceed it. You might fall short. But you’ve given yourself and your team some kind of benchmark of success.

This is similar to pricing, actually. Pricing a product is part science, part art. You can run all the analyses you want, but at some point, the psychology of the buyer is the deciding vote. Too high and you lose customers. Too low and, funny enough, same outcome.

Target-setting is the same. You can model it, forecast it, benchmark it. But ultimately, the number you choose must be something that gets rainmakers into good-quality action. Too high and they give up before the game starts - they never actually commit. Too low and they drag their feet.

What this has to do with Power Listening

Now we arrive at the connection I’m building toward.

Power Listening is the skill of staying in contact with reality. And target-setting is one of the places where that skill matters most.

Here’s why.

A target can become a pipe dream. You set an ambitious number, disconnected from what the market will actually bear, and then spend the year chasing something that was never achievable. That’s demoralising. It burns people out. It teaches your team that the numbers don’t mean anything.

A target can also be an underestimate. You play it safe, set a comfortable number, and leave opportunity on the table. You never discover what was actually possible because you never reached for it.

The art of setting the right target, the one that stretches without breaking, that motivates without demoralising, requires deep contact with reality.

You need to read the environment. What opportunity actually exists out there? What is the market telling you? What are customers responding to? What channels are working, and which are exhausted?

You need to read your team. What are their real capabilities? Where are the strengths you can lean on? Where are the gaps that will limit execution? What’s the honest assessment of what this group of people can achieve in this timeframe?

You need to read your resources. What do you actually have to work with? What constraints are real, and which are assumed? Where is there leverage you haven’t exploited?

This is Power Listening applied to the act of planning. It’s not about spreadsheets and forecasts. It’s about contact with reality, with your market, with your people, with your situation as it actually is.

The harmony of target-setting

When target-setting goes well, there’s a kind of harmony to it.

You’ve listened to the environment and understood the opportunity. You’ve listened to your team and understood the capacity. You’ve set a number that lives at the juncture between ambition and reality.

When target-setting goes poorly, it’s usually because someone stopped listening. They imposed a number from above without understanding what was happening below. Or they set a number based on what they wished were true, rather than what the evidence suggested.

The more I write about Power Listening, the more I see it showing up everywhere revenue lives. It’s not just a sales skill. It’s not just a marketing skill. It belongs as much on the desk of the CEO and the CFO as it does on the desk of the CMO. It’s embedded in the decisions that shape whether a company thrives or struggles.

What comes next

I’ve opened a door in this post, but I haven’t walked fully through it.

I’ve shown you why targets matter and how they connect to the deeper skill of staying in contact with reality. But I haven’t yet fully shown you the “how.” I may have given you a small taste but there is still a lot more to it. How exactly do you employ Power Listening in the act of setting targets? What does that look like in practice?

That’s coming. In the weeks ahead, I’ll probe deeper into the action of Power Listening. Not just the philosophy, but the method.

For now, I’ll leave you with this:

Your target is not an arbitrary number imposed from above. It’s the financial expression of promises already made. And your ability to set the right target, and then hit it, depends on how well you’re listening.

Make it rAIn, KG