Revenue goals are very important to IT firms, and itbestofbreed.com has spoken with several that are setting aggressive goals for themselves.

In a recent Inc.com blog, Peter Cohan goes over the keys to making $100 million in revenue in five years. Sound too aggressive? It's not. Cohan highlights Virtustream, a Maryland-based cloud services company that is perhaps even more optimistic than that.

What he finds is a company at the nexus of investor bullishness and customer demand. Not only could Virtustream and other firms like it put up huge revenue numbers, its founders and top execs could get rich doing it. Cohan digests some important points for tech companies looking to spur fast growth, they include:

• Success depends heavily on figuring out what skills you will need to prevail in your market and putting together a founding team with those skills.

• If you are afraid of a little adversity--you might want to stay away from the startup game. Rogers and Reid found that at the time of greatest adversity, most people were scared away from the startup scene. That meant that if they jumped in to raise capital then and succeeded, they would get a head start on rivals who waited until times were better.

• In the business of business technology, victory goes to the companies that can provide their customers with a return on investment. If you can persuade a company that you will give them, say, $10 back for every dollar they invest in your product, you are likely to make the sale.

• But those companies are not just going to take your word for it. In fact, it's critical to have a customer who has already taken a chance on you and is willing to talk to potential customers about how well they've done by using your product.

Click here to check out Cohan's blog.