Every business must know their numbers. That doesn’t mean you must be a math wiz, it means your sales numbers. Do you know how contacts you must make to create the pipeline of prospects necessary to sustain your income at a healthy level?
A couple of examples:
1. You generate your business through public speaking and you know you must have 2 speaking engagements per month with 20-30 participants. Out of those participants you know that you will schedule appointments with 30% and 30% of those will become clients. The other 70% are added to your newsletter and another 25% will eventually become clients. End result is each month you will have generated 3-4 new clients per speaking engagement. To increase your numbers you either increase the number of speaking engagements or you improve your skills at closing the opportunities you currently have.
2. Maybe your business is internet based and driving traffic to your website is your prospecting activities. You have put several strategies in place to drive that traffic and you know that you need 1000 visitors a day to hit your financial goals. 1000 visitors = 2 sales and 50 newsletter subscribers. You have the same opportunities once you know your numbers. You either increase the strategies to drive the traffic or you fine tune your website to entice more folks to purchase the first time they visit.
Where are you in your sales IQ? Do you need to increase the efforts that give you an opportunity to sell or do you need to improve your closing skills?
One more question you may need to look at is how do you feel about sales? Does the thought of selling make you uncomfortable? I will look at those thoughts in my next post.
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