“What gets measured gets done” ~Peter Drucker. That’s my all time favorite business quote. What is your time worth? When you keep track of your activity and the results they generate, you can learn what is going well, what needs to be tweaked, and what should get tossed completely.

The purpose of moving your prospects through a contact whether, whether that is online or offline, is the window into modern lead flow management. How funnels drive activity and bring focus to the right activity at the correct time is really the bar by which their effectiveness should be measured.

Ever wonder how someone knows how to “set their rate” or figure out what their time is worth?

Some people are paid on a salary, but across the globe so few people are paid for the value they create. Rather, they are paid based on the value of the position or role that they fill.

The challenge for most people is that our educational system has taught us that the “safe” route is to trade our time for a set wage. This is time based income. Your income is linked to the time you put in.

For others, they are on salary. While they are both time and location based for their income, they have outcome based income. In other words, they are being paid to produce a series of outcomes over time.

True wealth is secured by creating value, leveraging that value at scale, and then securing the income generated with assets (often real estate) to help secure the gains.

True wealth is generated by sales people and business owners. instead of tying their income to a specific task outcome or period of time, they have linked their income to a measure of value that they have created with for their clients through their product or service.

Because value-based income is forward looking and not backward looking, in most cases that income is also in the future. This is why it is so difficult for many to move forward and create true wealth. They just have a hard time reconciling what they were taught as children – to trade time for money, to be “safe” with what the wealthy teach their children about wealth creation.

Value creation and accessing wealth is a mindset first. Once you understand the mindset you can access and execute on wealth creation strategies.

98% of businesses fail within 5 years. Many sales people bounce from job to job. Why?

It’s because they have not understood the basic funnel that creates their income so that they understand what their time is worth. When you don’t properly understand how to manage your time, and when you don’t know what activities you should be working on, then your income will always be the result of “accidental” success rather than a reliable mapped out strategy that you can feed a family and secure a future on.

The most basic funnel is:

1.   Get leads

2.   Qualify leads

3.   Present to qualified leads

4.   Secure transactions with qualified & persuaded leads (client conversion)

Your time spent on these different actions is how to measure the value of each, and how you understand how much time should be spent on each activity.

For example:

In 2014 my gross personal revenues for one service/product/line before expenses was roughly $124,000 on slightly less than ~$1,100,000 in gross revenues.

Some weekends I worked and some I didn’t. There were 104 weekend days, 10 public holidays that year and 251 working days. This means I generated approximately $494/per working day. If we add say 25% for partial weekend days worked, then the number drops to $447/on 277 days worked.

That year in just one line of business, I generated approximately 2,789 actual leads. I qualified roughly 475 prospects that were at least willing to talk to me. I converted this into 176 selling conversations, and secured a total of 48 actual closed transactions. What does this mean

Regardless if they said YES or NO:

· Every lead I created was worth: $44.46/value.

· Each qualified lead was worth: $261.05

· Each selling conversation was worth: $704.55

· Each client was worth an average commission rate of: $2,583.33

What does this mean for me? When I sat down and evaluated it, then I understood that paying $20.00 or less per lead was an acceptable expense for me.

That I should not be spending more than a couple of minutes max, generating that prospect list. Why?

Because my time needs to be focused on qualifying, selling and closing my business! The problem for most salespeople is that they want to spend all their time on selling conversations and they fail to spend enough time in qualifying conversations.

The breakdown in creating productive salespeople being able to maximize their income is really due to failures in steps 1 and 2. They don’t properly qualify their target market. As a result, they are spending too much time trying to qualify the wrong target prospects, and they end up not having enough time to have selling conversations that result in closed deals.

Lead acquisition that costs too much in time & money results in low income biz owners and sales people.

Properly positioned lead acquisition is worth spending a more time, attention & money on because it produces a greater return in terms of money to time, and money per transaction. Close more – make more. Simple right?

I adjusted my target market by upsizing my client in terms of profile, I adjusted my target based on what was more profitable in terms of transaction type, and then I drilled in on maximizing my revenue per deal by properly positioning my value-offer for those targeted, pre-qualified opportunities.

Too many reps and businesses spend too much time and wasted money trying to market to “the world” because “everyone” needs what I have. Wasted money on a failure to target. Lost time in qualifying conversations that should never have been generated in the first place. Equals unprofitable time spent on revenue sucking activity. Omigod. Please stop.

In 2018, by taking those steps I mentioned, I used the measures from 2014 to mentally position my attitude for being positive in the face of the “No.” For example, when generating leads in my selected “target rich” environment I was able to genuinely say “thank you for the $44 and 46 cents.” Created funny looks on people’s faces :-D.

What did I do? I got my hustle on because I got excited about getting people to say “No.”

What was the result?

In 2018 I increased my personal gross income on one product line/offering before personal expenses to ~$291,000 on what activity?

~$1,835,000 in gross business revenues

On ~1,987 leads, ~936 qualified, 378 selling conversations and 227 closed transactions (which includes ~108 personal sales and another ~119 transactions which were shared with folks I trained and/or split deals with). That equaled a return of:

· Step – Stage – Gross Value – Personal $$

1.   Lead – $923.50 – $146.45

2.   Qualifying – $1,960 – $310.90

3.   Selling – $4,855 – $769.84

4.   Closed Client – $8,084 – $1,281.94

So why did the lead numbers go up and the income go down? Training and split deals. Not all my time was spent on my own income.

What’s the Lesson? I drilled in, got more focused, addresses my lead quality and focus issue – spent time where it mattered most and increased my gross business and personal revenues.

As I said at the top – Peter Drucker is noted for my favorite business quote of all time: “What gets measured gets done.” He is considered the father of modern management theory. The formal drivers for what are now popularly called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). It’s the data that drives business.

Your personal and professional success can be broken down into data. Do you track any KPIs?

If you do, what are they and why?

To discuss this topic more or see how I can help … please connect and engage with me here on LinkedIn.

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I provide coaching, mentoring and public speaking on the topics of social media marketing, direct sales (including door2door, telemarketing, B2B, B2C, and digital marketing. I enable salespeople, small business owners, and professionals to properly equip, positively position, and then close the deal! I am a published author with several title to my name on Amazon already; including Writing Copy Online: The 21 C’s of Content Creation & Curation. I will be releasing others including Selling Is Organic, How to Eff Up Your Life: in 12 easy steps, 365 Things You Can Do to Market Your Business, and perhaps 1 or 2 more titles in 2024.