You will be able to calculate the weekly activity needed to reach a sales target from your own conversion rates.
Your manager, or your own bank balance, says you need two new clients a month. So how many calls should you make this week? Most sellers answer with a feeling: "a lot", "more than last week", "as many as I can". Then the month ends, the target is missed, and nobody can say whether the problem was too little activity or the wrong kind.
There is a better answer, and it takes ten minutes with a calculator. You start from the target and work backwards through each stage of your pipeline until you reach the number of touches you need each week. This lesson walks through it with example rates. You will then repeat it with your own.
Begin with the number of sales you need in a period. Use a month or a quarter, whichever matches how your targets are set. The maths works on a count of sales, so if your target is in dollars, divide it by your typical sale first.
Mei's example target is two new clients a month. That is the only number she starts with.
A pipeline is a series of stages, each one smaller than the last, like the scorecard you built in lesson 2.4, Build a lead source scorecard. Between each pair of stages there is a rate: what share of people make it from one to the next. Working backwards means taking your target and dividing by each rate in turn.
The four rates you need are: sales per proposal, proposals per meeting, meetings per conversation, and conversations per touch. A conversation here means a real reply or call where the prospect engages, and a touch is any single contact from your sequence in module 6.
Here are Mei's rates, which are made-up figures for this example, not benchmarks:
One sale for every three proposals. One proposal for every two meetings. One meeting for every three conversations. One conversation for every five touches.
Now work backwards. Two sales at one in three proposals needs six proposals. Six proposals at one in two meetings needs twelve meetings. Twelve meetings at one in three conversations needs thirty-six conversations. Thirty-six conversations at one in five touches needs one hundred and eighty touches.
So two new clients a month needs, on these example rates, six proposals, twelve meetings, thirty-six conversations and one hundred and eighty touches in the month.
Monthly numbers are too big to act on. "One hundred and eighty touches" sounds like a mountain. A weekly number is something you can plan a prospecting block around.
Taking a month as four working weeks for round numbers, Mei needs nine conversations and forty-five touches a week. Forty-five touches is about nine a day across a five-day week, many of them quick: a templated email with a personalised first line, a LinkedIn note, a short call.
When a division does not come out even, round up, never down. If your maths says 8.3 conversations a week, plan for nine. Rounding down means planning to fall just short.
The number that matters most is usually the weekly count of new conversations. Touches are the activity you control, but conversations are the first sign the activity is working. If you hit forty-five touches and get two conversations instead of nine, the maths has just told you something important, and lesson 7.2 is about what to do with it.
You will find industry averages for reply rates, meeting rates and close rates on blogs and in sales books. Treat them with suspicion. They come from different markets, different products, different price points and different definitions of a "meeting". A rate measured on software sold to large American companies tells you very little about bookkeeping sold to Singapore cafe groups, or about insurance reviews for young parents.
Your own numbers, even rough ones, describe your market, your offer and your skill. That is why you built the scorecard in lesson 2.4 and set up honest stages in lesson 6.3, The minimum CRM fields worth tracking. If you have only a month of history, use it and label it as a first estimate. If you have none, start with a cautious guess, run the plan for a month, and replace the guess with what really happened.
Darren worked through the same steps with his own rates. His meetings turned into proposals much less often than Mei's: one in four instead of one in two. With every other rate kept the same as Mei's, that doubles the meetings he needs from twelve to twenty-four a month, and the conversations from thirty-six to seventy-two. Small changes in one rate move every number above it, which is why it pays to know your real ones.
You do not need to redo this by hand every month. A pipeline calculator can be five rows in a spreadsheet: your target in the first row, then one row each for proposals, meetings, conversations and touches. Put the rate for each stage in one column and a formula that divides the row above by that rate in the next column, then add a column that divides each monthly figure by four for the weekly number. Change any rate and every number above it updates.
What no spreadsheet can do is supply honest rates. In the activity below you will enter your own target and your own rates from your scorecard, and write down the weekly number of new conversations you need.
Fill in the pipeline calculator with your own target and rates and write the weekly number of new conversations you need.
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