Sales Predictability: The Lead Measures Advantage

Eric Dingler: Okay. Here we go. Recording a podcast episode. Wouldn’t it be great if you could predict the sales you would make three months from now? Let me teach you how. Welcome to the Digital Nomad Entrepreneur podcast. My name is Eric Dingler. I’m a full time digital nomad entrepreneur traveling around the world with my wife and our four kids. In fact, we are currently in Costa Rica having an amazing time here. Here in about a week or so. We’re going to do a visa run down to Colombia and then back up here to finish out a few months in Costa Rica. And yeah, having a ball and really excited, you know, as with as with the as what happens with business, you know, things started getting a little a little tight, a little, little shaky. But, you know, we we looked at our numbers and looked at metrics and pivoted a bit on our message. And this is terrible. Wouldn’t it be great if you could predict the sales you would make three months from now? Let me tell you how. Welcome to the Digital Nomad Entrepreneur podcast. My name is Eric. I am a digital nomad entrepreneur traveling around the world full time with my wife and our four kids. We are currently in Costa Rica and so if you are in Costa Rica or want to find out where we are as you are listening to this, send me an email Eric at D and E podcast dot com. And if we are in the same place in the world, we can meet up. I’d love to buy a cup of coffee. So today we’re talking about sales. Now, before I get into how to be able to confidently predict your sales in the next several months, over the next several months, what I’m doing is I’m doing a series right now, and this is part three of a series that I’m doing on the five stages of business. It doesn’t matter what kind of business you’re in, if you’re in a business like mine doing digital marketing or maybe your online business, you’re a course creator, you have a membership, you’re a coach, a travel blogger, an influencer a copywriter, video production, all the multitude of possibilities the of the kinds of jobs you could have as a digital nomad entrepreneur, dropshipping, whatever it might be you are going to share. And these five business processes. The first one is leadership. I talked to a great deal about that two episodes ago. So we’ve got leadership is a process number one. You have to have it your capacity of your business is going to be based. It’s going to be set by your leadership capacity. Your business will not outgrow your capacity to lead it. So you need to constantly be growing as a leader. Even if you are a solopreneur, you’ve got to be growing as a leader if you want your business to grow. Process number two is lead generation. That was last episode talking about creating leads and coming up with a winning lead strategy. And we talked last week about how to maximize the leads that you bring in regardless of what your lead strategy is today. I’m going to talk about the metrics of sales, and I will get into that in just a moment. And because lead conversion is the third business processes. Henry Ford said that nothing happens in business until somebody sells something. So you need to have definitely something in place for making sales happen. And then our fourth business process that we’ll talk about next week is what we’re going to do. We’re going to explore the collecting and managing money and what that looks like. And then fifth and final part of this series is the fifth business process of project management. All right. So for today’s episode, as we’re going to talk about the lead conversion here and specifically the winning metrics we need to have in place to make more sales. Now, predictable sales come from verifiable metrics so many times in business. And so many times I’ll talk to somebody and I’ll ask them, you know what? What are your sales goals? What are you trying to accomplish? And they’ll say, Oh, I need to make $10,000 next month. Well, the thing is, that can’t be a goal. Number one, if your goal and I’m you know, this is an audio podcast, so you can’t see me, but I’m doing air quotes. If your goal relies on somebody else making a decision or taking action, that is not a goal. You can’t control that you have you have no control. You can’t make somebody open their wallet and buy from you. So setting goals for sales numbers as things like I need make $10,000 next month, well, one, it’s really not a goal. And also, you’re not going to know if that is been a success or not. You’re not going to if you’re not going to know if you’ve reached that milestone until the month is over or almost over, definitely by the point where it’s really too late to do anything about it. So any time we have a measurement in place that tells us how we did, tells us if we’ve reached a milestone that is called a lag measure. It’s it’s happened in the past. It’s it’s it’s good to have and we can look at it and we can see how did we do did we reach this milestone we were aiming. For this this target. Are we there? And that’s that’s a lag measure. And those are good to have in business. But the key the key to success in business is setting up and measuring lead measures. A lead measure tells you if you’re going to reach your lag measure, it’s an indicator that based upon past experience that you are going to reach this thing you set in front of us. Now, it takes a little bit of time to put some of these lead measures in place. And, you know, it’s there’s a bit of a learning curve to getting these in place. But generally, I see people within 3 to 6 months get these really honed in for their business. Now, the the there’s a there’s a question, one real key question that I think is really, really helpful to ask yourself to set these measurements up. And I use this question if people in my team use this question, I had people that I coach use this question and and the question is simply this, and then I’ll tell you how we use it. The question is what must be true for that to happen? So if I ask you what is a target, what’s your sales target for next month? You may say 10,000, 15, 50,000, 100,000. A million. I don’t know what is. But for your business, what do you use? 10,000 is as a pretty easy, easy number here. All right. So what is your sales target for next month? $10,000. Okay. My next question is going to be what must be true for that to happen? And this is where you start breaking down. Well, for that to happen, I’ve got to sign on X number of clients. I got to make X number of sales. And that’s easy to figure out based upon your price. How much is it that you charge for something? You know, we we want to add for for my company, my target is to add $2,000 a month in recurring revenue. Well, I know our average new client pays us about 497 a month in recurring revenue, so we need to make four sales a month. So if I say, Hey, team, next month, I want to increase revenue by $2,000 and in monthly recurring revenue. That’s a very specific thing because I could go out and try to sell a website, but then we got to do all the work to build that website and then I going to go out and do the same thing the following week. And there’s no there’s no compounding happening there. So I don’t want to set my metric as just $2,000. I want to set a metric of I want to increase our monthly recurring revenue by $2,000 next month. So what must happen for what must be true for that to happen? Well, we’ve got to sign on for client. Okay? We got to sign on for new clients next month. Well, what must be true for that to happen? Well, I’ve got to I’m going to have to do eight sales presentations, because right now, word about a 50% close rate and so on my on my sales. So I’ve got to do at least eight sales presentations. All right. Well, what must be true for that to happen? Well, what must be true for that to happen is I’m going to have to have 24 hour initial discussions. We’re going to have to have 24 initial discussions. Okay. Okay. Because we know out of those 24, we’re going to get eight sales presentations. Eight sales presentations are going to turn into two for clients. Well, to have 24 initial discussions, what must be true for that to happen? Well, we’ve got to have so many. And I’m going to stop there. You can see how this goes. And we keep doing this until we reach really a point where that it gets ridiculous or there’s just no there’s no answer to this. All right. So. I know now that for us we have to put out x number of pieces of content per week to grow our are not it’s not just our email list but our contact lists because some people send us DMS through social media and that adds them to our contact list. So we have to add 100 contacts a week of warm leads, not buying leads. I can’t go out and buy 100 cold leads. That would be that would throw all of my numbers in whack because they’re very, very cold and they’re not pre-qualified or market qualified or anything like that. But instead, if we can organically add 100 contacts per week, that’s 400 per month, then I know I’m going to be able to get so much people into, you know, through our newsletter. I’m going to get so many people to our webinar or to a challenge and then into a one on one initial discussion and then into a sales meeting and then into becoming a customer. So I can look at this and say, All right, I need to have six initial discussions a week on my calendar. If I want to have 24 initial discussions, I need to look at my calendar and I need six every week. So for me, I want to set a metric, I want to set a target of having these six appointments. So every Monday I look at the following weeks calendar and I count how many initial discussions I have. If the number isn’t six the rest of my Monday and whatever it whatever time I have on Tuesday and if need be, Wednesday is dedicated to filling those slots. All right. I have to get those slots, because if I don’t get those slots the next week filled, then the following week I’m not going to have the sales numbers I need. But I know if I can get those numbers. And next week, I’m going to hit my metric for number of sales presentations to week, number of new clients, one a week now. Is this perfect? No, but it’s within 90%. And they tell you what? That’s good enough for me to take to the bank all day long. Because some weeks we get to clients, some weeks we get zero. But then the other two weeks out of the month, we’ll get one each. So it all works out in the end for a month. So those are our goals. When I used to just set the metrics, all I got to add, I got to add four new clients, oh, what am I going to do? And it was all the staff. And, you know, I was I was chasing the wrong thing. But now I can sit back and say, okay, I’ve got to make so many I can have so many appointments next week. And that’s not a goal because again, I can’t make people get on my calendar. But a goal is I’m going to look at my calendar every Monday for the following week and I’m going to see if my if I have six initial discussions. And if not, I’m going to do whatever it takes to to to make that happen. So now I’ve started having a goal. This is what I can control on Monday. Oh, you know I can. So what I do, I have a whole list of activities that I can do that I created a long time ago when it wasn’t stressful. Like, I can just open up this document and say, start going down through my list. You know, I can you know, I can call some people, I can text some people, I can look and see if there have been somebody that I’ve been having a back and forth with that might have to just push a little bit more to get them into that. It was there anybody that I needed to reschedule that I dropped the ball on, you know, it whatever it takes. I’ve got a I’ve got a whole list of things, but when I have this dashboard to look at that says, here’s the activity that I’ve got to have next week and if that activity is already on my calendar, that sets the work for this week. I know what I need to do this week because of that. Now, if I am Monday, I look at next week, I’ve got all six of those great. I can now work on improving myself and the sales I can work on. I can take some time and and work on improving my webinar presentation, my one on one sales presentation, my, my scripts, my email templates. I can, I can enhance the newsletter, spend a little bit more time on our blog, whatever it’s going, you know whatever, whatever there is for me to do to create content that’s out there that’s bringing in the, you know, 100 people a week and yadda, yadda, yadda. And I’ve got a team that helps with a lot of those numbers. But setting these numbers, setting these lead measures versus lag measures are one of the most critically important things you can do for your business. Now that that is that is the thing I wanted to share real short episode this week, especially compared to last week. Last week was like, you know, I think over an hour. But this week, this is what I want to talk about now are there are a lot more to do with sales. Yes. But honestly, it’s it’s very diverse. You know, you you could have a one step sales process, aa2 staff. You could have a consultative sales. You could have you you could be doing code outreach and stuff like that. Like there’s all kinds of ways to do sales, just like there’s all kinds of ways to create leads. What I wanted to do was say, Hey, I don’t care what you’re doing to create leads and sales, what process you use, what guru you follow, what expert there is out there. What I can tell you is this if you don’t have a dashboard that has predictable, verifiable numbers, you should be able to verify. And I can look and verify that I had this many meetings scheduled. If I don’t, that changes my behavior today. That is, imagine how much more powerful that is than getting to the last week of the month and looking backwards and going, Oh, I’m too short. We’re not going to make sales. We’re not going to make budget. You know, now I’m going into next month with a deficit and you’ve got this mounting pressure because you’re constantly chasing numbered numbers, not bad numbers, but old numbers. I mean, they’re true and accurate, but they’re old. It’s like trying to drive, using a rearview mirror. It just you can’t drive forward losing the rearview mirror. You’re going to crash. And so you’ve got to establish lead measures for your business. And this question, what must be true for that to happen is one of the most powerful questions I’ve got. Now, if you would, like, help setting some of these numbers for you and your business, I have a one time 90 minute road map. Session a one time one on one. This is a one on 190 minute coaching session on my website called Sales Metric Roadmap, and together we’ll identify the revenue goals. Are the revenue targets for your next year? Establish some key indicators to predict success. In other words, we’re going to create your sales activity calendar to help you reach your targets and you can sign up for that over at DMV podcast dot com. Just go to DKNY podcast dot com and scroll down. Now if you want to go further into this concept of lead measures and lag measures and you love to read, go to my resource page and scroll down to my recommended books. I have nine recommended books. I only ever keep this list at nine. If I ever come up with another book I read, you know, regularly. I read constantly the the book. If I found one that was like, Oh my gosh, I have to recommend this, I come to this list and remove one like these. If I only could travel, which I don’t travel with physical books, but if I only could have nine books, what would they be? These are the nine that I would have in the top row is a book, The Four Disciplines of Execution. Plus, this was a game changing book for me. It’s where I learned lead measures versus lag measures. The scorecard, we call it a dashboard. Absolutely fantastic book. Now, before I give you this week’s leadership tip of the week, I want to just say thank you for being a listener and getting up to this point of the podcast I want to ask you to do all the nice things, leave a review, subscribe, share, like let people know I’m being do me do me a favor. I’m asking if you would do me a favor and promote it. Like share this with somebody. And hey, listen, I’ve been listening to this goofball talk about business. You call me a goofball, but I’ve been listening to this this podcast, and this guy’s got some things to say. And I, you know, about business and and I think it’s helpful. And I think you should check it out. I’m telling you right now, friend, that would mean the world to me. I would be so grateful if you would do that. You are my marketing hopes, my department, my plan for this podcast. So this week’s leadership tip of the week. Why do I end with the leadership tip of the week? Because your leadership capacity is your business’s capacity. Your business can outgrow your leadership. And so every week I want to give you a little bit of a leadership boost, a nugget, if you will. And this week, this doesn’t always happen, but this week’s happens to tie into today’s and that is give a flag a lead. I say this to people on my team. If we’re working on something, if somebody comes to me and they give me a lag measure, I look at them and say, Hey, thanks for the work you’re doing on this. But remember, that’s give a flag a lead. We got to give a flag lead for every flag measure that tells us how we did. If it’s worth measuring a result because it’s impacting our business, then I want to have a lead measure that is predictive. If we’re even going to reach there and not just predicting, but based upon that, we have the number and enough time that it lets us pivot if we need to pivot. So with that, I really want to say thank you so much for listening. I look forward to reading your review in an upcoming podcast episode until next time. Chase the Big Dream Lead with courage and safe travels.