When it comes to your business knowing your numbers is what is going to give you control over your business. It can show where to concentrate your efforts (ie. where the money is), and it can show you where not to waste those efforts.

Knowing your numbers is at the heart of any sales training. And sales is the heart of any business.

If you need to make 4 sales per week and your closing rate is 20%, then you know you need to talk to 20 people to make those 4 sales. That’s 4 people a day. There’s your goal – and your plan is based on how to get those 4 phone calls a day. All businesses come down to that principle in the end.

 You might do better one week than another – you might work to improve your close rate – but at least you will have a target to aim for.

So getting those phone calls is where the funnel comes in – and a funnel is everything about the numbers – because it is about getting people who don’t know you to a sale.  As the diagram above illustrates, only 3% of prospects are ready to but right now, and only another 7% are open to the possibility. That’s 1 in 10. The rest need careful nurturing over time.

There are 4 stages to the funnel – Awareness > Capture > Nurture > Sale

Awareness – very often in an online business that means Facebook ads (but can include content marketing, social media,  messaging campaigns, etc)

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Capture – is the freebie you get them to sign up for in exchange for their email address. This is where the marketing truly begins.

Nurture – the email drip campaign that educates and nurtures people towards >

The Sale – either via a phone call or ecommerce click

Using the 80/20 rule you can estimate how many calls you can generate in our analogy above – so –

1000 people see your Facebook Ad (Awareness)

20% sign up = 200 (Capture)

20% are nurtured towards a sale = 
40 people buy the VIP Day

20% who come to the VIP Day go on to by the Annual Coaching Program = 8

Knowing these numbers gives you the power and direction.

  It is no longer guesswork. It becomes predictable. You know that if you pay $XX in Facebooks ads you will get 1000 views = 200 signup = 40 VIP sales = 8 Program sales.

This is a good benchmark – but in order to know what YOUR numbers are you need to actually run some promotions to find out. Do you get more than 20% – do you get less? What income is generated when compared to the costs of getting those sales?

Test it – track the results – see what can be improved to get better results next time. See what doesn’t work and that you can drop.

 You don’t start off with this knowledge. It is only through trying things out that you find out what works and what doesn’t. But when you find out those numbrs you re golden, because then you know that if you spend $XX you will get $XXX in return. It is predictable.

Facebook ads are a good analogy. You don’t just throw a lot of money at an ad you think is going to work. You try 4 different ads, test them all with a little money, see which one delivers, and only then do you put the big money into the winning ad.

It is exactly the same with your funnel and your sales process.

The ultimate goal in any business is to have a predictable income, and you can only do that by knowing your numbers.

  Why do so many people abandon their business and go back to a job? Predictability. With a wage you know how much is coming in – each and every week. But you can do that in your business as well – eventually.

Of course, circumstances change. What worked last year might not work this year. But if you are tracking your numbers you will see precisely where there is a problem – sometimes even down to a particular email.  Knowing there is a problem allows you to take action to fix it before any lasting damage is done, and improv the process towards predictability.

If your goal is to make $100K then how many customers is that – per year – per month – per week? Where are those customers going to come from? How much does it cost to acquire a customer? What is the average lifetime value of that customer?

Knowledge is power. Knowing your numbers puts you in control of your business. You won’t know when you start out, but going into each promotion with numbers in mind will allow you to build on each new funnel you try,  building on what works, discarding what doesn’t. Knowing where you are in terms of the goal you are trying to reach.

Knowing your numbers will set you free!