You’ve set your target for 2023, what do you need to do to achieve it?

We’re coming to the end of the year, reviewing how we’ve done and thinking ahead to the business we want to do next year.  You’ll be thinking about the turnover you want to achieve and what that means in terms of the number of bookings you need to do.  So far, so good, that’s nice and easy.  But how many prospects will you need, how many enquiries?  What does it break down to?

When I started in the world of speaking, I was set a target (remember this is back in 1998 when the pound was worth something), of 600K for the year (in fact if I didn’t get to 455K in 9 months, I would be out as it meant I wouldn’t be getting to the annual target).  For a bureau agent, that’s a modest target.  For many speakers that would be a target they would be happy to achieve today.  What I needed to do was work out exactly what that meant on a week by week, day by day basis.  I needed to break it down into manageable pieces so that I didn’t feel daunted by it. 

How did I do that?  I asked the director for two pieces of information:

• The average booking value
• Conversion rate from enquiry to booking (for new agents)

With that I could work backwards so that I knew how many enquiries I had to get per day to achieve my booking target. 

In case you were wondering, I reached my target, the following year I broke all the sales records, a year after that I was headhunted by a competitor bureau where I broke records there too.  How? Simply by focusing on what I could be doing every single day to move me towards my goals. 

Use the attached spreadsheet, put in our numbers and off you go.  And if you don’t know how to go about finding prospects book yourself onto my Practical Prospecting programme, I’ll help you out: https://www.mariafranzoni.me/practical-prospecting-one-to-one