Speaker 1: Hey, it's Michael Zyperski from ConsultingSuccess.com, hope you're having a wonderful day. Let's talk about metrics, specific metrics that you can use to get more clients, win more business, and actually grow your consulting business. And here's what's important to keep in mind here. These metrics are not the only metrics, but I'm going to share with you four that we always recommend to our consultant coaching clients that we work with, because they're foundational and they really will help you to improve your marketing, strengthen your business development and marketing efforts, and grow your consulting firm. So here are the four that you want to think about. I've started actually just writing this out and I thought I'll just turn this on and kind of walk you through instead. So the first one is, is leads, right? The number of leads you have, you want to track the number of leads that are coming into your business. So this is either outbound, meaning that you've gone out to someone, done some kind of efforts to reach out to them, or inbound, people that have come into your environment, your website or business, that is a lead. You want to track the number of leads that you have, because this is the starting point for your pipeline. And so these are really important that you track, right? Essentially, what we're looking at here is, this is your pipeline, and you're going to be moving people through this pipeline, right, through this pipeline. And so there's four metrics that we want to track. The second one is conversations, right, I'll just abbreviate it here, but conversations. It's really important that you track the number of conversations that you have, because there's very few people out there who will just win business without having a conversation. In fact, the vast, vast majority of consultants have a conversation before winning business, like it just doesn't really happen any other way, right? Especially if you're talking about a large consulting engagement, there's always going to be a conversation. So the more conversations that you have, the more opportunities that are going to come your way to interact with real buyers, the more opportunities you have to actually make offers. So you want to be tracking the number of conversations that you have. Metric number three that you want to track is proposals, okay? And this is really important, because the more proposals that you put out, potentially, right, or should be, the more business that you're going to win, but sometimes that's not the case. And so I'm going to come back to that and explain why that's not the case in some situations. And then what you want to track is your win-loss. This is simply, did you win, how many projects did you win, how many projects did you lose that you, you know, put a proposal up for? Now, you want to track this on a regular basis, you don't need to be doing every single day, but I would suggest that you update this at least once a week, if not more often. But don't get obsessed about it, like every single day that you're worrying about it, but you do want to keep this updated, because this essentially is like the health of your business. And these four metrics tell, give you a lot of information, there's a lot of value in them if you know how to read them, and that's what I want to share with you here today is how to do that. So, your number of leads will tell you the health of your overall marketing efforts. If your marketing is working well for you, you're going to have a lot of leads coming into your business. Now, there's good quality leads, there's, you know, poor quality leads, so you want to ensure that you're getting the right kinds of leads of real, you know, decision-making type of buyers as leads. If you're not getting enough leads, then you want to spend more time improving your marketing efforts. And so, there's a lot of things that we can talk about there, but that's what you want to do. So, that number, right, number of leads will tell you, is your marketing doing well or is it not doing well right now, so that you can then work on fixing it. Conversations. Now, conversation is important because if you have a lot of leads coming, but you're not having a lot of conversations, it means that you're probably not doing a lot of follow-up. Right, follow-up is the key to bridge the gap between leads and conversation. So, the more follow-up that you do, the better process that you have to work people through and to ensure that you're actually setting up appointments, the more conversations that you'll have. So, if you're, if let's just say you had 10 leads, but you only had one conversation, we know there's something going on here, right? You're not doing a very good job of following up or moving people from leads to conversation, so we'd want to spend more time improving on this follow-up process or the process that you're using to actually get appointments. Now, the next is proposals, right? So, proposals tracking, this is really important because if let's say you're having 10 conversations, right, we'll process off, you're having 10 conversations, but you're only having, let's say two proposals, then we might say, okay, well, why is that happening? Is it because the people that you're talking with aren't really buyers? Is it because you don't have a good offer? Is it because there's some fear or some mindset issues going on, just that you're not feeling confident to make an offer? What's happening? And so then we know, okay, we need to work more on the conversation, how you transition the conversation to a proposal. Now, if let's just say you had 20 proposals out and you only had two wins, right, so we'll say two wins, then we know that the issue is most likely that you are either not doing a very good job writing proposals or you're not doing a good job communicating real value in the conversation you're having with the buyer. And so when you're giving the proposal, they're not really getting it, there's no connection between the two, you're introducing a whole bunch of new information, maybe you're trying to use your proposal to win business and that's not the purpose of it. But the other thing that often happens that I've seen is that many consultants will rush from lead to conversation to proposal, so they'll rush like very quickly from this conversation, the first conversation, to giving a proposal, maybe the buyer says, yeah, I'd love a proposal and the consultant says, oh, sure, I'll give that to you right away. But the buyer is not really committed to the process, they haven't actually had a really meaningful consulting sales conversation. So the buyer, the consultant feels, oh, I'm going to win more business, I'm doing well and getting all these proposals out, but if the numbers don't show that, if they don't support that, then we know that there's something going on with the proposal process or how you're approaching the conversation before the proposal or the follow-up that you're doing or your pricing or, right, we can start to see. So that's why being able to look at these numbers and understanding these four metrics really allows for going in and making adjustments. Instead of just saying, oh, yeah, there's problems with your business, we can then start to figure out where are the problems and then we can start to actually, not only once you've identified them, but then we can actually start to attack them. We can start to improve upon them, right, to fix them, to put in place new tactics or strategies or new approaches or work on the mindsets that might be holding you back from moving people through the pipeline. But if you're not currently using these metrics in your business to track the health of your marketing and your conversations and your proposals and how much business you're winning, then you're leaving a lot of money on the table and a lot of opportunity. So, highly recommend that you put this in place into your business. I think you'll be very glad that you did.