Run the numbers yourself

What the leak costs you

Every month, one weak step in your sales process costs you a set number of customers. That number is knowable. Four figures and five minutes gets you there.

Most owners can feel that something is stuck. Almost none of them can say what it costs. And a problem with no price tag on it loses every argument to the problems that have one.

Why one step moves everything

Every buyer walks the same chain. Ad, inquiry, conversation, offer, sale, repeat, referral. You lose some at each one, and you always will.

  1. Ad
  2. Inquiry
  3. Conversation
  4. Offer
  5. Sale
  6. Repeat
  7. Referral

The number at the far end isn’t the sum of those steps. It’s the product.

Lift one step and everything downstream lifts with it. That is also why a little effort spread over all seven gets you almost nothing. Fix the weakest. The rest can wait.

The four numbers it runs on

  1. How many people hit this step in a month. Inquiries, calls booked, proposals sent, whichever step you are looking at.
  2. How many of them make it to the next one. Same month, same source.
  3. What an average customer is worth. Annual revenue over number of customers will do for now.
  4. What you think this step could do. Not a wish. A number you have hit before.

The arithmetic

The figures below are made up, so you can watch the maths work. Yours will be different, and yours are the only ones that count.

Fifty inquiries land in one month. Twenty turn into a conversation, so forty out of a hundred. From a better month you know that sixty out of a hundred happens when you answer the same day.

So you are ten conversations short. If one in four of your conversations closes, that is two and a half customers. At two thousand an order, that single step is taking five thousand a month off you. Sixty thousand a year.

Now the step has a price tag. And the price tag decides what you do first.

Run it again for every step. What you end up holding isn’t a forecast. It’s a ranking, and the ranking tells you where to start.

The worksheet

So you don’t have to do this on the back of an envelope. The Twelve Leaks Worksheet lists twelve places a business loses money, the question that tells you whether each one is yours, and two blank lines beside it for your number and what it costs you a month. A total at the bottom.

Get the worksheet One page, five minutes, made to print.

Where the arithmetic stops

It won’t tell you why the step is weak, and it won’t tell you whether your better number is within reach. Both of those come out of your own figures and a second pair of eyes, not out of a formula.

What it does settle is the question nobody had answered for you before. Whether any of this is worth your attention.

Questions about the arithmetic

Three numbers. How many people reach that step in a month, how many of them reach the next one, and what an average customer is worth to you. The gap between the rate you run today and a rate you have hit before tells you how many customers the step eats. Multiply that by customer value and you have the money.
Because steps multiply, they don’t add. The number that falls out the far end is the product of every rate along the way. Lift one and you lift everything behind it. That is also why spreading effort across all seven gets you nowhere.
Inquiries a month, conversations a month, closings a month, and your average order value. That’s the lot. If one of them doesn’t exist, you have already found something: a step nobody counts is a step nobody looks at.
There isn’t one, and anyone quoting you a benchmark is guessing. Industries, price points and buying cycles differ far too much. What tells you something is your own steps held against each other. The weakest one is the leak.
Work the top entry and let the rest wait. If you want to know whether the ranking holds up and what to do about the entry at the top, that is a thirty-minute conversation and it costs nothing.
No. All four numbers already sit in your books, your calendar, your inbox, your shop and your ad account. A CRM makes the counting easier. It won’t tell you which step is weakest.

Thirty minutes, no charge. Bring what you have.