Download template for Business Development Metrics
Welcome to Measure the Metrics that Matter™ for Business Development.
You can also refer to it as biz dev if you want. First, I just want to say that I’m so excited that you are choosing to dive into your business metrics. I’m proud of you for stepping into this. And I’m excited about how it’s going to support you and your business. ‘
Now, let’s talk about what business development is. It’s about strategic growth opportunities. And looking at the market of where your leads are coming from currently, and where you can maybe tap into more leads. This is often referred to as your sales funnel, your sales pipeline, or your sales process. And what we’re going to be looking at with business development metrics, is tracking the success of the journey from lead to client. And getting curious about where your leads are coming from. These are two very crucial points, eventually, they’ll tie into marketing. But right now, this is a great awareness to get from your business. And it can change various times even in a year in your business. So it’s a good thing to stay aware of and tapped into.
So now let’s look at your tracker, I have four metrics that I’ve provided for you to track in your sales process in your sales journey there. But we’re gonna focus first on two that you should start with. And then if you’re ready to dive into the other two, you can stack them and build them right now. Or you can stack those and build them in the future.
The first of four metrics that we want to track in our sales process and sales pipeline, sales funnel, is the number of opportunities, the number of leads. These are people that you’re talking to in DMS, these are people who have booked sales calls total those numbers up in this cell.
Then the number of sales calls. Here I would put the number of sales calls that you actually get on and talk to a person, I would not include in this metric, the number of ones that booked and then don’t show up or book and cancel and never get on. So we have the number of opportunities, the number of calls that you’re getting on.
And then the number of proposals. So whether you have a formal proposal tool, or you just send a follow up email, both of those work. And you do not want to include anybody who has sales call with but is not a good fit. So maybe this person told you on the call that they’re not a good fit. And you’re just sending them a nice note saying, you know, so great to have a call, thank you for letting me know, or maybe you’ll say, thanks for having that call with me, I’m not the right fit, but here’s a resource are here, somebody else that I think you would be a great fit for you or not including those that you are sending a note to, but you know that you’re not going to be working together, these are the individuals you had calls with, that you or maybe they go straight from an opportunity to a call for proposal. These are the people who you know, that you’re hoping to work with and they feel like a warm lead.
And then you want to track the number of new clients.
And so when we’re looking at this big picture, we’re looking at these four stages. But ultimately, what we’re trying to figure out is your conversion rate, which is your lead to your new client.
If you are only going to start with two metrics from this, please start with the number of opportunity. So those that you’re talking to in DMS, those that are you know, you’re talking to an emails maybe or those that have sales calls booked. And then I would do number of sales as your other one, totally see where you’re starting from and where you’re ending up from lead to client.
And then if you’d like add in the number of sales calls and the number of proposals if you want to dig in a bit more and figure out what that funnel looks like, what that journey looks like.
The next stage that we’re going to track is where your leads are coming from. Are they coming from social media? Okay, well, what platforms on social media? Are they coming from referrals? Okay, who is the referral? Because you might have different clients who are sending referrals your way. You might have a business colleague or collaborator or your best business bestie? Who is referring you? And so how many of those just come to you and where are they finding you? And then it’s good to know how many of those converted to a client. Once again, we are stacking here.
First, start with where are they coming from? Instagram, Instagram, LinkedIn, Instagram, you know, a talk I gave in a mastermind, whatever that is. And then if you want start diving into how many those are totaling them up, and then figuring how many of those leads became clients.
To hit pause for a second, and back up, if today you only start with entering three things. These are the three things I want you to enter:
- the number of opportunities,
- the number of new clients, and
- where your leads are coming from.
That’s it, and that will give you a lot of information right there. And then you can build upon that by adding in the number of sales calls and the number of proposals for the sales pipeline portion.
And then you can start adding in the actual numbers for your sources of where your leads are coming from. And that’ll help you tremendously.
Now, if you’re like, “hey, Amanda, can you give me a quick tip?” I don’t really know where my leads are coming from. At the very least when you are having clients fill out to have a sales call. Add a question where you’re saying like, what’s your name? What’s your email address? Where did you find me? So that is my tip for you.
I am so excited for you to develop, and to dive into learning more about your business metrics for business development.