more amazing is that very few businesses even know how many leads they get a week, let alone from each and every marketing campaign. It's great to get a lot of leads, but then you've got to remember your...

Conversion Rate

2) Conversion Rate: The percentage of people who did buy as opposed to those who could have bought. For example, if you had 10 people walk through your store today and you sold to only 3 of them, you'd have a conversion rate of 3 out of 10, or 30 percent. This has got to be a literal gold mine in almost every business I walk into. You've already got them interested; now you've just got to get them over the line. When I ask average business owners about their conversion rate, they take a stab in the dark and tell me that it's between 60 and 70 percent. Just for fun, I get them to measure it, and a couple of weeks later we find that it's more like 20 or 30 percent. Imagine how you'd feel.

You should feel great, in fact you should be excited, because if you're getting by at 20 or 30 percent, imagine how your business would run at 60 or 70 percent. Remember, double your conversion rate and you've just doubled your turnover.

Your Number of Customers

Number of Customers: This is the number of different customers you deal with. You work it out by multiplying the total number of leads by the conversion rate. I'll run through an example in just a moment. Remember, it's not about getting more customers. You can't change that number. It's about getting more leads and then improving your conversion rate. These are the variables that lead to the result.

Your Number of Transactions

3) Number of Transactions: Another of the five main variables. Some of your customers will buy from you weekly, others monthly, others on the odd occasion, and others just once in a lifetime. What you want to know now is the average. Not your best and not your worst, but the average number of times one of your customers buys from you in a year. Once again, here's another gold mine; most businesspeople never collect a database of their past customers, let alone write to them, or call them and ask them to come back. 28