When he first called me, he expressed concern over sustainability of his business. “Even though I’ve got great relationships with my clients, and they send me enough assignments to keep my business going, I have this nagging fear of losing them.

If I lost one or two at same time, I would really be in trouble. I really don’t like feeling this vulnerable. I don’t feel like I’m in control of my own business.”

“Okay, let’s say that happened,” I prompted him. “How long would it take you to get each new client to take their place?” “I’m not sure,” he stammered. “I don’t really keep track of those things. I’m scared to even think about it.”

“But that’s why we’re working together. So you can look at these aspects of your business. So you’ll be prepared for unexpected. I know it can be scary, so let’s look at it together.”

Paul and I continued to discuss this topic during our next four coaching calls. During that time, he plotted out his prospecting process, developed a system for tracking leads and prospects as they traveled through system, and created a spreadsheet that showed him status of each prospect at any given time.

With these figures, he was able to calculate how many leads he needed to generate in order to meet his sales goals. As a result, he now feels much more in control of his business and knows exactly what he must do in order to ensure his business’ survival.

None of us can predict when a client will move, lose money they budgeted for our services, take our function in-house or choose another vendor, but we can prepare ourselves to respond to these types of things so they have least amount of impact on viability of our business.

Do you know how many leads you have to generate in order to get a new client? 5? 10? 25? 50? Although industry guidelines may be available, what you really need to know is how many prospects YOU have to approach in order to get one new client.

Knowing this number tells you what results you need to be getting from your marketing efforts and knowing that tells you whether or not your marketing efforts are sufficient to reach your annual sales goals.

Let’s say you want to increase your sales by $18,000 over next 12 months, and you know that, on average, each client spends $1200/year with you. That means you have to bring on 15 new clients in next 12 months ($18,000 divided by $1,200).

Note that you’ll need to go into more detail in order to calculate your own numbers since in this scenario average client spends $1,200/year with you, but if you don’t bring him/her on until 6 months from now, you’ll only be making $600 in 12 month period we’re looking at. But let’s run with what we’ve got for purposes of this example.

So you have to bring on 15 additional clients. If you also know that you have to generate 10 qualified prospects for every person that becomes a client, then you’ll have to generate 150 additional prospects this year (15 clients * 10 qualified prospects).

On way there, we stopped to pick up some lunch to eat pool-side. Given choice of Wendy’s, Subway, or McDonald’s, I chose Subway because I knew I could get a relatively low-calorie, low-fat lunch there.

How did I know that? Because I’d seen their commercials starring Jared who had lost something like 150 pounds by eating an all-Subway-sandwich diet.

Now, I don’t need to lose 150 pounds, and I don’t plan to go on an all-Subway-sandwich diet. However, I also didn’t want to blow 648 calories I had burned on elliptical trainer that morning.

From moment we walked in, I knew I had made right decision. They had a poster-sized sign telling me how many calories and grams of fat each of their basic sandwiches have. That helped me make a decision about best thing to order.

Then, they reinforced my smart decision when they handed me my sandwich-drink combo. Plastered across sandwich wrapper, around my cup, and over my napkin were same calorie/fat breakdowns. I was pleased to see that I was only eating 320 calories for lunch (okay, truth be told, I splurged on chips too). But, nonetheless, Subway had done their job and done it well.

I’m talking about POSITIONING. They might be a lot of things, but thing they want you to know above all else is that they offer low-calorie fast food alternatives. Yes, they were fast. Yes, they were cheap. But point they have hammered home with their advertisements, in-store signage, and paper goods is that I can get a meal that won’t blow my diet.

Positioning is what sets you apart from your competitors. It’s what makes a prospect choose to work with you rather than someone else. It’s part of perception that you have most control over. But many business owners neglect to take charge of their position in marketplace and let customers position their business for them.

How many times have you lowered your prices to get a new client who balked at your original bid? How many times have you agreed to provide a certain service to a client that you never planned to provide, don’t enjoy doing, and isn’t very profitable? How many times have you taken on a job that requires most basic skills you possess and complained that you can’t get clients that want to use all of your talents?

These are all things that business owners experience when they let their prospects/clients position their business for them. If you find yourself doing this, time to change is NOW!