How many leads do you need to make the amount of money you want to have in a year? As simple as this question might be, I’ve found very few people actually have this number in the top of their minds.

There are two things to consider regarding this question. First, there are your expenses. You should make sure to have an accounting program advanced enough to help you analyze your costs and how they relate to your profitability.

Second, you need to know how well you are able to turn your prospects into sales (conversion rate). The more efficient you are at converting leads, the more income you will be able to make.

Let’s take a look at the process more closely:

First you need to settle on a sales goal for each month. For our purposes, let’s use $100,000 as your monthly sales goal.

Next, you need to calculate your current conversion rates. While this process can be used for any type of prospecting, for this example, let’s keep it simple and assume the only way you get leads and sales is through your website.

Now, let’s say that for every 1000 visitors, you “convert” 2.5 into sales leads. That’s a .25% conversion rate.

Here is a formula to calculate the number of visitors your would need to meet your monthly sales goals. Let’s assume every conversion will actually purchase from you in order to keep it easy.

(Desired Sales / Sale Price / Conversion Rate) X 100

The formula would look like this, if you want to achieve $100,000 a month in sales, you have a conversion rate of .25% and your average sales price is $20:

($100,000 / $20 / .25) X 100 = 2,000,000 visitors needed per month to achieve your sales goal.

Ouch! That’s a lot of visitors!

Luckily, there are a few adjustments you can make. You can increase the average sales price. Or, you can increase your visitors or the conversion rate.

For most people, the best place to start is conversion rate. If you test a bit, it’s actually quite easy to bring a .25% conversion rate into the 1.5% or even 2% range.

Let’s look at the difference that would make using the formula:

($100,000 / $20 / 2) X 100 = 250,000 visitors per month to achieve your sales goal.

What a difference!

By increasing your average sales price to $47, you can improve your results even more:

($100,000 / $47 / 2) X 100 = 106,383 visitors per month to achieve your sales goal.

If you are like most, you would rather make smart changes to improve your sales success rather than work harder. Hopefully these examples drive home the importance of planning the leads you will need to reach your sales goals, and testing the factors you can change to become more efficient.

Marty Dickinson has been an entrepreneur and owner of HereNextYear.com for fifteen years, and loves to share small business success techniques with other business owners. Claim your free white paper: “7 Ways Your Stone-Age Accounting System is Stealing Money From You Every Day … And, How to Get it Back This Year” and learn about an online accounting program that makes it easy to track your conversion rates.