My goal? Sign sponsors for 3 Willamette Valley American Marketing Association (WVAMA) events by June, 2011.

Sounds easy, right? 3 Sponsors — that’s like, what, 10 meetings?

Probably not.

If you want to get one customer, you must get X leads, convert them to Y prospects, go to Z meetings, and so on, where Z is less than Y is less than X.

RooshV wrote this concept about dating, but I’ve applied it to business, networking, sales, etc. — basically any medium where you’re converting potential customers to confirmed customers, the idea holds true. This concept is a method I use regularly to plan back from a specific SMART end goal to specific, weekly goals I can focus on.

A certain number of leads equals one customer, and that number will always be greater than one, sometimes significantly so. Tell me how many fresh prospects are in your phone and where your game is at and I’ll tell you how many customers you’ll get in the next month.

I have a clear understanding of the goal I’m working towards — 3 sponsors in 4 months — but I’m curious about how many leads I’ll need to approach to reach that goal.

This is the customer pipeline: Lead → Prospect → Meeting → Sponsor. As a customer moves through the pipeline, they move into the next segment of the pipeline at the segment conversion rate:

• Lead → Prospect: 1/3
• Prospect → Meeting: 2/5
• Meeting → Sponsor: 1/3

Note: I’m making assumptions about the conversion rate between lead / prospect / meeting / sponsor. If you think these are off, that’s cool. I’ll have more clarity on these figures once I start collecting data

To figure out the total conversion rate from lead to sponsor, we multiply the individual conversion rates together:

(1/3) * (2/5 )* (1/3) = 2/45.

For ever 45 leads I contact I’ll sign 2 sponsors.

To reach my goal of 3 sponsors, I’ll need to talk to (2/45)*X = 3 or 68 (67.5) leads.

Again, the big caveat — this calculation is based on a few assumptions:

1. Conversion Points — The only conversion points in this pipeline are between lead, prospect, meeting, and sponsor. There could be more conversion points, each with their own challenges.
2. Conversion Rates — The conversion rates are radical assumptions. As I start moving customers through the pipeline, I’ll have real figures I can use for this calculation. If the total conversion rate is lower than assumed (ex. 1/100 leads convert to sponsors), I’ll need to approach 300 leads to close 3 sponsor. If the conversion rate is higher than assumed (ex. 1/10 leads convert to sponsors), I’ll need to approach 30 leads to close 3 sponsor.

If I need to approach 68 leads to close 3 sponsors in the next 4 months, I’ll need to approach 17 leads/month or 4.25 leads/week. Great — that’s a really specific goal. The next step is to get in touch with our leads and start the sales process of learning how the WVAMA can help support and add value to their business.

p.s., Interested in advertising to marketers in Eugene, Oregon? Email me at kai@kaisdavis.com and let’s meet for coffee and chat.

Employers hire people to increase revenue or decrease cost.

That’s the only reason I can think of hiring someone at the company.

Either the new hire makes the company more money (good!) or saves the company money (good!).

If you fall outside of that, you’re costing the company money (bad!).

For everything you list on your resumé, how can you position it to demonstrate that you made your last employers more money or saved them money?

By extension, you’re demonstrating that you can bring this experience increasing revenue or decreasing cost to the new employer.

All that separates mediocracy from success is intention.

• Am I willing to get better?
• Am I willing to work on this?
• Am I willing to invest the time to work on this and get better?

Okay, great: How much time are you willing to invest?

I argue that it’s less than you think. I think you can get incredible results off of one hour.

One hour a day. One hour a week. One hour a month.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is setting that time aside to intentionally improve at a skill.

My intention for the year is to be physically fit and healthy. I spend an hour working out each day. I go to the gym. I do yoga. I go on bike rides. I use those 60 minutes intentionally — focusing on the goal — to improve myself.

Once Summer rolls around, I’m going to focus on learning Spanish to the point where I can have a dinner conversation in Spanish.

I’ll spend 1 hour — 60 minutes — on this every day. Maybe that hour takes the form of vocabulary drills. Maybe I’m reading a children’s book in spanish. Maybe I’m trying to pick up women in spanish.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is that intention. What matters is the line in the sand that says ‘I am using this time intentionally to work on this goal’ and seeing what happens.

The biggest change I’ve made to my busines life this year is taking 5 minutes each night and confirming tomorrow’s meetings.

It doesn’t take long — and it doesn’t take a long email. I like something short and simple:

Hey! Just confirming coffee tomorrow at TIME at PLACE. Let me know if you need to reschedule. Stay awesome!

Have a great night.

I’d like to share this which I recently c ame across (thanks zach and jessilyn)

10 Ways of Loving
Some guidelines for loving:
1. Tell them about their brilliance. They likely can’t see it and they don’t know its immensity, but you can see it, and you can illuminate it for them.
2. Be authentic, and give others the gift of the real you and a real relationship. Ask your real questions. Share your real beliefs. Go for your real dreams. Tell your truth.
3. Don’t confuse “authenticity” with sharing every complaint, resentment,or petty reaction in the name of “being yourself.” Meditate, write, or do yoga to work through anxiety, resentment, and stress on your own so you don’t hand off those negative moods to everyone around you. Sure, share sadness, honest dilemmas, and fears, but be mindful: don’t pollute.
4. Listen, listen, listen. Don’t listen to determine if you agree or disagree. Listen to get to know what is true for the person in front of you. Get to know an inner landscape that is different from your own, and enjoy the journey. Remember that if, in any conversation, nothing piqued your curiosity and nothing surprised you, you weren’t really listening.
5. Don’t waste your time or energy thinking about how they need to be different. Really. Chuck that whole thing. Their habits are their habits. Their personalities are their personalities. Let them be, and work on what you want to change about you—not what you think would be good to change about them.
6. Remember that you don’t have to understand their choices to respect or accept them.
7. Don’t conflate accepting with being a doormat or betraying yourself. Let them be who they are, entirely. Then, you decide what you need, in light of who they are. Do you need to make a direct request that they change their behavior in some way? Do you need to take care of yourself better? Do you need to set a boundary or to change the relationship? Take care of yourself well, without holding anyone else in contempt.
8. Give of yourself, but never sacrifice or compromise yourself. Stop if resentment is building and retool. Don’t do the martyr thing. It helps no one and nothing.
9. Remember that everyone you encounter was created by divine intelligence and has an important role to play in the universe. Treat them as such.
10. If you want to keep growing emotionally and spiritually for the rest of your life, accept this as your mantra and try to live as if it were true: Everything that I experience from another human being is either love, or a call for love.

Thanks for reading. Love you.

If we’ve had coffee lately, you probably noticed the notebook I carry around. It’s an Extra Large Soft Cover Plain Moleskin Notebook and I bring it everywhere with me.

It’s my implementation of Tim Ferriss’s article ’How to Take Notes Like an Alpha-Geek’.

When I have an idea, meeting, phone call, or task, I write it down in my notebook.

When I meet a friend for coffee, I’ll write down notes on the meeting, any follow-up, and any ideas for future projects.

I’ve given up trying to remember things. I hate that feeling of having a wonderful conversation, driving home, and knowing I’ve forgotten most of the things we’ve discussed.

When we talk about something interesting, I write it down.

When they mention someone I should meet, I write it down.

If I promise that I’ll send them a link, I write it down.

I write everything down so I don’t have to struggle to remember it later.

Next Steps

1. Go into your closet and find a small notebook and a pen. Don’t buy a new notebook (unless you really want to)
2. Carry it with you for a week.
3. When you think of something that you want to remember, write it down.
4. Send me an email and let me know how it’s working for you.

p.s., that red blinder clip on my notebook? I use it to hold business cards. I always used to lose my business cards or never have a place to put their business cards. Since I always have my notebook with me, I always have a place for business cards.

I love Tattly’s temporary tattoos.

When I came back from Denver I had 148 angry and important email messages to deal with and a head cold from the devil.

I didn’t want to deal with any of that, but every time I loaded gmail to email my mom and ask for soup, the stack of messages — 167 by now — was staring me in the face.

I realized three important things:

1. I was in no mental state to respond to Important and Angry Emails from Business People.
2. Seeing my Inbox flash up — even for just 5 seconds — made me stomach leap up into my fingers.
3. I needed my mom to bring me soup.

So I set up a blank label in gmail. A label designed to never, ever, ever have any email put in it.

That label became my Fortress of Solitude. I could fly up there — past the Article Circle — and forget the worries and woe of America. If #Blank became my Fortress of Solitude, I became Asshole Superman, not giving a crap about the citizens of Metropolis.

At the end, I was left with a URL: https://mail.google.com/mail/#label/blank

But that URL was a pain to remember, so I set up a custom search in [Alfred][1] for the phrase ‘Gmail’.

Now when I want to load gmail, I launch Alfed (Splat + Space), type GMAIL, hit Enter, and land in my desolate Arctic home base.

Any time I needed to send an email, I pulled up https://mail.google.com/mail/#label/blank and could send emails without seeing a full inbox. Little by little, I could come back to my full inbox and process it down, but in the meantime I had someone safe and quiet I could go to send emails.

Why Is This Great?

This is great if you need to idle in Gmail for a bit, but don’t have the time or bandwidth to Inbox 0 your inbox.

Key Takeaways

1. Set up a blank label in Gmail — You can use #blank, #love, #icecream, or really flip the boat and set up a label #KaiDavisIsSexy.
2. Set up a quick and easy way to access this blank label.
   1. You can bookmark it
   2. You can set it up as a custom search using Alfred, QuickSilver, or LaunchBar
3. Enjoy a vacation from the Inbox.
4. Go watch Merlin Mann’s ‘Inbox 0’ video from Google so you understand how to build an email system that can survive a 4-day vacation in Denver.

This is an ongoing, changing list of questions I ask at dinner parties. I’m tired of the same-old questions. Here are the new ones I enjoy.

1. What did you learn this week?
2. (When I find out what they do) What are the Two Things about {what you do}? (via Bobulate)
3. What are your passionate about?
4. What keeps you up at night?

In his famous Lectures on Physics, Richard Feynman presented this interesting speculation:

“If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.”

Fascinated by Feynman’s question, Seed put a similar one to a number of leading thinkers: “Imagine—much as Feynman asked his audience—that in a mission to change everyone’s thinking about the world, you can take only one lesson from your field as a guide. In a single statement, what would it be?”

(via ★ Starting Over — Seed Magazine)

The single statement for me life is “Love — Unendingly, Uncomprimisingly, Undenyingly, Unconditionally”

Why Love? Because if I don’t feel love for the life I have, I need to make adjustments — internal or external — in order to have a life that I can love. This is the statement I use to set the tone of each morning. It’s the intention I carry when I disappear into sleep. It’s what I use to center myself.