Your opportunity number is the smallest amount of business you’re willing to take on when you take on a new client. Here’s an example: if you have a ten-hour minimum per client engagement and your hourly rate is $300.00, then your opportunity number is $3,000.00.
Going after a business opportunity that is too small could actually cause your company to earn less. Since our limited resource is time, we can either spend our time going after small fish or big fish. If we want our business to grow, we need to let go of the small fish. In our example above, it’s not worth it to you to sign up a new client for less than $3,000.00.
Define your own opportunity number
The first action item is to set your opportunity number if you don’t already have one. Take a look at your average annual revenue per client for last year or the last twelve months. Continuing our example, let’s say it’s $10,000.00. You always want to be striving to increase your average annual revenue per client year after year, in most cases.
Your opportunity number and your revenue per client are related in an important way. If your opportunity number is too low, it can drag down your revenue per client average. That means it’s going in the wrong direction.
Evaluate your opportunity number
If your opportunity number is too high, you may be walking away from business that could be profitable after a period of time. It’s possible once you build trust after doing a small engagement that the client will come back for more. So it’s important to factor in the potential.
If you have a sales team, you may have a different opportunity number for each sales person and yourself. They may have more time to pursue a larger number of smaller deals. If you have lots of leads and less time, then you want to find a way to work on the largest opportunities by qualifying those leads, estimating the potential revenue, and comparing that to your opportunity number.
Once you implement your opportunity number, you might free up quite a bit of time. You’ll have more time to go after the larger opportunities while giving yourself permission to “throw the small fish back in the pond.”
Seizing the opportunity
There’s nothing wrong with taking your opportunity number a step further and proactively seeking power clients and deals that will net far more than your opportunity number. I have one client that doesn’t look at deals unless they have a $1 million potential. His opportunity number is $1 million.
Let us know if we can help you calculate yours.
