LinkedIn Currency: The ROI Of Your LinkedIn Network

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Would you spend 15 minutes a day to add 35 more clients to your business a year?

Let me ask you another question.

If you don’t measure your results, how will you determine the ROI of your efforts?

It’s simple. You can’t.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. ~Peter Drucker

If you don’t know what’s working and what’s not, you could be wasting your time and money.

This is true of the time, effort and money that you are investing in your network building efforts on LinkedIn.

Or maybe you haven’t yet begun to invest in community building on LinkedIn and are wondering if it is worth the investment and what kind of results you could be getting from leveraging LinkedIn to its fullest.

After reading Lori Carr’s success story and calculating your own potential ROI from LinkedIn you can judge that for yourself.

LinkedIn Success Story: Lori Carr

“I’ve had 26 conversations with qualified leads, I have $1.45 million in my pipeline, I’ve had four in-person meetings and I’ve closed three deals with two more pending this month.” ~ Lori Carr

Lori’s story is a great example of what can happen when you implement the 3 C’s of LinkedIn Currency (Community, Collaboration and Commitment) and then measure the metrics that matter. Read the full story here.

Lori’s story is not unique. The success she has attained can and has been achieved by many others (across many different industries and markets) who have an effective LinkedIn strategy that they execute daily, measure the results from and fine-tune as necessary.

You too can achieve your own success with your networking efforts on LinkedIn, but first you need to understand how to calculate your potential results.

I have developed a LinkedIn ROI Calculator that will show you how many new clients you could have each month, the lifetime value of your customers/clients and your potential LinkedIn ROI in an actual dollar value.

LinkedIn Currency: Calculate Your LinkedIn ROI

LinkedIn New Client Calculator

LinkedIn Prospects Reached

In the first step we calculate how many prospects you can reach out to in a year if you follow a daily plan to connect with a certain number of prospects on a daily basis. The number can be whatever you choose.

For example, let’s say you are committed to reaching out to six new prospects on LinkedIn daily. You will multiply this by the number of working days (based on your work schedule) in the year (excluding weekends, vacations etc.). For the sake of our calculation, we have set this as 258.

When you multiple those two number together you get the number of prospects that you can reach out to each year.

Amazing how many people you can reach in a year with a daily plan!

LinkedIn Prospects Converted to Clients

No, not every prospect you reach out to will be interested in connecting with you, much less moving the conversation forward.

Based on our experience working with clients, we have found that 30% of prospects are open to moving the conversation forward (when approached properly). You may find this number to be slightly higher or lower depending on your industry and target market.

Continuing on with the calculation, you multiply this number (30%) with the number of prospects you reach out to each day (6) and the number of days you work in a week (5). This will give you an average number of weekly calls/meeting with new prospects. In this case it is about nine people each week.

Next you need to figure out what your percentage is for the number of prospects who are interested in the next step, typically receiving a proposal for your services. Again we’ve seen this number to typically be 30%.

The last number you need for the calculation is your closing ratio after submitting a proposal or having a sales conversation with a client. For many of our clients that number is 25% that are interested in moving forward with their solution.

To complete the calculation, you will multiply the number of prospects you reach out to every year (1548) with those who agree to speak with you (30%). You will then multiply this number by those who are interested in the next step (30%). Next, multiply your answer with those who become clients (25%). Finally, you will divide the total number by the number of months (12).

This will give you an approximation of how many new clients you could be generating a month on LinkedIn (about 3 new clients) with you daily efforts.

Keep in mind:

In order to achieve the best results, you need to figure out what your metrics are for your own business and put those into the calculator.
You can significantly improve your results on LinkedIn by incorporating the network building suggestions that I shared with you, in my earlier articles in the LinkedIn Currency series.

Click here to download your own FREE and editable LinkedIn ROI Calculator.

Lifetime Customer Value

What is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and what can you do with it?

Customer Lifetime Value is the single most important metric for understanding your customers.

CLV helps you make important business decisions about sales, marketing, product development, and customer support. For example:

Marketing: How much should I spend to acquire a customer?
Product: How can I offer products and services tailored for my best customers?
Customer Support: How much should I spend to service and retain a customer?
Sales: What types of customers should sales reps spend the most time on trying to acquire?

Do you know what the lifetime value of your customers/clients is?

To figure out your CLV, you will have incorporate from your business history the following:

What is the average value of an order/sale by a customer?
How many repeat purchases are they likely to make over the lifetime of dealing with you and/or your company?
What does it currently cost you to acquire a new customer?

Once you have these, begin by calculating what their Total Lifetime Value is. To do this multiply your Average Order Value with your Repeat Purchase Rate. For the purpose of this example we will say the average order is $2500 which we will multiple by a repeat purchase rate of five, to equal a Total Lifetime Value of $12,500.

Next you will subtract the Less Customer Acquisition Cost (which we will say is $100) from your Total Lifetime Value ($12,500) to calculate your Net Customer Lifetime Value, which would equal $12,400.

Click here to download your own FREE and editable LinkedIn ROI Calculator.

LinkedIn Financial ROI Calculator

So just what could your efforts on LinkedIn generate for you in terms of revenue?

Using the figures we have calculated in the above sections, we can now determine the LinkedIn ROI for this particular example.

First we start by multiplying the number of new monthly clients (2.9) by the number of months (12). This will give us the approximate number of yearly new clients from LinkedIn (34.8).

Next we will multiply the yearly new clients (34.8) with the average order/sale value ($2500). This will tell us our average annual revenue from new clients on LinkedIn ($87,075).

Finally, we can determine our approximate return from all of our efforts on LinkedIn by multiplying the average annual revenue from new clients ($87,075) with the repeat purchase rate (5). This gives us our LinkedIn ROI ($435,000).

Keep in mind when reviewing your results that this number will be different for everyone. There is no one size fits all. Your results will vary depending on factors such as your:

Goals
Ideal Clients
Industry
Budget
Time & Resources

In addition, this calculator only helps you to determine the measurable results and doesn’t factor in the immeasurable benefits that your networking and community building efforts can provide you with.

Click here to download your own FREE and editable LinkedIn ROI Calculator.

The 3 Cs of LinkedIn Currency Review

I started by looking at why a strong and valuable LinkedIn network is vital to your success in measurable and unmeasurable ways in LinkedIn Currency: Calculating The Value of Your Network.

I then examined in depth each of the 3 C’s of LinkedIn Currency:

In each of these three articles I show you that developing community, collaboration and commitment is vital to helping your prospects get to know, like, trust and decide they want to work with you.

I have concluded this series on LinkedIn Currency with instructions on how to calculate the actual dollar value your LinkedIn efforts could be generating. These numbers can help you to understand the areas in your LinkedIn efforts that are working well and those which need improvement.

I hope that you have found this series to be inspiring as well as helpful. Remember, you do not have to do the calculations by hand, take advantage of the free LinkedIn Currency ROI Calculator with all of the formulas already built into it.

All you have to do is add your numbers into the various fields and the calculator will do the rest. All fields are editable so you can ensure you are using the right numbers for your business. Click here to download your own FREE and editable LinkedIn ROI Calculator.