Sales Activity Calculator

• How much sales activity is needed to reach your goals?
• How much is a sales lead worth for you?
• What would an improvement in your sales skills mean for your income?
• How much commission can you realistically earn?

We have created the sales activity calculator below to make it easier for you to get answers to these questions.

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How our Sales Activity Calculator works

If you work in sales, you’ve probably wondered how much activity you really need to hit your income goals. How many prospects should you contact? How many meetings will that lead to? And, most importantly, how much money could you earn?

Our Sales Activity Calculator helps you answer those questions. It takes your commission, conversion rates and sales activity and turns them into an estimate of your potential earnings.

You can also work backwards from an income target, see how much your time is worth and explore what happens when you improve your conversion rates.

Here’s how it all works.

1. It starts with your sales funnel

Every salesperson has a sales funnel, whether they track it carefully or not. You contact potential customers, some agree to a meeting, a proportion ask for a quote and a few eventually buy.

The calculator uses three conversion figures to work out how many prospects you need to contact to win a sale.

Let’s use a simple example:

• You get 1 meeting for every 5 prospects you contact.
• You send 1 quote for every 2 meetings.
• You win 1 sale for every 4 quotes.

Multiply those figures together (5 × 2 × 4), and you get 40.

In other words, you need to contact an average of 40 prospects to make one sale.

Now, let’s say you contact 20 new prospects a day and work 20 days a month.

That’s 400 prospects, which should generate approximately 80 meetings, 40 quotes and 10 sales.

Of course, not every month will work out exactly like that. But if your conversion rates are reasonably consistent, it gives you a useful starting point for planning your activity.

2. From sales activity to actual earnings

Once you know how many sales you can expect, the next step is working out what you’ll earn from them.

You can enter a fixed commission per sale or a percentage of the sale value.

For example, if you’re selling a product worth £10,000 and receiving 10% commission, you earn £1,000 per sale.

Using our previous example of 10 sales a month, that gives you:

10 sales × £1,000 commission = £10,000 per month.

Maintain that performance for a full year, and you’re looking at £120,000 in annual commission.

If you also receive fixed pay, such as a monthly retainer, salary or hourly payment, the calculator includes that too. For example, £10 an hour for 20 hours a week works out at approximately £867 a month.

You can also enter business expenses, such as travel, phone bills and software subscriptions, to see what you’re left with after costs.

All earnings are shown before tax and National Insurance.

3. What if you have a specific income target?

Perhaps you already know how much you want to earn. Rather than estimating your income from your activity, you can turn the calculation around and find out what you’ll need to do to reach your target.

Say your goal is £8,000 a month, and you earn £1,000 commission on each sale.

You’ll need to close 8 sales.

Using the same conversion rates as before, that means:

• 8 sales require 32 quotes.
• 32 quotes require 64 meetings.
• 64 meetings require 320 prospects.

Spread that over 20 working days, and you need to contact 16 new prospects a day.

That’s a much more useful target than simply telling yourself you want to earn £8,000.

If you’re receiving a fixed monthly retainer, the calculator takes that into account. With £2,000 in fixed pay, for example, you’d only need another £6,000 in commission to reach your £8,000 target.

When calculating the activity needed to reach a goal, the calculator rounds up to whole numbers. After all, you can’t close 7.2 sales!

4. How much is a prospect actually worth?

Here’s something that’s easy to overlook in sales.

Not every prospect becomes a customer, but that doesn’t mean the time you spend contacting them is wasted.

Think back to our example. You need to contact 40 prospects to earn £1,000 in commission.

That means every new prospect is worth an average of £25 in potential commission, even though most won’t buy anything.

The same principle applies to the different stages of your sales funnel:

• A new prospect: £25
• A meeting: £125
• A quote: £250
• A completed sale: £1,000

These are average values, not guaranteed earnings from individual activities.

But they’re useful figures to understand. They show how the work you put in at each stage contributes towards your eventual earnings.

They also help put rejection into perspective. Hearing “no” is part of the process, and a predictable number of those rejections are already built into your expected earnings.

5. Recurring commission can make a big difference

Some sales opportunities pay a one-off commission. Others pay recurring commission for as long as the customer remains active, or for a fixed period.

This can make a substantial difference to your long-term earnings.

Let’s say you earn £100 a month for each customer you bring in, and you consistently sign up 10 new customers every month.

That’s an additional £1,000 in monthly commission for every month’s new sales.

If commission is paid for a fixed 12 months, your earnings would build like this:

In month one, you’d earn £1,000. In month two, £2,000. In month three, £3,000, and so on.

By month 12, you’d be earning £12,000 a month.

Your total commission during that first year would be £78,000. That’s because you start with no customers and gradually build your portfolio.

If commission continues for as long as customers stay, the calculation works a little differently.

Suppose customers remain active for an average of 12 months. Some will leave sooner, while others might stay for years.

The calculator uses an estimated monthly customer loss rate of 1 in 12.

With those assumptions, you’d be earning approximately £7,800 a month by the end of your first year, with around £58,500 earned over those 12 months.

Your income would continue growing, although more slowly as existing customers leave and new ones come on board. By month 27, you’d be earning around 90% of the long-term £12,000 monthly level.

To make this easier to understand, the calculator includes a chart showing how recurring commission builds over two years. You can hover over, tap or slide along the chart to see your estimated earnings for individual months.

For recurring commission, the main earnings figure shows what you could be earning in month 12. If you’re working towards a specific income target, the calculator works out the activity needed to reach it by that point.

6. What about the time it takes to make your first sale?

Not every sales opportunity produces commission immediately.

You might need several weeks to build a pipeline, arrange meetings, prepare proposals and close your first deal.

The calculator lets you enter how long you expect that process to take, in days, weeks or months.

For example, if you expect your first sale after two weeks, your first month’s commission will be roughly half what you’d normally earn. Subsequent months are calculated at your full expected rate.

But what if you’re selling something with a much longer sales cycle?

Let’s say it takes three months before your first sales start coming through.

Using our £10,000 monthly commission example, you’d earn no commission during the first three months. You’d then start earning an estimated £10,000 a month from month four.

Over months 4 to 15, that would add up to £120,000.

The calculator makes this distinction clear. It’s your first 12 months of selling income, rather than your first 12 months of working on the opportunity.

For one-off commission, the calculator simply shows when your expected monthly earnings begin.

For recurring commission, the chart shifts to reflect the delay, and the main figure shows your expected monthly income one year after your first sale.

Any fixed pay is included separately, so you can still see what you might earn while waiting for your first commission.

7. How much time will all this take?

Earning £10,000 a month sounds attractive. But what if it requires 12 hours of work every day?

That’s why we’ve included the option to calculate how much time your sales activity is likely to take.

You enter two figures:

• The average time spent on a prospect who doesn’t become a customer.
• The total time spent on a prospect who eventually buys, from first contact through to closing the sale.

Let’s say you spend an average of 20 minutes on an unsuccessful prospect and four hours on someone who becomes a customer.

In our example, you contact 400 prospects and close 10 sales.

That leaves 390 prospects who don’t buy.

Those 390 prospects account for 130 hours of work, while your 10 successful customers account for another 40 hours.

That’s 170 hours of selling activity per month.

Over 20 working days, you’re looking at 8.5 hours a day.

And with £10,000 in monthly commission, your effective earnings work out at approximately £59 per hour.

There’s another interesting figure here.

Each completed sale requires an average of 17 hours of work when you include the time spent on unsuccessful prospects. Only four of those hours are spent on the customer who actually buys.

The remaining 13 hours go towards the prospects who don’t.

It’s a useful reminder that winning a sale involves considerably more work than just closing the deal.

8. Is your sales target realistic?

Knowing how many hours you need is one thing. Finding those hours in your working day is another.

The calculator compares your estimated workload with the number of hours you have available.

It then gives your plan one of four ratings:

Comfortable: Your planned activity uses no more than 75% of your available time.

Realistic: You can fit the activity into your available working hours.

Ambitious: Your plan requires up to 25% more time than you have available.

Not realistic: Your planned workload exceeds your available time by more than 25%.

For example, if you have seven hours a day available for selling, but your plan requires 8.5 hours, it would be rated as ambitious.

The calculator also shows what you could realistically achieve within your available hours.

In this example, seven hours a day would allow you to contact approximately 16 new prospects, taking into account the time spent on both successful and unsuccessful leads.

At the same conversion rates, that would generate around £8,000 a month in commission.

You might decide to work longer hours, improve your sales process or simply adjust your income expectations.

The important thing is that you can make that decision based on numbers rather than guesswork.

9. What happens if you improve your conversion rates?

One of the most interesting things you can explore with the calculator is how even a relatively small improvement in your sales performance can affect your earnings.

Let’s return to our original example.

You contact 400 prospects a month, and it takes 40 prospects to close a sale. That produces 10 sales and £10,000 in monthly commission.

Now imagine you become better at closing deals.

Instead of winning one sale for every four quotes, you start winning one for every three.

Nothing else changes. You’re still contacting the same number of prospects and arranging the same number of meetings.

But now you only need 30 prospects to win a sale instead of 40.

Your 400 monthly prospects would produce approximately 13.3 sales instead of 10.

At £1,000 commission per sale, that’s £13,333 a month.

You’re earning an additional £3,333 each month, or around £40,000 more a year, without contacting a single extra prospect.

Of course, improving conversion rates isn’t always easy. But the calculator helps you see just how valuable those improvements can be.

You can experiment with different stages of your sales funnel to see where a change would make the biggest difference.

10. A few things to keep in mind

The calculator is designed to help you plan and understand your earning potential. It isn’t intended to predict your income with absolute accuracy.

Sales figures are averages. Some months will be better than others. You might close several deals in one week and then go two weeks without a sale.

Conversion rates vary. Selling a relatively inexpensive product to small businesses is very different from selling complex software to large organisations. Use your own sales history where possible, or ask the company you’re representing for typical conversion figures.

Tax isn’t included. The figures don’t account for income tax, National Insurance or pension contributions.

Ongoing account management isn’t included in your working hours. If you’re earning recurring commission, you may also need to spend time supporting existing customers.

The more realistic your assumptions, the more useful the results will be.

11. What happens to the information you enter?

The calculator runs in your browser.

Once you’ve completed a calculation, the figures you’ve entered may be stored anonymously. This helps us improve the calculator and, over time, develop useful sales benchmarks, such as typical conversion rates across different industries.

No personally identifying information, such as your name, email address or IP address, is stored alongside your calculation.

Give it a try

Whether you’re considering a new commission-based sales opportunity, setting yourself an income target or looking for ways to improve your existing performance, the calculator gives you a practical way to explore the numbers.

Try a few different scenarios. Change your commission, conversion rates or daily activity and see what happens.

You might be surprised by how much difference a small change can make.