You are where you are. 

You stop. You ask yourself: “Where am I Year-to-date? Am I where I want to be?”

If the answer is YES, you do a happy dance and you carry on. 

If the answer is NO, you drown your sorrows with a pity party. You tell yourself that nothing you’re doing is working. So you come back to your desk and throw out everything you’ve been doing; you decide you need new clients; you decide you need a new niche; you start doing research and you dive into the dark hole of internet surfing. And, absolutely nothing gets done. You get paralyzed. The gap between your results YTD and your goal gets bigger and bigger.

But wait, there’s another way to look at this. 

Whether your answer is YES or NO, switch your question to: “Am I where I could be?”

If your answer is YES, examine what you can tweak to move your performance to an even higher level. 

If your answer is NO, examine what you’re doing right that you need to continue doing, and what you can do differently to get different results. 

Whether your answer is YES or NO, making a 2% adjustment can create more than $200K in additional billings. Making the smallest adjustments to how you do what you do can generate a huge increase in your results. 

One way to apply the 2% rule is to push harder to increase the number of Marketing Presentations you make every day, every week, every year. Pushing harder to increase the number of Marketing Presentations can dramatically increase your placement possibilities.

Examine each of the following:

• • If you’re currently making 20 Marketing Presentations/week, a 2% increase adds a mere 21 additional Marketing Presentations for an annual count for a total of 1061 Marketing Presentations/year. 

• If you’re currently making 40 Recruiting Presentations/week, you’re making 2,080 Recruiting Presentations/year. If you start adding a marketing and needs-based question into 2% of your Recruiting Presentations, you can add an additional 42 Marketing Presentations to your total, giving yourself an annual count of 1,103 Marketing Presentations/year. 

• If you make 1,103 Marketing Presentations/year and your standard MP:JO (Marketing Presentation to Job Order) ratio is 10:1, you’ve got 110 Job Orders to work with throughout the year. 

• If, on those 110 Job Orders, you apply the 2% rule by asking questions to quantify urgency and set tight expectations, you can convert some of those contingency Job Orders to engagement-based Job Orders. You’ll be able to lower your JO:PL (Job Order to Placement) ratio from 10:1 to 8:1. 

• So, of those 110 Job Orders, 13.75 of them will close. And, if your average placement is $20K, you’re looking at revenue of $275K. 

Your math will be different because you’ll have different MP:JO (Marketing Presentation to Job Order) ratios, and JO:PL (Job Orders to Placement) ratios. But, you can generate results that will be similarly impressive because they’re exponential. 

Where can you add a 2% multiplier to create exponentially higher results on your desk? 

• • Is it in the number of connects you attempt?

• Is it in the number of ways you attempt to connect to your target? 

• Is it in the number of ways you ask to understand the company’s challenges in making money or saving money?

• Is it in the number of ways you ask to understand the candidates’ professional hopes and dreams?

• Is it in the number of needs you attempt to uncover in a single conversation (Marketing Presentations and Recruit Presentations)?

• Is it in the level of compelling detail with which you quantify urgency?

• Is it in the specificity with which you confirm timeframes and expectations?

• Is it the clarity with which you get agreement on decision criteria?

• Is it the strength of the business case you build for your service fees?

Stop now to examine how you’re doing what you’re doing. Where can 2% add thousands of dollars to your bottom line?