Selling is a numbers game you can actually run

Selling feels like luck until you start counting. Once you know roughly how many conversations it takes to land one customer, the whole thing turns into math you control instead of hope. If it takes five conversations to win one job, you don't need a lucky break — you need five conversations.

Do this

1. Track it simply: how many leads, how many real conversations, how many became paying customers.
2. Work out your ratio — say, 1 in 5 says yes. That number is your engine.
3. Now run it backwards: want four new jobs this month? Line up twenty conversations.
4. When a no comes, it isn't failure — it's one of the four on the way to your yes.

Your simple sales math

Count for one month. No fancy tools — your pipeline already has this:

Conversations had ............ 20 Turned into customers ........ 4 Your ratio ................... 1 in 5

Now it's just arithmetic: Want 4 jobs? → have 20 conversations. Want 8 jobs? → have 40.

Every 'no' is progress, not rejection — you're four conversations closer to the next yes. Improve the ratio later; for now, just feed the top.