Lewis Point For Sales Development

I'm no economics expert. Then again, neither are the world's economists. Given their inability to provide a meaningful forecast that glances on anything near where an actual reading settles.

The Lewis Point of Economic Development is the moment that a nation's rural labour surplus is taken up by urban jobs.

Whilst having deeper insights, this headline pivotal economic switch in part helps determine whether and when a developing economy becomes developed.

This flip struck me when seeing it referenced with China's current state. In that there appears no more labour resource to fill the required jobs to fuel 'growth'. Thanks to their declining demography and engulfing middle-income trap.

For we in Sales can experience a similar stalling.

Particularly around the volume of prospect growth.

One of the areas when running a BI salesteam, through my own sales knowledge management SaaS, and then being commissioned for consultancy, which recur for me even today within video sales call guidance is with what I now term New Product Rescue.

Ironically yet paradoxically unsurprising, the exalted wares are often freshly hatched and internally primed for greatness, yet endure frustrating baby steps of stuttering sales.

Determining how to best pitch them inevitably must cover to whom and when.

There's no traction from talking up a wonder-product for whom the audience is neither receptive nor appreciative of said wonders.

Can we avoid such wasted time and effort?

I sense one equivalent of the Lewis Point conceptually is when we've enjoyed the patronage of all the innovators in our target market, and the imitators are now encouraged to contact us.

Operationally, it may well be when any surplus of leads can be productively handled and sated by our selling resource without any disappearing through cracks in the pavement.

This point may have a mathematical gauge too.

When the ratio of open leads to deals closed gets as near to 1:1 as you can.

Not always the best target, given how similar this can feel to anywhere in the universe actually reaching absolute zero. See this definition;

Absolute zero, technically known as zero kelvins, equals −273.15 degrees Celsius, or -459.67 Fahrenheit, and marks the spot on the thermometer where a system reaches its lowest possible energy, or thermal motion. There's a catch, though: absolute zero is impossible to reach.

Still, if winning 1-in-1 is also "impossible to reach", improving to the point you get as near to it as you can - say getting sub-1-in-2 as a starter aim - is a worthy KPI.