Page 35 - 42 Rules for 24-Hour Success on LinkedIn: Practical ideas to help you quickly achieve your desired business success.

Well… this is where it gets gray. The problem is
that when it comes to measuring the ROI, returns
are not direct and immediate. Thus the big
question is… how do you properly measure a
return from your activities?
Let's try to attack it from a financial analyst's stand-
point. They are interested in annualized results (i.e.
results that occur across a 12-month period). For
example, assume in an average week, you connect
with ten new people in addition to following up with
20 existing contacts. Thus, by the end of the year,
you can directly attribute say, $30,000 of sales to
your networking. Mathematically, for all your effort,
your return looks like this
(($30,000–$50,000)/$50,000) = -40%. Clearly a
negative return of 40% is an outright failure, right?
As Lee Corso (from ESPN's College Gameday)
likes to say, "Not so fast, my friend." Why? Let's
take a closer look.
First, while you have directly connected and
followed up with people, you have undoubtedly
also connected with an untold amount of people in-
directly (friends of your connections, people who
saw your communications, but didn't communicate
directly with you, etc.). There is no way to calculate
what benefits these returned. At the very least, one
non-tangible benefit is establishing brand
awareness for yourself. A more tangible but
un-measurable benefit is that these "passive con-

Chapter 4: Consider the ROI 19