Direct Value

Now this is a really useful guide to how much you’re worth. By direct value, I mean how much money do you generate for your organization? I think the drawback here is obvious, namely how on earth do you know? If you’re very lucky, you’ll do a job that makes it clear. If you’re a sales executive and you bring in £100,000 worth of sales a year, that’s your answer. But if you’re not a sales executive, that doesn’t help a lot.

Very few people are in a position to give a simple, clear answer to the question of their direct value. Now, I have to tell you that in a lot of jobs this is going to be next to impossible to establish. But I’m including it in your overall assessment of your worth because if you can work it out, you’ll be doing yourself a big favor. In fact, you don’t necessarily need to put a final and complete figure on it. You need only demonstrate – if you can – that you generate comfortably more income than you cost the company.

If you actually are generating direct sales, you won’t need my help working out how much business you bring in to the organization. But here are some examples of the kind of income – or savings – you can demonstrate even if you work in accounts, PR, production or distribution.

• Orders placed as a result of a marketing, sales or PR campaign that you were responsible for.
• Increased productivity due to a new system you proposed.
• Savings generated because you devised a more streamlined procedure.

You see, you don’t only have to bring in sales to generate wealth. You can indirectly boost sales, you can increase effectiveness and productivity, or you can save money by improving equipment, systems or procedures.

There’s one more point to look out for here: any income or savings contribute to your value, but generating significant wealth that is down to you personally is best of all. Any sales person should create income. The critical factor is how much did you generate above the average expected in your job? As a marketing person, you’re already being paid to run income-generating campaigns. If you want to be paid more, you need to show that your campaigns generate more than other people’s.

Performance

Income generated is an important factor, but it’s not the only one (luckily, if you don’t work in a direct income-generating role). You must have objectives and targets in your job – have you met them, or even exceeded them? If you’re being paid a standard rate for the job but your performance is well above standard, you deserve more. Likewise if your standard is below par, I wouldn’t advise tempting fate by asking for a pay rise until you’ve improved your performance.

Objectives and targets are really the key to this. You need to assess how well you have met them in order to establish your value to the organization in terms of performance. And take into account whether your targets have been set higher or lower than average. It may be that if you have consistently performed well your boss will be setting you more stringent targets than other people. In this case, even if you haven’t exceeded them, you may still have outclassed everyone else.

Write down all the targets you have been set in your job, and mark a tick or a cross beside each according to whether you have met it (or are on target to do so) or not. This gives you a single, clear assessment of which parts of your job you are most successful in, and therefore where you provide your organization with the most (and least) value for money.

Team value
You’ve assessed your job from an objective point of view, you’ve assessed how much wealth you generate for the organization, and you’ve assessed your overall performance in terms of objectives and targets. But there is one more factor that is going to be important to your boss in deciding whether to give you a rise: your value as a member of the team.

What your boss wants is a team made up of members who work together to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Are you helping to achieve this? If you get on well with other people (inside and outside your department), are popular, positive and encourage others to perform well, you’re valuable. If you have your own team to lead, your boss will want to know that you are fair, well respected and can motivate your own team members. , If, on the other hand, you are negative, discouraging and invite conflict, and you are more fond of finding problems than solutions, your value to the organization isn’t going to be as high. Most of us are moderately good team players, but we generally have the odd weakness or two. What are yours? Are you impatient with younger members of the team? Do you get despondent about projects too easily? Are you prone to argue, or to sulk? Are you inclined to keep things to yourself instead of sharing them with the team? Make an honest assessment of yourself.