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Business Real Estate How Tracking Allowed Me to Focus on the Right Business Tasks
| How Tracking Allowed Me to Focus on the Right Business Tasks |
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| Written by Rob Minton |
| Saturday, 14 February 2009 08:54 |
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When I first got into selling real estate, I copied other agents and just hoped for the best. I figured I would do the same things they were doing, just better. I would return calls faster. I would do a better job negotiating. I would provide better client service. All this, I thought, would lead me to more sales. Maybe you've followed this same path in your business as well. What I finally realized is that it's extremely difficult to outwork your competition if you're doing the exact same things they are. Why? Because there's a lot of competition. One day I decided to change. I didn't want to work harder. I wanted to work smarter. We've all heard the saying a million times, but we simply don't follow it in our lives. I began to track everything I did. For example: I tracked the number of leads each advertisement generated. I tracked the number of referrals I received from happy clients. I tracked the number of appointments I set with the leads generated and referrals received. I tracked my conversion of those appointments into home sales. I tracked the number of sales that fell apart because of financing or inspection issues. As my business grew, I tracked these numbers for each of my agents, too. I was trained as public accountant, so tracking numbers was in my skill set! I learned many things from tracking the numbers. First of all, I learned that what you measure, improves. Simply by tracking these numbers in detail, I made progress. However, this tracking also let me quickly spot problems within the business. I was able to see when a drop-off in sales was about to occur. We've all been through the peaks and valleys in this business, haven't we? One great month, followed by a slow month. This happens because we stop generating new leads and referrals during our great month. We stop setting appointments with prospective new clients because we're too busy. "Signing new clients can wait because I've got to close this sale ..." Ah ... no, signing clients can't wait. I was able to see a drop in home sales coming because the number of leads generated would dip. This dip in leads always resulted in a drop in sales. This made me notice certain trends within the business. I'll share just one of these trends with you here. That trend was the percentage of leads that eventually became home sales. Say, on average, you generate 100 leads per month and you typically sell about four homes each month. This is a trend that you can leverage going forward, since you have a very good idea you'll convert 4 percent of your leads to sales. In order to increase your monthly home sales to 8, you would must increase the number of leads generated each month to 200. To shoot for a gigantic boost and sell 20 homes each month, you would need to bring in 500 new leads, each month. Putting this tracking information to use, I slowly but surely started increasing the leads I generated every month. These new leads wound up becoming home sales at the same rate previously established in my business. I then just continued this process until we were selling between 25 and 30 home on average each month. I finally learned that I really could work smarter within my business. You work smarter by tracking every single detail within the business and using the information you pile up to your advantage. In the above example, the number of monthly leads was the driver of sales. I leveraged this data big time in my business. So ... let me ask you two very important questions: 1. What do you track in your business? If you're not consistently tracking things, you're making an enormous mistake. 2. What percentage of leads become home sales for you? Do you know this number? About the Author: Rob Minton, who reinvented this real estate sales business to sell 269 homes to a limited number of clients, has written a very practical book on how real estate agents can sell more homes For a limited time, you can download this entire book for free by visiting Renegade Millionaire Strategies for Real Estate Agents Kindly provided by MoneyHunter.org You are welcome to use this article on your own website, if you include the link just before this text. |
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