Post written by Rob Minton
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When I first got into real estate sales, I copied other agents and simply hoped for the best. I figured that I would do the same things they were doing, but better. I would return calls faster. I would do a better job negotiating. I would give better client service. All of this, I thought, would lead me to more home sales. Maybe you've followed this same path in your business, too.
What I finally realized is that it is very hard to outwork your competition, if your doing the exact same things they are. Why? Because we have 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 in my business. For example:
- I tracked the number of leads I generated from each advertisement.
- 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 how many of those appointments turned into home sales.
- I tracked the number of home sales that fell apart because of financing or inspection issues.
- As my business grew, I tracked these numbers for each of my agents, too.
Remember, I was trained as an accountant, so tracking numbers was in my skill set! I learned many things from tracking these numbers. First of all, I learned that what you measure, improves. Simply by tracking these numbers, I made progress in my business.
However, this tracking allowed me to quickly spot problems within my business. I was able to see when a drop off in home 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 were too busy. "Signing new clients can wait because I've got to close this sale…" A no, signing clients can't wait…
I could see the drop in home sales coming because the number of leads generated through a period of time dipped. This drop in leads resulted in a drop in sales.
This led me to see certain trends within my business. I'll share just one of these trends with you today. The trend was the % of leads that ultimately turned into home sales. Let's say that on average you generate 100 leads a month and you typically sell around 4 homes each month. This a trend that you can leverage going forward because you have a very good idea that you'll convert 4% of your leads into sales.
So if you want to increase your monthly home sales to 8, you would have to increase the number of leads you generated each month to 200. Or if you wanted to shoot for a massive transformation and sell 20 homes a month, you would need to generate 500 new leads, each and every month.
Using this information from my tracking, I slowly but surely began increasing the number of leads I generated each month. These new leads ultimately turned into home sales at the same percentages previously established in my business. I simply continued this process until we were averaging between 25 and 30 home sales each month.
I finally learned that you could actually work smarter within your business. You work smarter by tracking every single detail within your business and using the information you accumulate to your advantage. In this example, the number of monthly leads seemed to be the driver of home sales. I leveraged this information big time in my business.
Before we wrap up this post, let me ask you two very important questions:
1. What are you tracking in your business? If your not tracking things consistently, you're making a very big mistake.
2. What % of your leads turn into home sales? Do you know?
You can learn more about other lessons I learned when growing my business in my book Renegade Millionaire Strategies for Real Estate Agents, which is available for free at: http://www.FreeRenegadeBook.com
