By Matthew Collis
When it comes to maximizing your success, you need to understand four key pieces of information: how your leads and clients are hearing about you; your number of qualified leads; your number of qualified leads versus sales presentations; and your number of presentations given versus new business.
Without this knowledge, you’re often in the dark as to why you’re not reaching your full business potential and where you need to improve to take things to the next level.
There are a myriad of products and services out there for agents, each promising bigger and better results. But at the end of the day, which ones actually help your business, which ones hinder it and which ones do nothing at all?
The answer to these questions comes down to understanding fundamental metrics that drive your business so you won’t be investing in marketing blindly. Instead, you’ll know what works and where to spend more and less money.
1. Where are my leads and clients hearing about me? The easiest way for sales reps to get the answer to this question is to simply ask. Was it from a referral, your website, an event, a bench ad, Facebook? When you get a new lead, “Where did you hear about me?” should be one of the first questions you ask. Be sure to record the answer in your real estate customer relationship management (CRM) system.
2. How many qualified leads am I getting? Knowing the number of qualified and unqualified leads you’re receiving and where they’re coming from is important. This will be instrumental in helping you determine the effectiveness of the types of marketing you’re doing.
3. How many qualified leads am I getting versus presentations scheduled? Maybe you’re getting a ton of qualified leads but very few listing presentations. If this is the case, you may want to dig deeper to understand why this is. Perhaps these are good leads but they are just not ready to work with an agent right away. Conversely, if you’re getting a small percentage of leads from a specific channel but most of them opt for a listing presentation, you want to concentrate on getting more of these high-quality leads. At first glance you’d think that the more leads you get from anywhere the better, but that’s not always the case.
4. How many presentations have I given and how many of those turned into new business? Let me paint a hypothetical picture for this one. Mark, an agent in Victoria, was getting a ton of new leads from his website, social media and print advertising throughout the city. In fact, it was more than he could keep up with. He followed up diligently with every lead, but ultimately, a very small percentage of them turned into clients. As Mark didn’t have a CRM or record certain metrics (like the ones we’re discussing here), he was having a hard time pinpointing the problem.
If Mark knew his numbers, he would more accurately be able to tell if the issue was a result of a lot of unqualified leads, unconvincing listing presentations, not enough listing presentations or a number of other factors. Perhaps the leads were qualified and he gave a big percentage of them listing presentations. But after the presentations, they dropped off.
This is why it’s important that you keep track of these vital business metrics. I outlined just four of them but there are other numbers you should know and record, such as number of listings versus solds, average number of days your listings are on the market and the selling price against the asking price of your listings.
No one can remember all of this information and keeping track of it on paper or in a software program without the right fields is anything but easy. That’s why you need a real estate CRM. Once you have all the information in your CRM, you can then run reports with the click of a button and get nicely presented data on where your clients are coming from.
Do you have a grasp of the return on investment of your various marketing tactics? You need to recognize which marketing investments are producing the biggest ROI and where you may need to cut back. The key is to know your numbers so you can take your business to new heights.
Matthew Collis is part of the sales and marketing team at IXACT Contact Solutions Inc., a real estate CRM firm. He works with sales reps to help them achieve their goals through effective contact management and relationship marketing. IXACT Contact is a web-based real estate contact management and marketing system that includes powerful email marketing capabilities and a professionally designed and written monthly e-newsletter. www.ixactcontact.com
