Finding Safety and Success in Numbers
Sales is a numbers game. Prospecting is a numbers game, as well. The problem is too few agents actually know their numbers and how to track them.
The information below will help you understand and set objectives for your ratios of contacts to leads, leads to closings, appointments to contracts, and contracts to closings. Knowing this information moves you almost immediately into the league of our industry’s most productive agents.
The law of accumulation
The law of accumulation basically says that achievement is the result of ongoing and constant effort. Everything in life, whether positive or negative, compounds itself over time.
An illustration of this is money. If you want to be a millionaire, all you have to do is save a little on a consistent basis, and the law of accumulation will take over.
If you put away $2.74 a day from the time you were 20 until you were 65 and you received an average rate of return of 9% over those years, you would be a millionaire. You would have saved about $45,000 over those 45 years; the law of accumulation did the rest. If you ask most people if they would trade $45,000 for $1 million, they would say yes, but few people make the effort.
You can expect an equally uneven return when you invest in prospecting. The tricky part is that the reward for your miniscule investment of prospecting effort doesn’t happen overnight. You have to prospect for 90 days before the law of accumulation does its thing. As my good friend Zig Ziglar says, “Life is like a cafeteria. First you pay, and then you get to eat.”
The power of consistency
Marginally successful agents take a binge approach to prospecting. Highly successful agents are far, far more consistent in their efforts.
I can’t think of an agent who better exemplifies the power of consistency than a man I met in 2000 by the name of Rich Purvis. Rich had entered the field of real estate after 25 years in a fire-fighting career. His goal was to earn $100,000 in 2000, and when I met him in March his income was standing at a disappointing $2,500. I told him, if you call ten contacts within your sphere of influence each day, you will get your $100,000 before year’s end.
I can count on one hand the number of times he failed to make the ten contacts. He blew by his goal of $100,000 in less than nine months and ended up earning more than $120,000 that year. In 2001 he crossed the $200,000 mark – all the result of his extraordinary consistency.
The never-ending prospecting cycle
Agents can easily find time to prospect when they have no listings, no pending transactions, and no buyers to work with. The secret is to continue to prospect even when you are busy with all the other activities.
Look at a typical agent’s annual income stream, and you will see that it goes up and down like a yoyo. Most agents have four to, at the most, six good income months per year. The rest of the time – butkis – nothing. If you could overlay their revenue stream with their prospecting numbers, you would see that prospecting tapers and revenue decreases, leading directly to the business void that follows.
Our job as a salespeople is to fill a pipeline of leads, so we always have new prospects to work with. And the only way to keep a healthy pipeline or conveyer belt of leads is to prospect consistently.
Tracking daily goals and results
Any business in sales can be broken down to a series of repeatable numbers that, over time, will produce a pre-determined result. Once you establish goals and track your performance over a few months, you will be able to determine the activities you need to earn the income you desire.
When I was selling real estate, I decided that I needed one appointment per day in order to reach my income goal. I knew, through tracking my numbers, that I needed three leads to create one appointment. What’s more, I knew I needed to make twelve contacts to generate one high-quality lead since, through monitoring my numbers, I knew that two of three leads would be “tire kickers” – contacts who didn’t have the desire, need, ability, or authority to either list or buy in the reasonably near future.
Based on that knowledge, I determined I needed to make 36 contacts a day: 12 each for the three leads I would need to result in one appointment.
Miraculous!
The law of averages evens your numbers over time. Don’t evaluate yourself on a single day’s achievements. Even a week is too short a period for evaluation.
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