Planning is good. Doing is better.
Most business plans are created with the very best of intentions but then lurk on the book shelf causing you, the creator, guilt and shame for the next twelve months. These multi-page manifestos that promise to deliver all of your dreams and allow you to live a life of ease and abundance are the bane of most entrepreneur’s existence.
For 2020, why not create a Business Do instead of a business plan. Instead of creating elaborate marketing and prospecting plans, what if you simply calculated how many people you need to talk to in order to earn the revenue to support your lifestyle.
At the end of this post, there is information about how you can make this calculation customized for you, but for most people the numbers look something like this:
15 Transactions = 15 conversations per week
20 Transactions = 20 conversations per week
30 Transactions = 28 conversations per week
40 Transactions = 35 conversations per week
50 Transactions = 42 conversations per week
75 Transactions = 50 conversations per week
100 Transactions = 75 conversations per week
The definition of a conversation is: A two-way dialogue that is about real estate. It’s either in-person or on the phone and while it doesn’t need to be about real estate exclusively, it needs to have an element of real estate in it.
It doesn’t matter how you have these conversations. You can phone online leads, talk to people at social events, hold open houses, talk to people in the coffee line up. The opportunities are endless. All that matters is that you DO have them.
So, decide how many transactions you are going to make next year and then commit to having the required number of conversations. It’s simple, measurable and easy to understand. You either do them or you don’t. There is no room to hide.
The number of conversations required is calculated based on your conversion rates. If you don’t know your conversation rates, you can estimate them but ultimately, you want to know them because the easiest way to improve your business is to improve your conversation rates.
There are four important conversation rates and they are spelled out here:
Contract to firm deal: This is the percentage of your listings that sell averaged with the percentage of your buyers that buy. This is both market and agent specific.
Appointments to Contract: This is the percentage of people that sign an agreement with you after a listing or buyer presentation.
Leads to Appointments: This is the percentage of leads who agree to meet with you to discuss signing a contract.
Conversation to Leads: This is the number of conversations you need to have to find a quality lead.