Growing your business means knowing how to track your leads.
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One thing I’ve noticed in more than 30 years as a real estate agent is most agents stop doing what works before it starts to work.
For example, if somebody’s doing a marketing plan—let’s say it’s geo-farming—and they commit to sending out a postcard every single month but stop after a few months, the people that continue to market month after month will have a higher rate of return.
I have some marketing areas I’ve been marketing to for 36 months. We’ve been tracking our leads, and we’ve noticed that each year the amount of leads we get out of that farm area continue to grow due to momentum.
How can you track your leads to achieve this same effect?
Start by having a simple spreadsheet to track your leads. This way you can clarify if someone is an “A,” “B,” or “C” lead. You’ll also have their name, their email, the value of the property they want to list or purchase, and what your commission would be from that type of lead. Most importantly, you can find out where that lead came from and look back on other leads to chart what’s working and what’s not.
Whether you’re a new agent or a veteran, tracking your leads is very important.
If you have a personal referral, you have a high conversion rate—somewhere between 80% to 100%. If you’re working with an Internet lead, on the other hand, you might need 100 leads to get somewhere between five and 10 closings from that lead source.
Of all the lead sources that you have—and you should have many—you should track every single lead by that lead source. You should then review how much income has come from each one of those lead sources. After that, calculate how much it cost to market those lead sources. That will give you your rate of return.
One marketing strategy I use—which is a geographic farm—has a 1,100% return on the amount I’m spending on marketing. However, I have some other farm areas that aren’t doing as well. I had one area that I quit farming after 12 months because it was only breaking even instead of moving forward. I started a secondary farm that started getting higher results in a higher price range. I then took the marketing dollars from the area that wasn’t working as well and put them into the area that was working better.
If you’re at the beginning of your real estate career, you need to start tracking immediately. Even if you’ve been in the business a long time, tracking your leads is very important.
If you have any questions about tracking your leads or would like to look at the spreadsheet that I use, don’t hesitate to give me a call. I would be happy to help you.
