A Step-by-Step Guide on how to fill your calendar every month with listing appointments

Half of the battle is over.  You've made a conscience decision that you are no longer going to focus on chasing buyers all over town to close more deals.  (If you need to be convinced why you should want to be paid $2500+ per hour vs. $238 per hour, READ THIS)

Now, some of you are going to need a real action plan because if you just say "I'm never working with a buyer again," you might be have to ask for an increase on your credit card limit and we don't want you to do that.  Since listings take anywhere from 30-90 days (sometimes more), you will still be working with buyers. YOUR FOCUS NEEDS TO SHIFT so that you are asking:

"What am I doing today that  gets me closer to setting a new listing appointment?"

For example, we are talking about adding 4 new listings every month.  A lot of people make the mistake of looking at this and getting overwhelmed and not just simplifying what needs to happen to get 4 listings.

If we have a 50% appointment to listing taken ratio then you need to have 8 listing appointments each month.  Let's say you have an 80% show rate for your appointments, and that leaves us with needing 10 appointments scheduled.

10 Appts scheduled ---> 8 Appts Kept ---> 4 Listings Taken

We can improve on those numbers.  If you already take listings on more than 50% of your appointments, then this should equal more than 4 new listings each month.

The only thing to focus on now is how are we going to get 10 listings appointments scheduled this month!

So, now you are asking yourself, "Well, that sounds great but how do I get 10 listing appointments each month?"

Let's go through exactly how to do that by breaking it down and asking yourself:

• Who do I attempt to contact?

• How do I make sure I talk to them?

• What do I do with people that are interested, but not ready now?  

Who do I attempt to contact?

This is a fun one because it all depends on budget, time, threshold for pain, call reluctance, and hours left in the day.  When determining how many hours to dedicate here, keep in mind there are few things that you will do each day that is more dollar productive than this...

Inexpensive ways include FSBO's and Expireds but you better be ready to bang out a ton of phone calls and be willing to be hung up on.  Highly effective and extremely high ROI. These people have already said "I WANT TO SELL MY HOUSE!"

Mid range options include digital marketing on social media, search engines, data efforts, and direct mail.  We have found that any targeted keywords is challenging for listing leads, so for us the most effective efforts have come through digital home evaluation requests with an ROI up to 2300% .   Also, we have seen tremendous success with calling through data and surveying neighborhoods with the highest turnover rates but that is labor intensive and works best when you have an ISA to make sure calls happen every day because I love real estate agents, but we aren't the best when it comes to calling everyday NO MATTER WHAT.

High budget options include TV, radio, billboards, and other big media advertisements.  We have seen this not only work but make every other effort you have see dramatic increases due to you being in front of more people so they start knowing who you are.  This is when it gets really fun and people just call asking you to list their home, but we need to make sure budget is there because it doesn't always work over night. The name of the game is get in front of a group of people and stay in front of them.  Yard signs, wrapped vehicles, billboard, direct mail, Facebook, etc. When they see you everywhere, they will think of you when they are getting ready to sell.

The goal here is to not be a one trick pony.  You don't want to have just one source of leads and appointments.  Get one working then start another then you are building a leveraged business that doesn't crash when one things slows down.  Jay Abraham calls this building a parthenon vs. a diving board business.

How do I make sure I talk to them?

Not sure how much time or money we have spent trying to figure out how to do this, but no matter what we tested, we knew one thing....IT COULDN'T RELY ON US!  We always think we can do everything but following up and contacting every lead just doesn't happen when it is people dependent and not system dependent.

You must rely on technology to ensure contacting attempts happen EVERYTIME.  How many times have you not called someone that ended up listing or buying with someone else just because you didn't call right away?  It happens everyday.

Also, it's no longer 1996 where calls are the main way to communicate.  Most people prefer to engage via text, email, and even Facebook Messenger vs. talking to you on the phone.  So, you need a system to make sure that happens.

Professor Oldroyd from MIT did a study that shows that the odds of contacting a lead you respond to in 5 minutes has a 100X greater chance of contact versus 30 minutes.  100 TIMES!!! That's insane, so every lead, every time needs to be contacted within 5 minutes otherwise money is walking out of your bank account.

What do I do with people that are interested, but not ready now?

This was one test that our estimates were WAY off......but in a good way.  We assumed that there were quite a few listing leads that were interested in selling over the next 12 months but not right now.

Guess how many leads we talked to that we classified as nurtures in 2016? (A nurture being someone we talked to that was not working with another agent and actually told us they were selling within 12 months)

Over 2500 people!!!

This blew us away.  We were testing what to send these people and just the fact that we spoke to them and used technology to continuously follow up with them, we were getting 30+ people a month reaching back out to us to schedule time to meet with us.

How great is that??  Would you mind if people that you talked to 8 months ago would randomly reach out to you to schedule a listing appointment?   I think you might enjoy that...

So, again big lesson here was that people will have a hard time making sure it happens but technology is how you do it.  You now have more time to focus on other revenue generating activities because you get to set it and forget it....

Implementing those three strategies and setting 10 listing appointments each month won't be a problem, right?  Now we can work on maximizing what you are doing and get 5 listings instead of 4, then 6 instead of 5. But, lets focus on that later.

Now, figure out what your conversions are and what your goal is to find out what your number is.  You should be focusing on how to get to that number of listing appointments. If you want, steal the example number of 10.

Write it everywhere.  Change the background of your computer, of your phone...write it on your bathroom mirror.  And start asking yourself every morning...

"What am I doing today to get me closer to setting 10 listings appointments this month?"

This post was originally published by Market Maker Leads.