“Miracles are great, but. they are so damned unpredictable.”
– Peter Drucker
Quantity, then quality, then viability. That is the correct sequence with regard to leads, listings and leverage.
Leads always comes first. In this business if one can not generate sufficient leads nothing else will matter. It will make no difference how smart you are or how much you know – if you don’t have any customers to talk to. Lead conversion is obviously the action sitting between having sufficient leads to wind up with a sufficient amount of listings. But just having enough leads is the very first thing.
Ever “get careful” with a client or customer? You know, where you don’t dare screw up? It is a great feeling, isn’t it? Not. Nothing succeeds like insouciance. Show me someone “being careful” and I’ll show you someone who is really “serious” and who is also about to make mistakes. When one is playing, having fun, there is no need for carefulness. To achieve this with customers it is necessary to know that you can get more. If you know there are lots of them and that they are easy to acquire then no need to be “careful with this one”. You’re happier and the customer gets a much better experience too (as they are being taken care of by someone who is relaxed about about the outcome and knows what they are doing).
Quite often, if one has the viewpoint that customers are scarce, they get into carefulness. This is common with agents barely making it – as the very reason they are barely making it is they don’t have enough customers. The reason they don’t have enough customers is either they don’t have an effective lead generation system or don’t consistently use the effective one they do have. Either way, not enough leads is a “bad” thing as it leads to carefulness.
The future success and viability of a real estate office can be accurately predicted by how many producing agents they have. Not how many high producing agents, just how many producing agents. Offices (particularly those paying rent for space in a commercial office building) with just a few producing agents are often candidates for going out of business. For agents it is how many listings they have; the average number of listings an agent carries will be the best indicator of their future viability. Notice it is quantity first, not quality. Having one or two “good ones” is not a substitute for having many listings. In the first place if an agent has two “good ones” he won’t have them for long and he is at once down to zero listings for sale.
Obviously we strive for the very highest quality – in every area of our business. But when just getting an area going (for the very first time or when getting it going again) do not fixate on quality. It is quantity.