How Do You Identify Holes in Your Business?

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One tool that I've found helpful is, when you look at your business, thinking about its holes. For any of you that have read the book Traction by Gino Wickman, this is kind of how your business needs to be set up.  Don't think so much about that this has a potential structure, because some of you, it's just you and that man, or you and that man, like a couple buyer agents. 

But if your business is weak in an area, if you don't have enough leads, you have a marketing issue.  Right?  That's the first function that, even if you don't have a person to fill it, someone has to pay attention to marketing. 

Then if you have leads that are coming in, and you're not converting them, then you have a sales issue, either inside sales or outside sales. 

And if you're not getting any appointments to meet with buyers and sellers, then you have an inside sales issue. 

If you're meeting with people, but they're not signing, they're not being loyal to you or committing to being loyal to you, you have the outside sales issue. 

If you're getting clients, but listings aren't selling, or you're getting buyers, and they're not going under contract, you have an operations issue.  This is where the world-class service is delivered. 

And then most of you won't have a person that's sort of in charge of HR, IT and finance, but that's the last part of it.  

But everyone of you has to start thinking about your business as marketing, sales and operations, operations being the world-class service.  So how do you create interest in what you have?  How do you get those people, those leads, potential clients, to meet with you and then do business with you?  And how do you service them at a level where they're going to give you referrals and they're going to want to come back and just tell the world about you?  So you've got to think about your business from marketing, sales and operations.  Right?  

So when you think about holes in your business, do you have enough leads that you're not -- it's not a leads issue.  So for us, it's not actually a leads issue.  We actually have a conversion issue on my team, so which is why a lot of you, if you're paying attention, you may see my name in the "Sales Manager" box.  

We have four rocks as a company.  I'm going to go through them here in a second.  The first two are about conversion, the first one being, how do we increase our listing appointments from 9 met per week to 12 met per week?  And our conversion, how do we increase it to 20 percent overall?  That is a rock I'm tackling this quarter. 

The second rock is, how do we increase buyer appointments met to signed by 25 percent this quarter?  So my agents are meeting a lot of buyers, and they're not getting their commitment to be loyal to us.  Right?  About 50 percent met to signed right now. 

And I'll go through these in a second here so you guys can see it for yourself, but those are two rocks that I took on.  Those are two really game-changing rocks, let's just say it, paradigm-shifting, game-changing -- changing the game, you know.  

If I can jump back into the business and solve those two rocks -- we're hiring a sales manager now, so this isn't forever for me, but if I can get back into the business and get our conversion straight on the listing side -- so set more appointments and convert more of those appointments into signed listings -- it's going to be amazing. 

So that's how you determine holes in your business.  What's your issue?  Where are you struggling?  Do you have enough leads?  Do you have enough clients?  Are you giving world-class service?  These are the three areas I would look at when you're thinking about your multiplier projects.