AN EXCERPT FROM OUR DECEMBER NEWSLETTER...

In November, we talked about a Blue Print for your success which had four critical components to put in place before the New Year begins:

•    A Book of Business (BOB) to keep your pipeline full •    A scheduling system to effectively manage your time •    All the tools you need to conduct your business •    Selling skills that you are confident enough to use to overcome objections and hesitations and convince people to do business with you

This month, let’s boil things down even further and focus on what you can do now to keep your pipeline filled to the brim in 2012.

Pick Up the Phone: Open your Book of Business and start making calls. This is a perfect time of the year to connect and reconnect with past clients, friends, family, and associates—even people you haven’t spoken to in a while. Don’t worry, they won’t bite. Trust me on this: They will all be glad to hear from you and if they have a referral to make—and if you ask for it the right way—they will make it.

Make a Commitment: One of the best New Year’s resolutions a salesperson can make is this: Resolve to prospect. Make the phone your best friend. Commit yourself to making the calls and building your Book of Business. It sounds so simple, but it’s such a huge key to success: Smile and dial your way to a prosperous New Year.

Review Your Numbers: One thing that Floyd Wickman Program graduates do better than their competition is tracking their numbers to see how they really did. How do we know our students average 1.07 transactions and 2.37 referral leads per person per week? Because we keep track. There’s great power in the numbers and no business can be a success without knowing where they stand.

December is the perfect time to look back on the year and analyze your efforts. The numbers will speak to you and show you what you did right and where you must improve. I’ve met many stressed agents, working hard, pulling their hair out, but not making much money. They say they are very “busy.” The question is though — busy doing what?

How many appointments did you go on in 2011? How many transactions did they result in? How many referral leads did you get? How many did you convert? Where did you spend your time most effectively? Where did you waste time? Like any profitable business, you need to analyze your performance. If you tighten up the areas where you were weak and focus on your strengths, you can’t help but improve.

Set Your Goals: Now that you’ve analyzed your performance, you can set goals for the coming year. If you went on 30 listing appointments this year and wrote 5, that’s a 1 in 6 success rate. Why not learn how to make it 1 in 3 and write 10? And while you’re at it, why not shoot for 52 appointments, 1 per week and write 17?

How many hours a week did you prospect? How many referral leads did you generate? How many of these did you covert to appointments? How much more would you have to prospect a month to generate six more leads? And if you converted these six to three appointments and of these three you wrote one additional listing, what would that mean to your bottom line?

I hope you now see clearly how important your numbers really are and how you can use them to increase your production. If you want to find out how to do your numbers more effectively and reach goals you never thought possible, please get in touch with us.

Handle the Holiday Hesitation: The good news is many agents shut it down for the holidays and leave the field open for those who know better because they’ve been “Wickmanized.” The fact is, there are many perfectly good reasons why sellers should list their homes during the holiday season and once you can explain them to your prospects, you’ll quickly fill your pipeline and hit the ground running in 2012.

Get your copy of Floyd's HOLIDAY MARKETING ANALYSIS and read the rest of December's news stories today -- just click here:  December's Connecting and Communicating

Enjoy and have a great week!