One Page Plan
Lesson 10, 11, 12: Devising Important Action Plans
June 18, 2009 by · Leave a Comment
Do you sometimes feel like you do a lot of work, but it isn’t getting you any closer to achieving your goals? Or you work an entire day relentlessly only to feel you didn’t accomplish much? Why do some Realtors work fewer hours and earn triple the income? Don’t confuse motion with action. Just because you’re moving doesn’t mean you’re achieving results. The only thing that matters is you’re working on things that grow your business.
The primary focus of the One Page Plan is to keep you on track with the most important activities that grow your income and develop relationships. This section is designed to help you develop and prioritize your action plans. Plans that relate to your objectives and strategies. Think of each plan as a specific project. When you build projects out of each plan, it’s easier to manage, can be held accountable and keeps you focused on the most important priorities.
The next three lessons are worksheets specifically designed to help you convert your objectives and strategies into mini-projects.
(To download, right click link and select “save target as”)
Congratulations, You Made It!
Use the document below to form your One Page Plan by transferring your final vision statement and notes from Lessons 4, 6, 9 and 12.
Download The Final One Page Plan
(right click on link and select “save target as”)
Lesson 7, 8, 9: Your Direction
June 18, 2009 by · Leave a Comment
Marketing strategies describe the direction you will pursue and guides the allocation of resources; like time, money and people. By following a predefined set of strategies, you keep your marketing on track and carry out your mission effectively and efficiently. Strategies that are crafted suitably deliver clarity and focus for many years with only modifications made along the way. There are several ways to determine strategies.
For the sake of simplicity and efficiency, you’ll use a contemporary approach. It includes investigating your business to understand its strengths and weaknesses, and evaluating the outside environment for opportunities and threats. With this approach, it helps you think from the market’s perspective and align internal and external factors to create value and establish a key competitive advantage.
Internal Focus
Strengths and weaknesses are internal factors. In looking at your strengths, think about them in relation to your competitors – for example, if all your competitors provide free home valuation tools, than offering a free comparative market analysis is not a strength in the market, it is a necessity.
External Focus
Opportunities and threats are external factors. A useful approach to looking at opportunities is to look at your strengths and ask yourself whether these open up any opportunities. Alternatively, look at your weaknesses and ask yourself whether you could open up opportunities by eliminating them.
Use the worksheet in this lesson to conduct your SWOT Analysis
(right click on link and select “save target as”)
You Attract What You Seek
Remember the line from the classic film, Field of Dreams – “Build it and they will come”? It’s about the Law of Attraction. The Law of Attraction says each human being is a living magnet, that we radiate thought energy and that we invariably attract into our lives the people and circumstances that harmonize with our dominant thoughts.
Just like a magnet, you want to attract the ideal type of client. When you have a profile of your most ideal client, you’re enforcing the Law of Attraction. It’s as simple as describing the client you want to do business with and then place your marketing in front of them. Too often, Realtors are happy to have anyone as a client and it leads to headaches, grief, time and money spent.
You can eliminate this mistake by defining your ideal client. Knowing the demographic and psychographic of your ideal client helps you pinpoint where you need to place your marketing efforts and reap the benefits of the Law of Attraction.
In this lesson, write your definition of your ideal client
(right click on link and select “save target as”)
Not the Average Joe
What do Federal Express, Tony Robbins and the iPod have in common? Each one commands a premium fee and has a constant stream of new clients at their doorstep. They enjoy their “expert” status and don’t have to work as hard as their competitors.
Imagine how much easier it would be if you enjoyed “expert” status – never having to advertise or buy Internet leads because prospects were constantly requesting your services and referrals frequently were pouring in. It’s a better feeling than winning the lottery, isn’t it? Ok, a small, a really small lottery!
But if you want reduce your advertising expenses, increase referrals and earn more income without working harder, you must become known as an expert. You must build a reputation in the local community that shapes their perception of your expertise.
Your reputation should be supported by your positioning statement you developed in an earlier lesson. It’s also one of your strategies. It gives your a path to follow over an extended period of time. Nobody becomes known as an expert overnight, but as long as you work at it and it’s one of your strategies, you can achieve it.
In this lesson, compile your notes from the previous lessons in this section and determine between 4 and 6 strategies.
(right click on link and select “save target as”)
Lesson 5, 6: Your Income Goal
June 18, 2009 by · Leave a Comment
Your income is more than a number. It’s compiled from certain activities in your business, so instead of just naming a dollar amount you want to earn, you need to drill down to the point that you know the number of prospects you need daily to achieve it. If you could do that, wouldn’t it help you see if your income goal was realistic?
To calculate how many sales you need annually to achieve your income goal, you compute the number of prospects needed annually and break it down to a daily goal. When you see how many prospects you need daily, you give yourself a reality check. If it isn’t realistic, you can lower your income goal, re-calculate the numbers to compute a new daily prospect ratio and determine if it’s more realistic.
By calculating your income goal, you learn if it’s achievable.
For instance, a Realtor earning $50,000.00 annually and wants to increase it to $100,000.00, discovers he or she must go from discovering one prospect every 4 days to discovering one prospect every other day. For many, that’s too unrealistic.
In this example, good planning would mean lowering the income goal to $75,000.00 and work toward increasing the discovery of prospects from one every four days to one every three days. Now does it make his or her income goal more realistic? And if he or she achieves it, do they stand a better chance of growing their income from $75k to more than $100k the following year? Absolutely. Because smart planning does that for you.
In this lesson, open the MS Excel spreadsheet and follow the simple instructions to quickly compute how many prospects you need daily to achieve your annual income goal.
(right click on link and select “save target as”)
What Do You Need to Accomplish?
A marketing objective is a result you decide to measure. It becomes more meaningful when you make each one specific and measurable. Objectives that are measured and tracked are more likely to lead to successful implementation. What do you want to achieve and how will it be measured? Depending on your present environment, deciding your objectives can be based on one, two or three factors:
- The need to develop new relationships
- The need to service existing ones
- Or doing both
You use an instrument, called forecasting, to gauge which factor is most appropriate, so you can prioritize your marketing objectives accurately.
What is Forecasting?
Forecasting is a self-assessment tool that takes the pulse of your business to know how healthy it is. It’s the process of organizing and analyzing information in a way that makes it possible to estimate what your production will be over a particular period of time. Rather than guessing, you’re analyzing data, blending it with future trends, and computing an educated approximation.
The true value in making a forecast is that it forces you to look at the future objectively – a future that forecasts a surplus or shortage of business. Either way, you’re in a better position to apply the correct marketing objectives based on your circumstance. When you forecast, you improve your understanding and management of your marketing and of your business.
Use the MS Excel spreadsheet you downloaded in the previous lesson, click on the second tab marked “Forecast”. Follow the instructions at the top of the spreadsheet to calculate your forecast.
Forecasting a Shortage
A shortage is determined when your total number of prospects from your forecast is less than the total number of prospects needed to achieve your income goal. In marketing terms, a shortage means you need objectives focused on lead generation and client acquisition.
Lead generation is the starting point for every shortage. It means you have to find more ways to generate more prospects daily. A common mistake Realtors make is not adding prospects to their database regularly and then keeping in touch with them. Since you’re constantly hunting for more sales, which drives your income, you leave behind prospects who you could have warmed up over time and converted into clients.
Converting Strangers into Friends
After lead generation follows client acquisition. Whereas, lead generation is about quantity, client acquisition is about quality. Client acquisition is the successful result of converting strangers into friends and friends into clients. It’s achieved through an ongoing exchange of information shared between you and the prospect. Every exchange develops familiarity and fosters a greater sense of trust, eventually to the point that it materializes in the exchange of business.
What Does a Surplus Mean?
If you are forecasting a surplus, this means you have enough channels to produce the number of prospects needed to achieve your income goal. It means you can relax and plan for an easy year, right? Not exactly.
Pat yourself on the back for building strong channels. But don’t rest on laurels! Changes in the housing market, changes in mortgage rates, or even changes in your operations that diminish your ability to render quality service can alter your relationships instantly and reverse your forecast to a shortage.
What’s the fun about a surplus? You get to work in ways many Realtors never get the chance – piling resources into building client retention and client loyalty. Client retention means you’re doing multiple transactions with the same clients and client loyalty means clients are recommending your services to others forming a constant line of prospects at your door.
Once you determine if your forecast is a shortage or surplus, you know where to place the focus of your objectives:
- Lead Generation
- Client Acquisition
- Client Retention
- Client Loyalty
In this lesson, use the worksheet to determine 4 – 6 marketing objectives you can measure and quantify.
(right click on link and select “save target as”)
