Looking at the numbers

We ended up 2010 with 329 sales and a lead conversion rate of a little over 4.25%. Not bad. I'm excited about this year because I think we will start seeing a rise shortly in business. There seems to be a little bit of confidence out there. I sure hope I'm right.

Every January we get a good amount of new members who want to make changes in their careers. Welcome to all of you who are new! One of the things I think is a MUST, is understanding your numbers. It's almost impossible grow your business without understanding the numbers.

So what do you need to know? Well in my case, I always want to know my gross number of leads per year. Then of course I look at our total sales. Once I know my sales per leads numbers, I can make adjustments from there.

Let's look at real numbers:

If you are spending $1,000 a month on PPC marketing at $1 per click and a 10% capture rate, this means you would receive 100 leads for that marketing expense. If you close at 2%, you will be getting 2 sales out of that 100 leads. Your cost per sale is $500.

So how can you increase sales with this amount of information? Firstly, you can easily increase your monthly spend to $2,000 per month on PPC. This theoretically should double your sales. But what happens if you also increase your conversion rate with good systems? If you get to where we are this year at more than 4 sales per 100 leads, your cost per sale goes down to $250. Not bad!

As you are putting your plans together to grow your business. Remember, it's all numbers. Everything you do in your business can relate to numbers. Once you understand how these numbers affect your business, you can then strengthen those areas to increase production. Not as hard as it seems. If you have any questions, watch our knowing your numbers webinar. It breaks this down a lot more.

Understand your numbers, change your business. You are almost there!

Here we go again!

Ok, well it's time to get the ball rolling for 2011. I spent the last two weeks turning 50. I know, it's a little long for a birthday, but heck, it's 50. I was kinda freaked out for a bit but now that I am officially 50, I don't feel any different.

Tomorrow I go back into the office and am booked solid with helping customers, helping my Agents and helping several RESN members. Once I get through all those, I am doing two demos of our software in the afternoon. Yup, it's time to get rolling.

On top of that, I have to write our webinar for Thursday. It doesn't give me much time, but I want to make sure I get a webinar in this week for our members. I'm going to be discussing how to jump start your career through the Internet for buyers and through FSBO's for listings. I love my FSBO program. It works great, I wish I could get my Agents to do it more often, but none of them really want to tackle them.

I'll be posting a bunch of stuff on here this year that is about everything from lead conversion to just daily thoughts that run through my head as I continue my quest to 10% lead conversion. Have a productive week and I'll talk to you shortly!