To know whether you’re on schedule to reach your goals as an agent, there are two things you need to track: leading indicators and lagging indicators.
What’s the difference between them?
If you have a goal to sell, for example, 20 homes in one year, the number of homes you sell each month is one of your lagging indicators. In other words, it’s lagging behind the activities you’re doing. If you’ve only sold 12 homes by the time November arrives, though, do you have time to reach your goal? Maybe, but it will be difficult.
That’s why you want to know ahead of time whether you’re on track to reach your goals, and that’s where leading indicators come into play. These are the activities you do that lead you to your goal. In real estate, they include the conversations you have, the meetings you attend, etc.
So basically, there are two things you need to measure when tracking your numbers: the money you make and your leading indicators. How many phone calls do you need to make? How many appointments do you need to set? What do you need to do to sell the listings you want to sell?
On our team, we track these on an excel spreadsheet. It outlines how many calls we need to make in order to get an appointment, and then how many appointments we need to make in order to get a closing. We do this annually in terms of setting goals.
If we’re not on track to reaching our goals, we do what we refer to as the “15th protocol.” If our leading indicators show that we’re not halfway to our goal on the 15th of the month, we don’t wait until the end of the month to find out whether we missed that goal. Instead, we try an activity that will jumpstart business for the team.
So make sure you’re tracking your lagging and leading indicators, but only base your activities on your leading indicators, because they’ll tell you whether you’re on schedule to reach your year-end goal.
If you have any questions about this topic, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’d love to help you.
