Hopefully you’re experiencing a good year in your commercial brokerage business right now, and if I were to suggest one activity to accomplish that will greatly help to ensure your success, it would be to always get your prospecting done.
Over the years I’ve been told that the standard for Marcus & Millichap brokers is to make 250 prospecting calls every single week, and if many more brokers within our industry would do the same, they’d be constantly swimming in a ton of solid new activity. Heck, for many brokers, making 100 prospecting calls a week would produce great results for them, yet so many brokers still fall short of making even this number of calls per week.
So when you look at your income goal for this year, how many prospecting calls do you need to be making every week in order to achieve your goal? If you’re someone who tracks your metrics on this, like how many calls it takes you to get an appointment, how many appointments it takes you to get a listing, what percentage of your listings end up selling, and what the average commission is that you’ll earn per transaction, it will then be easier for you to determine how many prospecting calls you need to be making in order to achieve your income goal. But if you don’t track these numbers, you may need to then go with your gut-level feeling, or you can begin by taking the amount of money that you’ve earned in the past twelve months, and divide it by the approximate number of prospecting calls that you’ve made, and then utilize this amount of commission earned per prospecting call as your beginning point.
Then from here determine how many prospecting calls you need to be making per week to achieve your income goal for the year, and then make sure that you’re making your calls every single week! In addition, when making your calculation, recognize that you will probably need to generate any new transactions by August or September, in order to get paid within this calendar year.
So for example, if you determine that you need to be making 100 calls every week from this moment forward to achieve your income goal, and as the year progresses you then realize on the average that you’ve been making only 40 calls per week, should you then be really surprised to recognize that you’ve fallen way behind on achieving your income goal for the year?
When you make getting your prospecting calls done your #1 priority, and you consistently get your calls done, your biggest problem will then be how to follow-up on all of the tremendous activity that you’ve developed for yourself, and that can be a wonderful problem to experience!