Not Hitting Business Goals? Here’s how to Re-Align

June 27, 2017

Lee Bressan

We’re six months in to 2017 and you probably have a pretty clear idea of what is working, and more importantly, what isn’t in terms of your business goals. When it comes to a winning strategy, there’s certainly no “one-size-fits-all” solution, but no company will see success without strategic alignment in their business.

By strategic alignment I mean that each component of your business, from the marketing plan to the team structure is arranged in the right way to support your long-term goals. If you’re missing the mark on your business goals, this is probably the culprit. Throughout the year, your goals probably haven’t shifted, but supporting strategies, organizational structures, team members can all fluctuate which makes aligning your strategies and the organization even more difficult.

So let’s take a look at what you need to re-align and get back on board with your business.

Reassess the action plans for your goals

You’ve created SMART goals that will drive your business forward, but are you working in what you need to do to support them?

Many times the issue lies in translating your goals into daily actions to help keep you going,

Identify the most productive daily activities to help you reach your goal

(Hint: These should be much easier to accomplish than your overarching goal, and something you can use each day. They’re the simple daily plans and contingency plans that drive you towards your end goal.)

Here’s a quick example:

Goal: Increase Yearly Transactions to X

Daily Actions:

Make 60 prospecting calls each Monday

Block 2 hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays day to focus on KPIs

Meet up with past clients for coffee, lunch or drinks each Friday

The person who is blocking off 2 hours of their morning to call leads, who has said, “I need to accomplish this task to reach this goal, and no one is going to bother me right now,” are the people who reach their ambitions. They’re being productive.

Know what might distract you and choose a course of action

Stephen Cooley runs the #1 Keller Williams team in South Carolina, and he asks a simple question: What is my time worth? He learned if he gave up some tasks, it would allow him to put more emphasis on money-making tasks. He knows he can make $500+ an hour with a client. Anything less than that, he pays other people to do it. He doesn’t need to be taking signs to people’s houses or making copies of keys. Time is money.

Take a long hard look at your marketing strategy

Blasting out content to everyone in your contact list, or simply posting listings on your Facebook page is not going to cut it if you’re trying to generate quality leads or nurture prospects into clients. Tailored marketing efforts focus on relevant content. And relevance is what grabs people’s attention and gets them to engage with you.

Are you using the right tools to help you stay relevant and market efficiently? Post-It notes and Excel spreadsheets mean no. The right answer is an organized and intelligent real estate CRM that will sort and segment contacts by intent and relevance, and act as a central command center to help you build, execute, and track your marketing strategies.

Here’s the scoop on an effective marketing strategy:

Choose Target Audience and Segment your Leads

Identifying your audience is the most important step to building any marketing campaign. In your database, there are multiple audiences: sellers, buyers, first time homebuyers, hot leads, leads that are 6 months out, you name it. Each of these groups represents a separate target audience that you need to market to appropriately.

Create Relevant Content for your Audience

Here’s where the right CRM can really help you with smarter marketing by allowing you to easily deliver tailored messages to each marketable “bucket” or group in your database.

Automated drip campaigns are the perfect way to nurture relationships with leads that are not quite ready to buy. Create campaigns that are relevant to different segments of your audience like:

a collection of buyer resources for first time buyers

housing data from recent months

neighborhood updates

testimonials from locals,

your take on neighborhood events and hot spots

comps, CMAs, and market updates for your seller leads

emails to help generate referrals from past clients

birthday and anniversary check-ins

Measure Your Marketing Campaign Performance

The CRM will track open rates, responses, and log each interaction automatically. This makes it easy to see what emails are working, and where you might want to improve.

Perhaps your data show you one email campaign isn’t really converting. Try testing a few new options. Make it a game! With time, you will discover what is successfully reaching different segments of your email list

Align business around a single platform

Choosing the right tools and software can be very overwhelming. Each week there seems to be a shiny new toy that “you have to have!!” Sure their marketing might seem slick, but most of these offerings only help with one task and you’d have to build a virtual army of software vendors to handle your business needs.

The problem is when you have one system for lead communication and another for handling current clients, then you have one system for tackling transactions and so on … it gets very muddled. The process you designed becomes task-heavy and a time suck. Agents need one system to operate from, one that’s easy to use because they’re busy with money-driven activities.

This is why you need to work your business around a platform not a product.

real estate platform. A real estate platform connects with other software applications, “talking” to other systems, so it can build on its capability. These platforms work with other best-of-breed products, like in the instance of BoomTown, the Boomtown platform partners with BombBomb, Mojo Dialer, and Dotloop. All those tools have built-in functionality, where you can use them within the BoomTown platform.

When your business goals and marketing efforts are aligned around a single platform to support everything from the daily database management and accountability metrics to streamlining your tools and providing you with a single business ecosystem, it becomes much simpler to get your company on track and achieve your business goals.