Where Does Your Business Come From?

Building your referral network is a great idea. What you did is a greta foundation to building your strong business.

Social media has been my biggest challenge - with respect to the huge time commitment one has to invest.  I say invest time vs spend time.  Knowing the difference is key.

Time management...marketing plan and organization...review, measure...move ahead

Sphere of Influence first, past clients, then marketing and blogging.  Also the more listings you have the more buyers you will generate.  It has to be a balanced mix and you have to work them all.

It's easy to get caught up in the latest and greatest new idea - unless you know where your customers are coming from you can spend thousands of dollars and countless hours of time for zero return.

But I agree with Barbara Todaro - sometimes people don't know where they found you. I try to remember to ask all of my customers and often they say "someplace on line." Well, of course. Since my business is not local, the Internet is the only place I market my services.

Cara ~ Tracking success is key to continuing it! Great post! I am curious, where do you believe you gained the biggest bang for your buck?

Thanks Cara, tracking your successes and failures are important keys to any good business planning, and with the complicated mix of internet marketing systems, that is getting harder to do.

I have always tracked where my leads come from.  Once in awhile the party calling doesn't remember what site they found me on but that is not the norm.

Monitoring and measuring your marketing opportunities are essential to determine what is most effective and efficient, however, identifying which markets and how to reach them is a challenging task and may take more time to analyze before you can finally select your market. However, using a spread sheet to analyze your marketing efforts is a very useful tool to see at a glance what is working and not working, so thanks for the tip.

Hi Cara, our business is about 30% expired listing calls, which result in listing which generate about 60% buyer calls.  10% is miscellaneous.

Great ideas.  I haven't been good at keeping records of where my business comes from and when it comes time to develop a budget and a business plan I've been at a loss.  Now I have revised my record keeping and it becomes easy to track. 

Great post and good reminder.  I seem have more success in the business when I track where my business is coming from in writing and not in my head.  Thanks for reminding me about what works.

Thank you for the  suggestion Cara, Great ideas, thank you for sharing!

I have gotten so busy I have started using a spread sheet just to keep track of escrows - income - and expected income.  But you are right I can do so much more with them.

Open houses have worked very well for me, I also do postcards, newspaper ads and lots of internet. I am relatively new in my city so don't have a very big soi.

I totally have a color coded spread sheet too!  I can tell at a glance where my business came from year to year.  Have a great 2013! -Kasey