Setting And Achieving Prospecting Goals by Dirk Zeller

In setting prospecting goals, focus on three core areas: the number of contacts you should make each day and week, the number of leads you should develop, and the number of personal appointments you should set.

Start with easily attainable numbers, so you can build up your energy, intensity, focus, and discipline slowly and steadily. You wouldn't decide to run a marathon without working your daily and weekly mileage up over time, and the same premise applies when establishing and meeting your prospecting goals.

A contact is a personal conversation with a decision maker who can make a purchase or sale or who might refer you to someone who could. A contact is not a conversation with the babysitter, a 10-year old neighbor, a friendly teenager, or an answering machine.

When I take on a new coaching client, I almost always start them with a goal of five contacts a day, and I would suggest the same for you.  Make a goal of five contacts a day without fail, resulting in the completion of 25 contacts a week.  It will take three to four weeks for contact with five prospects a day to become a habit. Once you achieve the goal for three weeks straight without missing a single workday, you can raise your goal to seven or ten.

Leads are contacts that have demonstrated through their dialogues that they possess the basic motivation and desire to make a change in their living arrangements. In prospecting, we assume until we either pre-qualify them ourselves or they secure an appointment with a lender that determines they have the financial capacity to make a purchase.

To advance your business, you should aim to develop at least one lead per day and five leads per week.

An appointment is a face-to-face meeting with prospects, during which you discuss their needs and wants, share how you work, and aim to gain their commitment to work with you in an exclusive relationship to sell their home or find them a home to purchase. An appointment is the launch of the agent-client relationship. It is not a meeting during which you show a property!

Like your lead-generation goal, your appointment goal should be set at a reasonable level: A goal of one appointment a week is a solid start. If you acquire two appointments, terrific, but make sure that you are able to secure at least one.

If about now you are wondering, hmm, five leads and only one appointment a week from all those calls, realize that these are starting goals. It is far better to begin with aims that you can actually achieve rather than ones that overwhelm you from the onset. As you gain consistency and skill in prospecting, both your numbers and your ratios will improve.

Even if you maintained the goals we set and sales ratios of leads and appointments, you would have a good year as a newer or inexperienced Agent.  At the end of the year, you would have made 1,250 contacts.  You would have created 250 leads.  You also would have set and conducted 50 appointments and gotten two weeks off with your family to boot.

Even if only half of the appointments turned into listings or sales, you would have 25 deals in your first year.  In most companies, that would make you rookie of the year.  You would also earn in excess of $125,000 in gross commission income.  I do not know too many people in real estate or in any other profession that make that type of money in their first year.

So set your prospecting goals by focusing in those three core areas: number of contacts made, number of leads established, and number of appointments secured.  You will meet your goals if you follow through and be diligent in achieving them.