I'm would be surprised at how many businesses think that one single website will cover their business if I didn't feel that way once. Like most, I thought you could do it all with one stop, as long as you planned carefully. That may be the case still for some businesses, but for a vast majority of businesses they would do better to have specialized sites that would make it easier to build their business.
As I mentioned in the intro, there are really only three areas to focus on in order to build any business.
- Get New Customers
- Keep Your Customers
- Enhance The Opportunities For Them To Do Business With You
Yet, the vast majority of business owners will make it way to complicated. Or try and dumb it down even further. A quick evaluation of any business will reveal what needs to be improved to change the direction of any company.
I've heard it said that if you want to have revenues of a milliion dollars then all you have to do is find one thousand customers that will do one thousand dollars of business with you in a year. You can adjust that formula to match your business model and revenue obejctives, but the concept holds true. Do you have a thousand clients that would bring your $1000 in revenue this year?
I can hear a lot of readers thinking, "OK, I see what you're saying, but that's really not the way it works in my business." Hum...I wonder if that's really true? In real estate people are not buying houses mulitple times a year, generally speaking. Statisticly, they'll buy and sell every seven years. So, how long do you plan on being in business? The revenue generated by a single real estate agent client is well above $1,000, in fact with prices being where they are if you only picked up half the commission available you would be expecting to pick up some where in the range of $8,000 and up per transaction. If we double that for the buy and sell portion of the statistic we're at $16,000. Divide that by seven years and that means if your goal is $1,000,000 then you need to create a client list of 500 people. If you can increase the average ticket price you reduce that number even further. Divide that number by 7 and now you realize where you need to start.
So once you know roughly how many people you need to do business with to lock in a consistent million dollar income, then you can start building your client list.
This is where most drop the ball. They bring in the client through their marketing efforts, successfully close the transaction and then send recipie cards to the client for the next while. Maybe an occational greeting card or birthday card.
The biggest problem with this method is you won't maintain your client list as effectively as you could with a few key strategies.
Maintaining contact is important but you have to establish yourself as their go to person. Expand their mind as to the possibilites. Teach them how to identify the pit falls and the gold mines. Earn their trust and loyalty.
Maybe you could enhance the relationship by helping them to learn how to effectively invest in real estate. We all know that they would be better off properly investing their money in real estate than in stocks these days.
These three simple areas of any business can be enhanced and cultivated to take that business to the next level over and over again!