Today I want to give you my professional advice about how to track your leads.

At one point in my 33-year career, I used to only track where my closings came from. But about two years ago, I was introduced to tracking every lead—how it comes in, the source, and our conversion rate. Let me give you an example:

You do an open house and you get five leads. You add the five leads to the tracker, including their name, address, phone number, and you include the source (the open house, in this case). Additionally, if they give you the information that they’re interested in buying or selling, you’ll want to categorize them in the tracker accordingly.

On our lead-tracking spreadsheet, we have all that information recorded, plus, the first contact date with the lead, the next contact date scheduled with them, and also the value of that lead—for example, a buyer looking to purchase in the $300,000 price range. From there, we can calculate a $9,000 projected commission.

Looking at my 2018 tracker, I notice that we had 213 leads come in, 45 of which came in with an income potential of $912,000. My leads had an average of $20,000 in potential income per lead.

“Knowing exactly how much return you get on your leads and their sources is vital.”

By tracking our leads, I’ve found that we’re able to save money and/or move our money away from something that isn’t giving us the conversion we’re looking for and put it towards something with a higher conversion. Last year, we underwent 10 months of parallel tracking for two different high-cost marketing for internet leads. 

For example, after tracking Zillow and a pay-per-click service, we found that one of those was producing three times the amount of revenue as the other. Because we could see that, we stopped paying money for one and then doubled down on the one that was working. Don’t be afraid to stop investing in something that isn’t working because you’re afraid of losing a possible lead that will come in. Knowing exactly how much return you get on your leads and their sources is vital, no matter if you’re running a team or if you’re working as an individual.

Here are some other interesting facts our tracker also tells me about our 2018 business:

  • 11% came from agent and client referrals
  • 22% was tracked all the way to close
  • 26% came from open houses
  • 9% came from Zillow
  • 4% came from sign calls
  • 5% came from our sphere of influence

At the end of the day, we know exactly where all our leads are coming from. I challenge you to start tracking each and every one of your own leads so that you can identify which sources are worth investing in.

If you have any questions about lead tracking, feel free to reach out to me. I’d be happy to speak with you.