Dollar-Productivity: What to Start, Stop, and Continue in 2024

Real estate moves fast, and in order to keep up, you have a lot to manage, maintain, and strengthen. With competing priorities and new goals for 2024, it’s more important than ever to zero in on the strengths, weaknesses, and areas of opportunity for your business. This helps ensure you’re maximizing dollar-productivity, or the tasks that will generate revenue for your business.

By having a strong lay of the land for the current state of your business, you have ample opportunity to know what to start, stop, and continue to ensure success. Let’s take a look at how you can execute this exercise.

The First Step to Determining Ways to Maximize Your Productivity

Before you dive headfirst into deciding what to start, stop, and continue in 2024 to drive more income, it’s important you first get a lay of the land. Without knowing exactly where you’re starting, it can be difficult to identify where you can pare down, and other places you can scale up.

First, take a look at what daily tasks you’re performing for each revenue-generating area of your business, like lead generation, marketing, and follow-up. Then, measure your own success metrics directly related to generating revenue.

As you review 2023’s performance, make sure to measure things like:

• How many leads are you generating?
• What are your best lead generation sources?
• How many phone calls are you making?
• How many calls does it take for you to have a conversation?
• How many conversations does it take for you to get a meeting?
• What’s your client conversion rate?
• How about your lead conversion rate?

By understanding the current state of your business, you’ll have a strong grasp on areas of opportunity, things you can eliminate, and what you can strengthen this year. Doing this early in the year helps you gain the right footing on the path of planning ahead, especially since you’re equipping yourself with a year’s worth of fresh, recent data.

How Exactly to Determine What to Start, Stop, and Continue in 2024

Now that you’re deeply familiar with your key success metrics, you also have a good view into what’s working, what can stay the same (or be kicked up a notch), and what you can cut out completely. Remember: the goal is dollar-productivity. This means you need to assess exactly which activities you’re doing are ones that are either helping, hurting, or maintaining your revenue goals.

Use each of the following areas to assess what you can start, stop, and continue for the year ahead. We recommend getting a piece of paper and creating three columns for each of these three actions and categorizing your efforts appropriately.

Marketing and Lead Generation

When it comes to deciding which of your marketing efforts are worth starting, stopping, and continuing, you have a lot of opportunity to refine in this space. Since we’re approaching this from an income-based perspective, start by looking at your top-performing marketing sources from a lead volume and conversion perspective.

Where are you generating the most leads? What is the conversion rate on those leads turning into clients? How long does it take for them to go from “client” to “closed deal”? Knowing what’s working well will help you understand what you can continue. To know what to stop, flip these same questions on their head by looking at your lowest performers for marketing. Is there anything viable? Can anything be improved?

If you answer “no,” it’s a good idea to trim the fat and stop those efforts. But if there’s a chance things can be improved, like if you’ve transitioned to a new market, hired marketing help, or have acquired a higher marketing budget, formulate a game plan to continue these efforts, and set a timeline to ensure you’re staying on track. Then, revisit these questions above.

Follow-Up and Conversion Rates

Your approach to follow-up is what gets looky-loos to become leads, who then turn into clients. Earlier, we recommended you measure your phone call volume, how many calls it takes to get a real conversation, and then the amount of chats that lead to an actual meeting with the prospective client. It’s also important to assess your follow-up via email and text message.

How many email and text touches does it take to get on the phone? How many to get a meeting? Analyzing these averages will help you find the sweet spot of getting casual conversation into committed clients. If you find your outbound phone call volume is sky-high with limited success, consider adding in email and text touchpoints.

Or, if you find your email and text touchpoints fall flat, consider paring them down. If you’ve never tried a mix of these three outreach methods, and you want to improve your conversion rates, you might want to start them in 2024.