Bianca Denham: How to set goals and unlock your full potential in 2024

Goal setting goes hand in hand with high performance.

In fact, writing your goals down typically results in a more than 40 per cent greater chance of success than when they are not written down.

As we near the end of January, hopefully filled with excitement and enthusiasm about what the future holds, it’s an opportune moment to set your intention for what and how you want to achieve success this year.

Something I’m often surprised about when agents set goals is that they’ll declare a GCI goal, for example “This year I’m going to write $700,000”.

But that’s as far as the calculation goes.

How many would actually understand the level of activity required to hit the $700,000? 

Some will understand how to calculate a simple ‘reverse engineering’ annual plan, but the rough numbers typically look like this:

List-to-sale ratio: typically a good business will turn over 70-80 per cent of what it list.

So, if you list 50 properties in a year, you will sell 35-40 of those.

Appraisal-to-list ratio: this number is often falsely over inflated, meaning agents believe this number should be higher than it is.

Taking into consideration that appraisal-to-list ratios will generally take in appraisals and listing presentations, this number should usually be lower than what you may think.

In this instance, your appraisal-to-list ratio should sit somewhere around 15 per cent.

This is because you will see near, medium and long-term sellers, so your success ratio will appear lower in the short-term.

Taking the above example of 50 listings, you will need to conduct 330 appraisals in the year.

That works out to 27.5 per month, or more realistically, over a 10-month year, that’s 33 per month.

Planning around fitting in that volume of appraisals is the key to success.

Call-to-connect and connect-to-appraisal ratios: these numbers are very much impacted by the volume of calls that an agent makes and the quality of the data and depth of relationships they establish.

For agents calling good quality, qualified homeowners, with whom they have a relationship, the average dial to connect sits in the 40 – 50 per cent range.

Meaning, if you dial 100 homeowners, 40 to 50 will pick up and have a conversation with you.

Connect-to-appraisal sits at around 10 per cent, but again, this is subject to many variables.

In this instance, to generate 33 appraisals per month, you would need to have 80 to 85 connected calls per week and dial 160 to 180 numbers.

As mentioned, these numbers are subject to change depending on the data and your length of time in the industry.

I would recommend starting with these numbers as a guide and track your outcomes to tweak your goals to be more accurate for your individual performance.

Once you have worked out your targets, the next step is to think about how to plan this across your work week.

Many agents often fail to allow enough time to hit their upper number, rather than what they currently do on average, these two things are very different.

If you want to increase your output or performance, you need to schedule time to facilitate that.

Think about the number of calls, appraisals, listing appointments, opens, auctions, vendor meetings, (the list goes on) that you will need to allow for to be operating at the level you are aiming at.

You can’t be too detailed with this, success lies 80 per cent in preparation and 20 per cent in execution.

Managing distractions can also be critical to the success of your strategy.

Are you easily led astray by the offer of a walk to grab a coffee or lunch?

Are you better making calls on your own or is the accountability of making them among your peers critical?

Think ahead to what will trip you up and how you can avoid what you know will make you fail.

Many understand the power of visual reinforcement of goals, so consider would work for you.

Are you a whiteboard person? Or would you prefer a poster above your desk?

Some dabble in the annual operating plan, the likes of which I am currently preparing.

It’s a more detailed document that you can share with your team members and leaders for greater accountability.

As stated at the start of the article, writing it down makes you more successful and publishing it or sharing it makes it even more likely to succeed.

Once you have established your annual plan, written it down and shared it, the final piece is measurement.

Regular reviews are important for many reasons, but the simple act of looking back over the past week, month or quarter helps you to reconnect with your intentions and goals, gets you back on track and helps you understand if you need to adjust your goal, or put in more training or support to achieve it. 

Good luck with winning 2024, your best year yet is waiting for you to plan it out.