Countdown to Payday

This is a tactical business tool I use all the time in my own businesses and to help improve the businesses of the people I coach. I’m excited to share it with you because it can open up a world of insight into your business and the potential to massively increase your income.

I’m going to walk you through the real estate of this process, but every business has a Countdown to Payday. If you are not in the real estate industry I would challenge you to define what these steps are for you, using this framework as an example.

The overall flow of a successful Countdown to Payday looks like this: First, you need to generate leads. Those leads then become set appointments. Set appointments become held appointments. Held appointments become signed agreements. Signed agreements become contracts. Finally, contracts become dollars.

Download the Countdown To Payday

Breaking down the process

I see agents wanting to take lead generation and lead conversion and simply smash them into one step. This doesn’t work and hampers your ability to gain key insights into your process because they are really very different concepts. Lead generation can be broken down into two steps: 

• identification of a lead’s intent to buy or sell.
• The qualification of a lead’s motivation and timeline.

Identifying what a lead is to you will also help you to become more effective in this step. Personally, I identify a lead as someone with the intent to buy or sell in the next 6 months. Read more about lead identification in our pipeline growth tool.

Now you need to convert your leads. The process of lead conversion can be broken down into three steps: set the appointment, hold the appointment, and the signing of an agreement. Once a lead has signed an agreement, only then they are truly a conversion.

Breaking lead generation and lead conversion into these separate processes allows us to become more scientific in our approach, identify where we are in the process, and how we get to where we want to be.

Notice two things in our visual aid that are very important for you to define for yourself and your business: your Selling Proposition and your Value Proposition.

The Selling Proposition is about answering a potential client’s question, “Why should I give you my time to discuss my real estate needs?” To effectively respond to this question you’ll want to have built out what we call an Arsenal of Offers. This is a list of compelling reasons why they should set an appointment with you that sound very different from your competition.

Similar to the Selling Proposition, once you’ve set an appointment with a lead the Value Proposition should answer why that lead should hire you over every other agent in your market. The more you can nail down what sets you apart from and above the competition, the more likely you are to convert that lead then and there. 

For some examples and inspiration to develop your own talking points, download our example Arsenal of Offers.

Download the Arsenal of Offers

Make More Paydays

Using the Countdown to Payday gives you a tremendous ability to discover where your process is breaking and how to remedy it. If you aren’t achieving the number of paydays you want, it means you don’t have enough closings. If you don’t have enough closings, you don’t have the contracts. If you don’t have the contracts, you don’t have the agreements, and so on. You can follow this process back up the chain to discover what is keeping you from making the money you want.

This is a powerful tool. Understand your Countdown to Payday and all of its steps to be able to identify where it’s failing and how it can be improved. I hope you’ll use this to develop your own Countdown to Payday and become a more powerful and effective business owner.