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Are you ready for 2021?

The Importance of Goal Tracking

After you’ve set your 2021 goals and projected the numbers you need to hit to actually meet them, the next step is to implement the plan and track progress so you can ensure the numbers you set and projected are actually real. If they're not, and you find that you overpromised a bit, you’ll need to readjust the plan to ensure you actually hit the goal. 

For example, let's just say that your plan was to go after a hundred leads per month and you hoped to list 10 percent of them. What I always do when I'm setting goals like this is to track my progress daily. Whether you’re using a pen and notepad, recording information on a CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce or using Excel spreadsheets, the key is to track your results.

If you set a yearly goal and put in your numbers — and then you never revisit them again or analyze to make sure you’re achieving your goals — it’s pretty much like checking your bank account at the beginning of the year and never checking it again! Think about what would happen if you did that. Honestly, you’d probably bounce several times and you definitely wouldn’t have as much money by the end of the year as you hoped.

So it's really important to track your progress and to make changes based on how things go. As one example, suppose you don't get 10% of your contacts to respond — maybe you only get 5% — and then the goal for the month is lagging and the trend continues. You need to know these things, right? 

Maybe at that point, you need to double your lead source to hit your goals or add a new stream of business. As things change, tracking them ensures you see the changes and can respond to them.

I’ve also realized time and again that real estate agents usually believe they're doing more than they are. It’s easy to skip over tracking, run blindly and think you’re getting in touch with everyone — but you aren’t. We've all done it. And then at the end of the week, although you FEEL like you worked your butt off, you have very little to show for it.  Tracking your progress means you know exactly what you did and didn’t do, feelings aside.