Once upon a time, a long, long, time ago, I was a real estate agent. A pretty good one too. In fact, my husband and I worked as a team and we were named top sales agents for our office. Early on we had decided to enlist the help of a coach and that made all the difference. We got a lot of good advice from that coach but the number one thing we took from our weekly coaching sessions was that sales is a numbers game and in order to play you’ve got to have enough numbers. In our case it was 40 a day. We were told to “touch” or basically contact 40 people a day in order to get enough negative responses that would lead to positive contacts. I think the numbers worked this way; you touch 40 people and of those you’ll get three leads and of those three leads one will be a sale.
So we found the easiest way to touch 40 people a day. Instead of door knocking like most other agents we decided to go to businesses. You’ve got a captive audience and they almost have to be nice to you. We never took advantage of that, merely coming in introducing ourselves as real estate agents and then leaving. But the numbers worked every time.
I’m not saying there’s a magic formula to sales but yes, I kind of am. Back in the day it was called networking. And whatever you want to call it, touching people, networking, whatever, I’ve always been a big believer in it. With social media it’s easier than ever to do it. Want to grow your email list or drive traffic to your site? It’s not going to happen if you sit back and list your site on a few blog directories. You need to work it. You need to touch people. I’ve heard from some bloggers that they drive traffic by commenting on 50, and even 100 sites a day. When you are making that many contacts on a daily basis you are bound to make some connections and gain some followers.
Try it. How many people will you touch today?