Should you spend your time or your money to get listings? That's a huge debate that I hear a lot. Often, when you have money, you don't have time, but when you have a lot of time, you don't have the money.
So let's talk about the pros and cons of spending time to get listings versus spending money. There are obviously benefits of both, and understanding that will help you make the right decision.
Pros for Spending Time
Let's talk about time first. Obviously, the big pro of time is that it doesn't cost any money. So if you're running a small business, and you want to get the highest return on investment for your time and your energy, sometimes this can be a great method if you're not really wanting to scale past a certain level financially. The other pro is that the better your skills, whether sales skills or marketing skills, the better your money. And perfecting your skills takes time.
Pros for Spending Money
The pro of spending money is that you can monitor it. If you find something that works well, like a marketing campaign or a mail campaign, you can monitor it and bring in a lot more business. The benefit of spending money and creating a marketing campaign is consistency. When you spend money, a lot of times you can keep those deals coming in consistently and trickle them in as you need them, versus spending time (a resource that is more in flux).
Time Cons
There's only so much of your time and your energy that you can give. You don't have an endless bank of energy or time. We all have the same amount of time in a day. If you're pushing to scale or grow and you don't manage your time correctly, it's really easy to stop generating leads or bringing in new business.
Another con pertaining to time and enhancing your skill set is that you become great at the job, but it’s hard to duplicate yourself. It’s hard to go out and hire another person and clone yourself. We've all tried it, right?
Money Cons
Spending money costs money. If you start investing money into all these different ideas and these different magic bullets and they're not giving you a return on investment, it's really easy to lose revenue. So if you're going to go spend money on marketing, know what it's making you in a return and make sure that each dollar you're spending is making your return on investment. If you invest everything in the long game, you may not make anything in the short game. If you run yourself out of cash, that's a bad position to be in. So it's kind of balancing out short term versus long term.
Another con with creating mail campaigns and marketing is that people can copy you. If you go out write a really good letter and somebody else gets their hands on it, they can copy it word for word. Yeah you can sue them, but that's going to take your energy.
Which method is best?
Whether you invest more time or more money comes down to what is right for you.
If you're going to spend money, one of my favorite methods is direct mail. There are so many people doing online ads and social media. So my recommendation is spend some of your dollars on marketing mail campaigns, especially if you're trying to get listings. If you want to see how we're going after FSBOs, go to a Authorify.com/FSBO to see the 11 step mail campaign that we send out to FSBOs to help you get listings.
Another one is offline and online ads. You can do real estate magazine ads; you can do online Facebook ads; you can do Google pay per click. You can also buy leads from Zillow or different lead providers. Obviously the bigger the return on investment, the more lucrative that marketing method is.
The other way that you can spend more money than time as you can pay others to do it for you. You can hire an assistant, or you can hire companies like us to go out and help you get listing appointments.
Now what about methods with spending time? Cold calling is obviously a really popular method. Texting leads, emailing and stopping by homes are other ways to spend time. And you can also use social media to connect with your sphere of influence and friends -- maybe if you worked at a bank or in retail before and you have a bunch of friends still there, work with them to get listings and stay in touch. There are many ways to do this.