Let’s talk a little bit about planning ahead.

If you are investing, you are probably no stranger to planning, having goals, and having a structure around what you want to do.

In fact, you probably need that in order to have the amount of success that you’ve had, in order to do any deals at all. If you’re still working on getting your first deal, you have probably decided to get educated. Maybe you joined a coaching program or bought a self-help book.

Sound like you? If so, you’re probably no stranger to goal setting.

Setting Goals and Sticking To ‘Em

Part of being goal-savvy is being in touch with the numbers on your goals, as well as what your investor business or marketing is doing.

You need to be in touch with those numbers pretty much every day. Now, this is a little bit different from stuff I’ve said before. This is because I’m a big believer. I do a lot of ad words, Facebook ads, SEO, right? Search engine optimization for motivated seller leads. One of the things we always say is this: You have to be very careful of what you look at.

Here’s an example. You’re a stock market investor. Depending on what kind of investor you are, you’re not likely to look at the stock market every single day. If you look at the amount of ups and downs that your portfolio is going to do every single day, you’re going to make yourself go nuts. And if you’re not in a right frame of mind under that kind of stress, you’re actually going to make way worse decisions and make less money over time. This is pretty much a universally accepted truth.

But a lot of people look at their stock market every day. And you’re really not supposed to look at it every day. You’re supposed to buy and hold, let it ride, right?

When it comes to marketing, that’s also generally true as well. If you’re running ad words, for example, you do not generally want to look at your ad words account every single day because those numbers are going to go up and down. Your cost per click might go up or down. You might get no leads one day and 10 leads another day.

A lot of randomness is built into any marketplace. And ad words is a marketplace. Facebook ads is a marketplace. Even direct mail, it’s a marketplace of attention, isn’t it?

There’s a lot of randomness built in there. You don’t want to get sucked into that. But you do want to have an idea of whether your trend line is going where you need it to go. And one of the things I like to do is have what I call a data pulse.

Keeping a Finger on Your Data Pulse

A data pulse is the speed and regularity with which you check in on the data that you’re running.

For example: If you’re running ads, you might say tell yourself that you don’t want to check in every day but rather every week. Sometimes that won’t happen. Curiosity and worry take over. You want to check in and know what your numbers are daily.

But you don’t have to know what all the numbers are. You can pick one or two. It could be number of leads, could be cost per lead. Choose whatever you think is indicative of whether you’re moving towards your goal.

Still, you want to have some regularity (shall we say, pulse) at which you check in with these numbers. The reason you’re checking in is because you want to understand if the trend line is positive or negative and whether you’re on pace to get you to your goals.

If your goal is to do three deals in the next quarter, well, all right! You can break that down into the number of leads understand that you need to roughly get that particular number of leads every week.

When you check in, ask yourself: Are we on track to hit those numbers? And if you’re not on track to hit those numbers, you can change what you’re doing. Simple as that.

Check In, But Don’t Become Obsessed With Checking In

Remember that it’s important to think about sample size. Think about the amount of data you’re looking at. Like we’ve said, you don’t want to do this every single day. You don’t want to make decisions based on fluctuation and randomness. You don’t want to over-manage.

But at the same time, you don’t want to under manage.

So have an idea of what your regular pulse is for checking in on those numbers and check in on that on your planned schedule. That’s going to do a lot to make sure that you actually hit your goals.

What most people do is this: If their goal is for the quarter, they get to the quarter. At the end of the quarter they ask, “How did we do?” And over at Ad Words Nerds we’ll say, “Well, we missed our goal, but it’s too late to do anything about it.”

This doesn’t have to be you. Instead, check in at regular intervals. You can make sure your trend is trending the way that you want, and you can make sure that if you’re not doing what you need, you change what you’re doing.

Change your strategy, change your tactics, and get on track. If you’re not doing online marketing, then you need to do online marketing, and you need to think about what it’ll take and what the budget is to do that.

Hope that was helpful, guys. I’ll talk to you soon! Remember, check your numbers. Not too much, but check them.

Cheers!

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