How managing your pipeline can help to increase market share

Despite the somewhat challenging year, we have seen many agents we work with continuing to flourish. We support hundreds of agents across the whole of the UK, so frequently get to see a good snapshot of the market. This – in turn – helps us to gain a deep understanding of what really makes the successful ones stand out from the crowd and there is one common and crucial denominator amongst them: effectively managing their pipeline.

Managing fluctuations and looking ahead

The combination of ‘Trussonomics’, interest rate rises and the cost of living putting a burden on peoples’ finances has significantly impacted the property market this year. As we head into 2024 and with the unsettled nature of the market continuing, we can see at first-hand just how crucial it has become to plan for the peaks and troughs in order to manage cash flow effectively.

Fluctuations need to be carefully managed to sustain a healthy business, whether that’s outsourcing in times of high demand, or carefully managing cash flow to ensure financial stability throughout the market swings. I believe that ensuring you have contingency plans for both scenarios is the only way to manage such fluctuations.  At some level, the sector is always fluctuating - seasonally for example - so businesses need to be flexible and quick to scale up and down by having overflow arrangements in place.

New instructions and segmenting the pipeline

The most successful agents we work with are those who are constantly looking ahead to new instructions – fluctuations are more significant in this market and without new instructions on the horizon, there is no business. Managing and segmenting their pipelines is helpful in this scenario.

For example, looking up and down their chains to see where they are in their lifecycle. Asking questions such as: How many sales are completing? How many are possibles? The newer instructions aren’t going to complete any time soon so it’s best to focus on the ones that can.

We recently launched a pipeline calculator, which provides an instant projection of agents’ potential earnings and pipeline turnover to give them a better feel of the position of their business and can help to focus the mindset onto future instructions.

Time management

Although there is a temptation for agents to solely focus on completions, those agents we see who segment their time are the ones who have the most market share in their area. Whether that’s ensuring one resource (in-house or outsourced) focuses on sales progression and completions whilst another concentrates on new business and develops the pipeline.

As such, it’s incredibly beneficial to ensure there are processes for managing sales to allow time for focusing on new business and developing the pipeline.

Ultimately, if the sales process is correctly managed, completion turnaround times are then quicker, and turnover can increase – a win-win for any agency and even more so for one which is focused on its pipeline.