Lead Follow-up
Lead follow up may be the most under rated of all steps in the sales process and quite possibly the number one cause of lost business.
There are two specific ways that incorrect lead follow up can kill your business. The first way is the obvious one that involves not being diligent and doing the follow up that you need to do to nail down the appointment. The second is the complete opposite of that - too much time and effort wasted on leads that are garbage and should be thrown away. This often overlooked pattern is what I really want to focus on in this post.
Remember that selling is a numbers game - you will go through a lot of leads. Your objective should be to turn those leads in to appointments or disqualify them as soon as possible. One or the other. Keeping poor leads around hides the good leads and clutters up your whole system. Poor leads waste your valuable time that you could have spent following up on the quality leads or time that you could have used to generate new, high quality leads.
Poor leads will do more than that. They will ruin your attitude and kill your desire to prospect for new leads. The sooner that you get rid of them, the sooner you can free up your mind to go after your good leads. The bottom line is that leads themselves have little or no value.
Agents cling onto their “leads” like they are gold and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Most of the precious leads that they are hording are crap, and they only hang on to them because it gives them the illusion that they have something going on. The highest quality leads will require the least amount of follow up, the least amount of time, and ultimately will give you the least headache.
A great guideline for you to use when following up on your leads is is the rule of threes. If you leave three messages for the person and get no response - throw it away. If you have three conversations with the person and can’t get the appointment, throw the lead away. Unless they set an appointment with you for a specific date in the future, get rid of them immediately.
Be militant about following this strategy and you will clean up your pile of leads quickly. The ones that you have left will be quality leads and worth the time you have to spend on them. It will also free up a bunch of your time that you can then spend on new real estate lead generation. Implementing this one suggestion and spending your time only with qualified leads could boost your productivity by 50% or more.
Steve Didier
