In my last blog post, I talked about effective email communication and made the statement that the focus of every email should be on getting the lead on the phone. This may have been a little confusing as it was understood by a few of you to mean not to call until you have emailed. NOT THE CASE. Email is a measure taken as a means of contact when a number isn’t provided in the lead info or as a follow up after a call or voicemail. Email is also a way to supplement the amount of attempted contacts without inundating your lead with a large amount of phone calls. With that said, an email should never be considered a replacement for a good sales call. Calling web leads is vitally important to the success of the conversion process.

Be the First to Call Your Lead

Over 65% of leads that have been successfully converted are done on the first call. Why is this? Simple, homebuyers visit several websites when searching for a home. On average, a real estate web consumer will submit lead form on 3-5 of your competitor’s websites. The real estate consumer will more than likely respond to the first (sometimes the second) call put into them by agents responding to the inquiry. As for the third, fourth or fifth . . . they are simply out of luck as the consumer is tires of receiving calls relatively quickly and become non-responsive.

Call As Soon as Humanly Possible!

Waiting longer than 5 minutes to call a lead after a lead form/registration has been submitted has a 46% lower rate of qualification than those called in UNDER 5 minutes. In fact, the under 5 minute response vs. the over 30 minute response drops your chances of converting the lead 100 times! In addition to increasing your conversion ratio, it helps build rapport with the customer generating the idea that you will be responsive to their needs.

Weekends and After Hours Calling

The contact rate increases by almost 20% and the qualification rate increases by 30% when calling after hours. No big surprise here as most people that can afford to buy homes usually have jobs and are more often than not working from 9 to 5 Monday through Friday. Even if you were lucky enough to make contact with a lead during business hours there is frequently less focus and less time for a successful sales call as your lead is probably in the middle of something.

Salespeople Can’t Shouldn’t be Lead Coordinators

From studies I have seen and experience within my own office, most leads take 60-90 days after they register to be ready to communicate actively with a salesperson.  Despite their best efforts, the majority of salespeople will make one or two attempts at follow up.  Good salespeople will give it three or four tries but it is very rare that traditional sales people will continue following up after one or two weeks  . . . and why should they?  Commission based sales people can’t afford to spend their time following up on leads for extended amounts of time.  Let’s face it, real estate agents do their best work in the car with ready buyers (not at a computer) and as a manager or owner, being out in the field is where you want them to be.   The bad news is that if the salesperson is giving up after the first two weeks, and the majority of leads won’t communicate until week 8, we as real estate companies are leaving a good amount of business on the table.  (See my post on When are Web Leads Ready?).  The solution is to hire an Internet Lead Coordinator.

So what is a Lead Coordinator?

A lead coordinator that focuses solely on lead conversion can develop a system where leads are contacted using a follow-up plan that is designed to be both immediate and long-term.  It is important to remember that even though most leads (7 out of 10) convert in at the beginning of month 3, there are some leads that are ready immediately.  It would be the lead coordinator’s job to analyze and determine exactly how ready they are and to assign them out accordingly.  In addition to these tasks, the lead coordinator is often charged with following up with salespeople after assignment to determine if a once ready lead has slipped back into the non-ready position and needs to be put back into the normal long-term follow-up plan.

Some Lead Coordinators Duties

• Monitor incoming leads both mail and phone (sometimes it helps to use a separate number on the website)
• Manage the lead database, taking notes at every interaction with leads and salespeople.
• Analyze user history e.g. saved searches, favorites, etc.
• Do initial follow-up (do not rely on automated replies) remember to both call and email ALL leads.
• Do an overall lead evaluation (how ready is the lead) based on user history and initial follow up.
• Assign lead to an agent or long-term follow up system depending on readiness.
• Systematically follow up with leads and salespeople regarding lead statuses.

Lastly

The type of  follow-up, phone scripts and actual processes will depend mostly on the companies local market and policies.

The Greatest Area of Opportunity

Because many agents won’t work with leads that are initially non-responsive, the ones that do have less competition for the attention of the lead.  The trick is to develop rapport and get the lead to interact with you before they are ready to go out and see homes.  The timing here is very important, because once the lead turns the corner and decides to make an appointment, he/she will go with the first agent they get on the phone and it then becomes a free-for-all.  I have found that it is at this very stage in the sales cycle that the lead starts jumping website to website and will sometimes be in contact with several agents at once, shrinking your window of opportunity.  If steps have been taken by you to develop rapport, this is less likely to happen.

How to know when they are ready

The reason I keep referring to the 90 to 120 period is because the greatest amount of leads become responsive soon after.  This doesn’t mean all leads will automatically become ready on day 121 as the non-response period can sometimes be up to a year or more (see graph above).  So how do you know when they are ready?  The short answer is, until they are in the car, you don’t.  With that said, there are some things that begin to surface in the lead profile that will help you make the best guess.

In the same way I analyze lead data at time of registration, I analyze my returning leads for readiness (buyer behavior).  The only real difference is that now the lead has some accumulated history I can look at.

• The first thing I consider is log in history.  If the lead initially has a login history of once or twice a month then jumps to several times a week or daily, it is time to step up the heat and apply a high-touch level of follow up (more about high-touch vs. low-touch in a later post).
• Secondly, I look at the “Saved Favorites” of the lead.  If the lead has recently begun to save home listings to their favorites, implement high-touch.  If the lead has been saving favorites all along, try to look at the types of homes the lead has been saving to see if a trend is developing.  Usually as a lead becomes more serious (demonstrating buyer behavior), he or she will go from saving all types homes (all areas and price ranges) to saving homes that are more specific to a set of criteria (tighter price ranges and areas within a certain vicinity).

There are lots of other little things that will start to throw up ‘buyer behavior’ flags as you become more familar with analyzing lead data.  I didn’t want to get into them because most of them are completely obvious (lead makes a call into the office, lead asks about taxes on a property, lead submits a mortgage requal form, etc.).  The key is to get to them before the more obvious indicators surface, because if it is painfully obvious to you, it is equally as obvious to the 5 other realtors who’s site they have been on.  Get to them fast and develop the rapport before your competitor does.

Bad News for Old School Sales People

Traditionally, sales people are taught to spend their time on “hot leads” (ready to look) and devalue customers that take longer to buy. While working with “hot leads” is probably a good idea for commission based sales people that are looking to efficiently allocate their time.  The bad news is that this approach is leaving a good amount of business on the table. The problem is that traditional sales people will only attempt follow up directly after registration and will abandon leads after a few attempts not knowing that 7 out of 10 are not ready to be contacted (in my office it was more like 9 out of 10).  In short, it is vitally important to contact the lead as quickly as possible but it is also important to understand that most of them just aren’t ready yet.

The right way to do it

When training my agents, I continuously used the words “prompt and persistent” when referring to the follow up of real estate web leads. Even though only 3 out of 10 will responsive, you risk losing even those 3 if you don’t get to that lead before they move on to a different website. Another thing that is very important to understand is that the remaining 7 ARE NOT POOR LEADS. They are simply not ready to be contacted. You as a sales person must figure out how to be in contact with them at the point where they are ready to be contacted. There is a systematic approach to recognizing the readiness of a lead using proper lead data analysis. I will go into details of this in Part 2 of my “Analyzing Lead Data” series.