What do you have planned today?
You may be at a closing for 2 hours, negotiating contracts for 30 minutes, spending 2 hours cleaning out your email, nurturing your SOI (sphere of influence) on social media for 1 hour, networking with agents for 1 hour at your office's sales meeting and 3 hours meeting with current home sellers and buyers. But wait a minute. What are you doing today to actively generate leads?
Yes, your hour on social media may comprise some lead generation if you are using that time to post ads, share warm and fuzzy pictures from your recent closings and to connect with those with season of life changes that may eventually need to buy or sell (such as the Johnstons having triplets unexpectedly or the Smiths youngest child and last in the nest applying for college). But what else are you doing to generate leads?
Remember, the leads you generate today will be your closings in the future but if you are not daily and purposefully seeking new clients, than you may be a victim of sporadic, inconsistent closings - no bueno.
"Cut down on non-sales related activities, and voila - instant sales growth"
~From the book Sales Growth: 5 Proven Strategies from the World's Sales Leaders by Baumgartner, Hatami and Vander Ark.
It is important to learn how to no longer neglect lead generation (since it is what many times we put off for "tomorrow") in order to manage the business of today. Accordingly, it is vital to schedule defined time each week to generate leads, which may mean you will need to approach your daily and weekly schedule differently. Here are some tips to do so:
Rent a shared assistant with other agents or contract with a hourly virtual assistant.
Automate.
Look for software that can help you salvage your time from administrative processes like Reesio - instead of manually entering your new leads from Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com etc. into your main database, Reesio can automatically import them and start automatic engagement with those leads.
Instead of trying to do a little each day, block off 1 day a week for prospecting.
If you feel that for you Thursdays are a relatively slow paperwork day that rarely buyers or sellers want to see homes, make that your day dedicated solely to lead generation. This means that NOTHING else should be scheduled for your prospecting day - make it off limits as much as possible. Of course there will be the occasional fire that will cause you to use that day for something other than lead generation activities but try to make sure that is the exception and not the rule, where that only happens once every 1-2 months.
Instead of trying to block off 1 whole day, plan a little, like 2 hours, each day.
Partner with another agent.
Leverage the work being done by the most visited real estate websites.
Despite the controversy, there have been agents to successfully generate quality leads (for free as well as for fees) from Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, Homes.com and the like (yours truly included). Zillow currently captures 56% of all online traffic to real estate websites. When you couple this with Trulia's and Homes. com combined 45%, it is easy to see that these sites can push real estate traffic your way.
Begin by creating on these sites free online profiles, thn try to get at least 5 reviews posted within the next week, continue to monthly have clients post reviews and then (and ONLY then) assess if you should go a step further and pay for ads.
Follow me on Google+ and Facebook for more tips and check out our upcoming events and FREE webinars. Here's to your success!
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