A lead is someone that wants to buy or sell real estate in the near future. How you define near future is up to you, but taking a lead longer than 1 year is not recommended. Strong agents that are doing more than 50 deals a year should not want to take a lead past 90 days. Lead follow-up should be done on a regular and consistent basis. Your success as a real estate agent will eventually come down to how good you are at lead follow-up.

You should make a binder for all your leads. You can divide this binder into 2 areas; 1) Current Leads (30 days and less); and 2) Future Leads. Let’s look at these two areas.

Future Leads
In the “Future Leads” area, you should have a monthly divider system so you can file each lead in the month you are going to do your follow-up. At the beginning of each month you will pull out all your “Future Leads” for that month and make contact with the lead. During your contact you’ll need to determine if they can be moved into the “Current Leads” section or filed into the next months follow-up. It’s really important that you develop some intuition in this area. If you get the feeling the client’s plans may be changing, move them into the “Current Leads” section. Trust your intuition. You don’t want to call them back next month only to discover they’ve already listed!

Current Leads
In your “Current Leads,” you should have 2 sections. Section one, should be leads that you need to follow-up on daily or every other day. Section two, should be the leads you will follow-up every week. Monday is the best day to designate as your weekly lead follow-up day. Most prospects will make their major decisions on the weekend. They’ll likely try to contact a Realtor on the Monday following their decision….you’ll want to call them before they can contact someone else.

The pages in your lead follow-up book will consist of customer logs. This is basically your notes for each and every contact you’ve had with a prospect. This way you can quickly scan your previous calls and ensure you are prepared before you call again. If you’ve sent your client any information, make sure you keep copies of that information or a note describing what you sent them. This will prevent you from looking unprepared and unprofessional. (If you’d like a free log template feel free to contact me and I’ll send you a copy.)

Over time your lead book may get pretty thick, so be sure to use an over-sized binder. Carry your lead follow-up book with you at all times. As agents, we have lots of idle time. Sitting outside a house waiting for a buyer, at the office waiting for an appointment, waiting for an important call, etc. Use this time to do some additional lead follow-up.

Since lead follow-up is the key to ultimate success, don’t be afraid to call you leads or feel as if you’re pestering them. These people are looking for an agent to sell their home. YOU ARE NOT BOTHERING THEM! It’s amazing how many agents are afraid of lead follow-up.

Remember, you need to call “Current Leads” frequently. It may sound annoying, but it’s not. Have you ever seen one of your leads list with another agent because they were calling so much the lead said, “The only way we could stop him/her from calling was to give them the listing?” This happened to me several times before I started to become the agent that erred on the side of making a few extra calls. If a prospect asks why you are calling them so much, just let them know that you’re tenacious and you’ll be just as tenacious when you have a potential buyer for their home.

(c) 2008 Leading Example Enterprises Inc.

Corey Wells, is the founder of Leading Example Coaching which offers Real Estate Agent Coaching, Books, Audio, Scripts, Packages, Software & More.
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This article was originally posted on LeadingExample.com/Blog