Our business typically comes from two major sources - about 60 % is from repeat business or referrals from past clients, and about 30% from on-line marketing. The remaining 10% is catch-all that includes a couple of lead services that work on a referral basis, responses to local advertising like our billboards, or just people wandering in from the street.
Finding Leads:
I recently posted a blog that covers how we work with our past clients to keep that portion of our business healthy, so instead of repeating it, here's the link if you'd like to check that out - A Spherical Strategy.
For on-line leads, we count on our IDX search website, which features over 50 preset searches for homes in our major cities. Most of these searches enjoy Page 1 Google placement as a result of continuous market reporting on ActiveRain with back-links to the relevant searches on our site. The site itself offers to users the capability of setting up and saving custom searches, so we're getting leads both from specific property inquiries and from user sign-ups on the site. We also get on-line leads for other on-line efforts like Facebook ads.
Qualifying Leads:
Our personal definition of qualifying leads simply means are we able to establish a connection with them that may lead to them becoming clients. We don't deal with financial ability as this stage - we're more concerned determining the seriousness of their search and with building a relationship. We can work on financial concerns - even on a long term basis - once leads become clients.
Any leads that come from our past clients are considered as good leads automatically. We have a name and a need, but even better, we have a connection through our past clients. Experience has taught us that even though some of these never amount to a closed deal, they're all real and all worth pursuing.
On-line leads are a different animal. We like the property inquiries best, since they're a bit easier to make a connection with - we can always offer relevant information, a showing and a search for similar properties.
The people who sign up for our website accounts are more independent, doing their own searches. We don't attempt to hard-sell these, but do contact them, usually every 3-4 months, to offer our help and ask if they have any questions or needs we're not meeting with just the website search functions. Before we do that, we'll review their account activity to familiarize ourselves with what they're looking for and how seriously they're searching.
Tracking Leads:
Our IDX website uses IDXBroker Platinum, which provides excellent tools to track the activity of our on-line leads. There's a bit of self-selection here, since we don't require sign-up for the site unless full on-going search functionality is desired by the user.
For leads that have become clients, while they are actively working with us pre-closing, we have several systems to track what's going on. The pre-contract system is basically a whiteboard maintained by our assistant that gives us current status info. We use that in connection with information from on-going searches, showing history and notes from the MLS-based client search websites we set up for each buyer. Once they're under contract, we have an extensive contracts management system.
And for overall tracking, we use an Excel spreadsheet that contains information on all of our closed sales, including their source. We use this to evaluate how the different segments of our business are doing and to tell us where we might want to make adjustments or focus additional effort.
Comments(14)