If you’re relying on traditional listing lead generation strategies to build your business, you are missing out on a monstrous opportunity.
Unfortunately, lead sources like Expireds, Withdrawns, FSBOs and Home Evaluation are only part of the equation.
Yes, they’re crucial to your success, but they don’t propel your listing business completely to the next level.
To build a huge pipeline of seller opportunities and quench your thirst for the predictability you crave as a business owner, you must have a demand generation strategy that uses good data and and Inside Sales Agent ( ISA ).
A demand generation strategy is one where you have a skilled phone-sales person in the form of an Inside Sales Agent systematically calling homeowners in high-turnover neighborhoods to identify who is going to be selling their home in the next 12 to 24 months.
As part of your ISA’s activities, they will also send handwritten notes, emails, neighborhood data updates in between well-timed calls to strengthen the relationships they’ve created. Doing this puts them in prime position to help you be the go-to agent when the person is ready to sell.
We call this strategy nurturing, because the ISA is literally nurturing these leads, like a mother nurtures a child as they grow, until they are in position and wanting to sell their home
It’s a powerful, but underutilized approach that can help you build your business in ways that conventional lead sources just can’t touch.
Let’s dig a little deeper to see how huge the opportunity can be.
Keys to Using an Inside Sales Agent to Turn Data Into Listings
For the purposes of real estate, a nurtured lead is one for whom you have good contact information, that is going to sell within a year, open to doing business with you and clear on when you can reach back out to them.
We know from our research that at least 8% of our nurtured leads are going to sell. As a result, we can assume from this that once we achieve a pipeline of 600 nurtures, it will yield roughly 4 sellers per month.
The only proven way to achieve a seller pipeline of this magnitude and achieve this level of predictability is to have an ISA in place who can call data sources in your area on a regular basis.
It takes consistent calling not just to identify opportunities, but also to build (and strengthen) relationships with these people in order to produce a consistent output of 4 listing sales per month.
That said, a solid lead nurturing strategy works perfectly to provide you with predictability and the science proves it.
Most agents are focused on scooping up the easy, ready-to-sell business they find in their prospecting efforts each day. The bad news about this is that there’s a ton of competition for those opportunities and they get harder to come by on a daily basis.
By using an ISA to turn data into listings, you can uncover a tremendous amount of opportunities that the other agents in your market don’t even know exist.
Freddie Mac Research Outlook 9/21/2017
In reviewing Freddie Mac’s home sales forecast for next year, it looks like we’ll see yet another increase in the number homes that are going to be sold across the country and even in your marketplace.
At this point, you have to ask yourself these questions:
The answer to all these questions is the same: having an ISA call the data from the neighborhoods with the highest turnover in your market. In doing so, you’ll uncover some of the best listing opportunities in your marketplace where other agents have no clue they exist.
Once you have your demand generation strategy in place, you need to track your efforts on a consistent basis. Doing this will allow you to not only verify the assumptions you’ll make about calling data in your market, but also it will provide you with a baseline set of expectations as to what will likely happen in the future.
These are the statistics we recommend you track in order to know - without a shadow of a doubt - exactly what your efforts in calling data are netting you. In order to optimize your results, you must audit and track what you’re doing firsts.
As soon as you have your finger on the pulse of what your demand generation strategy will yield, you can use these predictable results to scale your operation and experience geometric growth in your results.
It’s important to note here that you MUST nail your efforts in using your ISA properly and calling the right data. Calling the wrong data and employing an ineffective ISA will not get you the baseline results you need to crush this strategy.
As well, you truly need to be deliberate and intentional in your tracking efforts. Without knowing your results, you’ll never be able to make the necessary changes in your approach in order to scale your business for the future.
If you want to get a huge leg up on your competition and establish true predictability in your business, you must implement a demand generation strategy using good-quality data and a top-flight ISA.
Then, you need to track your results with a tremendous amount of fervor so that you know exactly how you’re arriving at the results you’re getting.
When you do these three things at a high level, you’ll put yourself in position to grow your listing business as deep and wide as you’d like to grow it.