A big challenge facing a lot of up and coming agents and teams when they start doing online lead generation is keeping up with all of them. That may sound like an overgeneralization, but nurturing online leads is a lot different than nurturing your geographical farm area or your sphere of influence. Leads from your sphere or farm area are going to feel much more genuine as they are going to be further in the sales cycle. Online leads–while still valuable–are going to be lagging behind in the sales cycle. That doesn’t mean you abandon online leads; you might have heard that the internet isn’t going away anytime soon. Instead you must nurture these leads in a different way.
Pitfalls
If you’re an agent running solo you might find that you don’t have time to keep up with the amount of leads that are coming in. Being overwhelmed you might find the urge to slow down on lead generation compelling, but you will find that online lead generation is a numbers game. So while you’re pulling in a lot of leads, the conversion rates for those leads will be 3-5%. The other scenario that some find themselves in is just not responding as in no one is contacting the leads. There’s a lot of rejection that comes with following up with these leads and a lot of follow up. Agents used to having a lead ready to show homes to will be disappointed. Don’t be discouraged! These leads are still very valuable!
If you’re a team, your agents might find themselves choosing to show homes over responding quickly to an online lead. While they know the 5 minute rule to call the new lead within 5 minutes of receiving it, are they really going to step out of a listing appointment, showing homes, or even an open house to do so? The answer you might find more than not is no. Your agents will want to engage in more revenue generating opportunities and who could blame them?
In order to combat these scenarios, a lot of single agents or teams hire an inside sales agent (ISA). These ISAs can call the leads the minute they come in and help them bubble up to the point where they’re ready to list their home or buy a home.
That brings us to another pitfall: training. Training an ISA team can be intensive, expensive, and obsessive. There’s scripting, incentives, and being dedicated to it. Some teams and agents find themselves constantly re-hiring ISAs which results in taking time away from agents and team leads from real revenue generating activities.
This might sound all doom and gloom for online lead nurturing, but that’s not the case. You have to approach these leads differently.
Take it from Brian Burds and his team
Brian Burds was living in the team scenario of these pitfalls. His agents felt discouraged when they called online leads because they didn’t see any success. If you’re spreading out these online leads amongst a team of 5 people and there’s a 3-5% conversion for buying a home on them … there’s a chance that out of a 100 people one or two of those agents will never see a sale from it. You as a team leader are seeing the payoff and the return on investment, but not the individual agent on your team. That was happening with Brian’s team. They weren’t being as responsive to the leads as they could be; Brian was reluctant to hire an ISA because he didn’t want to see his costs go up.
Brian finally took the plunge and hired ISAs and a new dynamic began. While his leads were being called he didn’t have enough hours in the day. Say a lead comes in after hours, he didn’t have someone on staff to contact them. His agents weren’t going to call them and contact them. There also just weren’t enough hours in the day to follow up with all of them. He also found himself being an Inside Sales Agent Manager rather than a team leader. The constant cycle of hiring the next ISA and training them on scripting was overwhelming. Brian knew he needed a solution but wasn’t sure if he could afford hiring anymore ISAs or incentivizing them differently.
Rokrbox
Brian then turned to Rokrbox to solve his ISA problem. While Brian’s CRM needs were taken care of with Firepoint, Rokrbox helped him with his lead nurturing. Rokrbox is a professional real estate system used in the 21st century for identifying serious buyers and sellers from internet leads. With Rokrbox integrating with Firepoint, Brian was able to take the next leap in his business. Rokrbox’s team doesn’t just call a lead when it comes in, they follow up with a lead multiple times within the first 21 days of that lead registering; 10 phone calls, 4 text messages and 4 emails are performed during the first 21 days after registration. Best part is it integrates with Firepoint. Brian was able to see when Rokrbox made calls to the leads in his system and once they were ready to be contacted by an agent they were assigned to right agent. Brian didn’t have to spend hours of his time and money training, re-training, and keeping ISAs accountable AND he could reap the benefits of his internet lead generating efforts. Brian’s conversion rates went up as a result because he and his agents could focus on revenue generating activities and Rokrbox handled the lead nurturing.
For more information on Rokrbox go here.
Firepoint will help you track your internet leads
Firepoint was the base system for all of this to work. Firepoint allowed Brian Burds and his team to have a database that organized their leads, make detailed histories on those leads, and to pool all of them into one easy to use software. Firepoint allowed him to have accountability with his team. He was able to get notifications as to when a lead came in and to distribute those leads to his team with advanced lead distribution rules. Firepoint allowed his agents to be in amazing communication between each other and Rokrbox’s ISAs.
If you’re spending money on marketing and lead generation, you must see exactly where it’s going. Otherwise, you will constantly fall victim for chasing the shiny object in your marketing plan. With Firepoint, we track your spending and returning revenue on every lead source in detail.
You are able to set custom time frames so that you can know your true return on investment. This allows you to make well-informed business decisions without needing sophisticated business training.