The Secret to Scaling Real Estate Lead Management
You invest so much time and energy into your business as a team lead. You wear all of the hats right now, and you look great in all of them. You’re the agent that crushes deals, the administrator that organizes which agents get which leads and the coach that meets weekly in one on ones to discuss strategy.
You’ve been hustling for a while now and your agents rely on you to put the work in but…are you wondering where the breaking point is?
If you find yourself wondering where those weekends, those nights with family and friends have disappeared to, then it might be time for you to take a step back to re-examine the best way to grow your business.
I know letting go is hard to do but… you can do it!
I say this with confidence because I know the real secret to effectively scaling your business is to make the leap from working in your business to working on your business. So, what does this entail?
Let Go of Buyers
Making this switch is not an all-at-once kind of thing. You need to smoothly transition from doing everything in your business to focusing on the key pieces that facilitate growth. The first step to stepping back and scaling up is to let go of working with buyers.
Buyers are way more time consuming than sellers. Dropping buyers can be hard for some team leads to swallow. Buyers are how you built your business! When you really think about it though, you’ll realize how much time you’ll gain back into your day when you aren’t showing people houses after 5pm every day.
But there’s more to it than just getting time back into your day. Your team might have started out small — just two or three agents working closely under you. The culture when you started out was collaborative and cooperative, but as you’ve added agents to your team this isn’t as clear. You need to focus on building the trust with your new agents and facilitating their ability to sell. There can be a competitive perspective when the team lead is still working with buyers. Focus on helping your agents to grow by providing them with the leads and guidance they’ll need to succeed.
Give your agents the room and opportunity to build their skillset and to sell more homes. If you’re worried about the pay-cut that might come when you stop working with buyers (because you are on-fire with your clients) think instead about how the work you are putting back into your business and your agents will quickly and easily make up for the loss and improve profit ten-fold.
Inspect What You Expect
So once you’ve taken a step back out of the business to work on the business, your perspective will shift. You’ll be able to focus on getting better results from your agents by providing better tools and guidance.
Strategies, like the Rule of Three, require a lot of follow up, and agents require more help from team leads when it comes to proper real estate lead management so they can follow up on leads quickly and efficiently. You’ll be able to hold more weekly strategic meetings to check in with agents and their numbers, ensuring they’re on track. You’ll also be able to inspect the numbers behind your agents and the leads they are pulling in and the deals they are closing.
A good rule of thumb is to inspect what you expect. If you expect your agents to follow strategies like the Rule of Three and follow up with leads across multiple platforms, multiple times a day, then you need to have a way to check in on whether or not that expectation is being met.
Do you ask your agents in weekly meetings how it’s going? You can — and you should — but perhaps even more important than that is having the right tools to visualize success. You should be digging into the software behind it all. At this point, a real estate CRM is a necessary tool for your team to really be able to scale, grow and meet their potential, all while seeing the results in your reports.
CRMs allow you to see how each agent is tracking toward their goals and how they are interacting with leads. You’ll be able to go into each one-on-one meeting with real suggestions based off of your research. You’ll be able to better support and target different agents’ needs.
Recruit!
The further you get away from working in the business, the more you will want to focus on your recruiting efforts for your team. There are a lot of pieces that go into this. You need to make your team attractive to potential agents both through showcasing current successes and through offering the kind of guidance, lead generation and tools that prospective agents will be looking for in a rockstar team.
Recruiting is especially important as you grow your business, because you never know when agents might leave your team. It happens often! If you want to avoid setbacks and focus on increasing your profit, you’ll need to make up for these losses and eventually be adding agents to help with the growing number of leads coming into your pipeline.
Make the Leap
Trust me. Change is scary, and I get that, especially when it comes to taking a step back from something you’ve invested in so heavily. The truth is, your team will have room to soar if you give them the room, the tools and the guidance to do so.
You got this. Make the leap!