How to Convert Leads at the Highest Level - Part 3

Welcome back to the Business Freedom Podcast. This is part three of how to Convert Leads at the highest Level. And Dan Jones is finishing out his schooling of us on lead conversion and lead management and it really is where the rubber meets the road in real estate. So stay tuned for part three. If you haven't already shared the Business Freedom Podcast, please do it now. This is members only content and so that is my ask of you. Just get the word out about the Business Freedom Podcast and also leave us a five star review. It's super helpful when you leave us five star reviews and don't leave us anything less than a five star. It's less than five star. Send me a message and tell me why and much love and respect. And stay tuned for part three of how to Convert Leads at the highest Level. This is where the rubber meets the road in your business. Much love and respect.

So we're getting towards the end. So these are some action items I want to leave everyone with. So going deep and following up on every single appointment. Right? Squeeze that lemon. That's what Laura says all the time. I love that saying. I just imagine just squeezing a lemon and then you don't stop there, you squeeze it again, I guarantee you get more juice out of it. Right? We don't need to spend more, we just need to go deeper. You know, agents, we don't have to go on triple the amount of appointments or double the amount of appointments. Go deeper with what you have. Number two office language tracking set, met signed. Everyone speaks that language. Really simple. But it's a total buy in. Right. Get leads under 100. And if you have, you're hesitant to do that, it's the biggest monkey off your back. Because those 30, 40, 50 people you get rid of are the people you're going to chase for the next year, two, three years. And a few of them might do it. But if we spend all that time you're doing, you know, following up on people who probably aren't serious, right. And spend it on more of the right now stuff and people you need to be following up with, you're gonna sell a lot more houses and then finally marketing plan. You have to know what's working in your business. So going back to 2015, when I very first sat down with Lars and I want to find it one day and I'll give you a copy, Lars. I had everything single thing I was spending on a monthly basis, I would write it out. Next month, I would rewrite it out again just to make my mind focus on what I was Spending and I want to write it out again. And I just kept stapling it and stapling it and stapling it. When I met with Lars, he's like, how's this work? And I'm like, I don't know, not that good. How about this? How about this? That's when we made everything transparent and started tracking and really understood what our ROI was. But if you don't have a marketing plan to really understand that and you're not tracking your appointments, how many leads you're getting, calls per lead, what you're converting, what you're not converting, I want to say you want to have a struggling year, but you're not going to be profitable. And the people who are with you, they're going to struggle as well. Right? So besides that, we'll open up to Q and A. So our team is over here if anyone has any questions for them. But I just want to leave you guys with simplify consistency, squeeze that lemon and dig deep. Dan.

Dan, my question is, in the item you had there, recycle every lead. What's your recommendation as to how to actually implement that, like on a nuts and bolts level? So the prospect gets turned down from the agent on OT or. I don't know how you run that. We're just, we're literally requiring every lead before we put a tag on our trash to be recycled or what does that look like?

So the biggest one in the objection list that we have is, for example, let's use a buyer lead that they say, for example, I have an agent. There's so many objections you can handle. I have an agent lead. And what we found, at least 50% of people who say they have an agent truly don't have an agent. They had somebody who unlocked a door. They have a part time friend of a friend who can only show homes on Friday and Saturdays, whatever the case is. But if you struggle with that sort of lead and you're not 100% clear that that lead is truly garbage and you just weren't able to convert it, even if it's a listing appointment, right? Hey, we have an agent. We're signing paperwork on Friday. And you can shoot everything at them to get that appointment. They still say no. We know they're signing, they're signing Friday. We have three, four more days to convert that and get face to face. Why not give it to someone else, right? So for a buyer call, let's just say it's a yard sign call. They had kids crying in the background. You call it back 20 minutes later, you know, they're still in a rush to get you off the phone and say, hey, I have an agent. I have an agent. Okay, well, we do. We'll put it into Boomtown, right? So you can add it to Boomtown and use, like, their phone number, hotmail.com, call it a yard sign, and put the real phone number in there. So. So we can continue calling that number. We don't just give up on it and turn it down. You have to go deep with that. But putting it back into the CRM or just sending it back to the isa, or if there's two listening partners, send it to the other. If there's no isa, back and forth until we convert it. If you feel like you didn't 100% determine that this person will not do business with our company, give it to someone else. Good question. I love that part of that.

Just had a quick question about. Does your team do daily new business development calls? If so, if they're limited to 100 leads, who are they calling?

So we have. Good God, we have too many leads probably coming in. I get it. We could bring on four people right now and make them extremely busy. Everyone has their own agenda in regards to when they're making dials. So everyone's required at least four hours in office a week making dials through the dialer. 4 hours either in office or out of the office, and then four additional hours in the office doing some sort of prospecting. So that's how that world looks. Looks for us there.

Who else has questions? So this is a guy. What last 3, 175, 225, 275 this year. Units got out of production about a year ago. Runs one of the most profitable businesses that I've seen now. Puts all his time and energy into his teammates. So you guys better fill up the rest of the time with questions.

We have 11 minutes.

So, Dan, just wondering about the emails that you're sending out, the seller and the buyer emails. There was four there. Looks like two of them go to the agents after the appointment.

Who?

The other two before the appointment. Where do they go and who do they come from?

Let me re. Explain that one more time so maybe I can do a good job there. So let's say I'm isa. I'm setting an appointment for, let's say for Lars. So that would go to the agent listing appointment, and we would also copy listings at Mahone Carolinas. So we have one email address. Everything goes to. And Lars as the listing Agent would be the only agent who got that appointment and then that's when the change starts. So the next day SRI usually comes back in and then that the secondary follow up email after that appointment would go out at that point and then large would be copied on it. The same with listing in my home care lines. The same email that went out gets responded to. So it starts that chain on that one appointment.

So the email, the first one before the appointment has the information in it for that appointment.

Correct.

And the second one is more of a questionnaire.

Set met sign, next steps, what happened kind of thing. Set met sign and next steps. Cool. Okay. I've never used one of these. Very interesting. Okay. Hello. Okay, can you walk me through? Once a lead comes in, it goes to your ISAs and they make the appointments for your agents. Is that correct? Yes. So now we have, we're shifting over towards our ISA team handling all incoming leads. But before that realtor.com would basically come through. It'd go to two or three agents. Somebody would claim it. Now we're trying to move to a model of having our agents only focus on follow up new business development on leads we haven't contacted. So they're just staying in the dialer. To get back to your original question as well on who they're dialing. We have yard sign list of people that we've missed in the past. Old Zillow leads. We never to get in touch with leads that have come in. But we're moving towards that model of ISAs handling majority of our leads that come in. But still the same process. ISA handles lead or agent handles lead. How many ISAs do you have and how many leads approximately do you have per month coming in? We had too many last month. We cut down on Facebook. So we were kind of still in that two, three month test run. We were roughly about six and a quarter last month. Two ISAs going to be three here fairly soon. Can you talk about how you break up the listing, the listing side versus the buyer side? Do you have a listing agent that specializes in that? Do they do both? Can you talk through kind of what your thoughts on that is? Yeah. So we don't on our team, I like everyone to do at least, at least 30 transactions before they do anything on the listing side. So with the whole, you know, who does what? We do have a few agents that focus more on the listing side, but they do work with buyers as well. In a perfect world, we would like to make that shift over. Most of our team still doesn't Mind to work with buyers if they're in their, you know, area geographically where they live, you know, so it's not like we're only focused on listings. I know some teams do that, I get that. But if it's a buyer in my neighborhood or like in my, you know, five, 10 minute drive from me, three, 400,000, I'm personally not going to say no. So we do have a little bit of separation there. But as our team comes up on that 30 year mark, 30 homes or that kind of that year mark with our team, we do allow them to do sphere of influence, past client and if they're just knocking out of the ballpark, guess what, Step up to the plate and we'll get you on some listing appointments. Hey, Dan.

Hey, My name's Nate, I'm a realtor from Philadelphia area. I had a two part question. You briefly mentioned, you know, in that initial conversation, two red flags. And you're not showing them a house. I think you said, could you go into examples of those red flags? And then also sounds like you started right out with showing houses, you know, you'll, you'll go right out and show them. At what point do you then have a buyer consultation?

So our buyer consultation, we want that very day. Right. That's the whole idea around question two of AR 1 through 4, 1 through 5. So that question two is time, right. Do you have time to talk, you know, to see additional homes is what we set it up as. Right. But that home run appointment establishes that sit down to do that buyer consultation. So our goal is to have a buyer consultation at every single showing appointment. If it's either at the house. Like for example, Clay on our team, he lives a little bit further out. So there are no Starbucks Panera Breads, you know, real good places for those. So he does the majority of his right there at the house. Right. Our ultimate goal is to get them to a Starbucks Panera Bread to sit down and just listen to them build rapport and be their best friend for that 15, 20, 30 minutes and understand what they're looking for. Right. So we can service them at a high level. The first part of your question was yes, red flags on the pre qualification. So we're not just hustling out to go show every single house. So the three questions is credit. So if somebody doesn't know their credit, it's probably not that good. Right. This is something you just know, right. Last time you pulled it, right. What was it? When last time you pulled it, what was it? What did it Say why was it this? Right. So if that's a yellow red flag, we're probably not going to show you the house, right? If it's a yellow flag. Yeah, I pulled it. You know, it was like 680. How long ago that? Six months ago. Have you bought a car? Have you done anything since? Nope. Okay, that's fair for us for now. We're still get you in touch with our lender, right. Number two is how long have you been at your current job. You got to be really careful on people who are 1099 employees who might not be able to buy for 18 months. They just started their business, they're doing extremely well. But we're not showing you that house. You can't qualify. Right. And then how long have you been. No, excuse me. How much do you have for your down payment? Cause some people like. Yeah, are you willing to do a down payment? You know when you hear them. Yeah, I got $7,000 saved. Like oh wow, we're not saving this house. That's not good. You know. So those are our three. But we'll give them the appointment up front. I have no problem giving the appointment. So you can always take it away. I just like to have that commitment up front.

Dan, just to clarify, you had mentioned max 100. You mean you meant 100 leads in their CRM at a given time and then if there's more than that they're getting put into the group account. Your lead list to clarify, you said are older leads that are on a dial list that your agents are prospecting to. I missed something. You said earlier how many inbound leads per month maybe per agent. Do you recommend coming in to be able to properly handle.

Absolutely. So with us if you take Facebook out this past month because we spent quite a bit on Facebook just from that test run. So a lot of people are doing that. So we're looking for like one more lead source moving forward. If you take those out, we're probably in that 40ish range.

40 per month per agent per agent.

Which is probably a little bit too many as well. The reason is. So if it's just a general pay per click lead, that's not. I mean I don't like the idea of pay per click leads. Right. So it's like the lowest of the low. But with a realtor.com lead you don't need to talk to too many hand raiser people or to have 40 signed calls come in you. If you can't convert three 40 sign or three out of 40 sign calls, that's a problem, right? We had a little bit additional. But 40 is probably a good, healthy. 30 to 40 is probably a good, healthy number. If they're actually, if you include that in sign calls as well, you can include that because there are people who are reaching out to. Right. I get some people might not qualify, some people have agents, but you have 20 other people that reached out to you about real estate. Hey, Dan, as far as the blast, when a lead comes in, you said you do three days, that they blast. We do 12 days and then we put them in a fishing pond after that. And they're supposed to be contacted three times a day. So what do you guys do for those three days? And do you recommend three days or do you think we should go longer with that or not? Like I said, we do 12 right now for our attempted contact. Yeah, I like that question. So I think a lot of people would agree. 12, 12's too many. I've seen a lot of people with three and I've seen four and five. Once you get over five days, the odds of that lead being properly worked get really slim. Right, so three by three, we do four texts, four calls in the first 24 hours with an eight by eight and kind of that three day vision. Eight calls, eight texts. Is that daily for the three days or just the first day? You know, so we daily. Yeah, first 24 hours, four by four, four calls, four text. Right. You can do more. No one's gonna, you know, get upset if you call it seven, eight times from a couple different numbers. But minimum requirement's kind of four and four, and we're looking for eight and eight, only three days. Okay, you can do more. But that's just something we came up with. Day two, you know, if you hit two, then four, then one and you know, but we're just looking for that eight and eight.

So when you say 100 leads, I have Boomtown. So they have like the Hot Nurture Watch. Does that mean the 100 leads divided into those three categories that your confidence is going to buy? And then the archive section for me right now, because I'm a solo agent, has a, you know, 600 people and I just hired a new agent. If he does the three day cycle and he doesn't convert someone or get an appointment, does he then put into his own archive? How do you combine those?

Yeah, that's a good one. So there's a few things you can do. You could create one account, for example. But to get to your original question, the 100 that would be your watch, nurture and hot. You don't want more than that. It's crazy hard to keep up. And you're probably keeping up with people you don't need to be keeping up with. You could create a totally different account to put those in, but we have one we just call buyer leads. So any lead over three days, the entire team has access to it, right? It gets uploaded. Our virtual assistant goes in daily, pulls all those leads. So from day four until 25, they're under qualify, which would be under Brendan qualify in our team. On day 25, they come back to me and then they're under Dan qualify. So we know they're a little bit older. So for a newer agent, go have at it. On the 25 plus days as we start to get, you know, a little bit more familiar with the system, prospecting, get a little bit better on the phone. But I mean, just with the two of you, you still need something in place, you know, some sort of lead management policy to say, hey, you had this lead for X amount of time, but given it's just you two, and if you're still working with buyers, you gotta give yourself a shot at it at a certain point in time. You can't just let it sit there because if you, depending on how many leads you have coming in, you're gonna have things just sitting all over the place that you're. You'll have access to it because you're probably on the administrative side. But you need to make that clear with your agent as well, saying, hey, after four days, it's game on. Same with the lead that you get. If you're still working with buyers, it has to be uniform across the board. You can't just keep your leads over here. He doesn't have access to them, but they need to go into some sort of dialer so you can dial them at a high level. Especially if you couldn't contact them in three days.

A quick question. If you're getting 40 leads and you're doing a lot of realtor.com stuff, unless I'm missing something about how you're doing it, I mean, you're spending 12 to. At least in my market, that'd be 1200 to 2000 bucks a month per agent. Is that anything like the kind of money you're spending for agent, for leads?

It's pretty hefty, I'll put it that way. We convert at a high level. Um, it's all about knowing your lead, how much you're. You were spending. You are Spending in different lead sources. What your ROI is on different lead sources. I will say Realtor, Zillow, they're all moving their prices up, right? So you have to go deeper with what you have is number one. But I think, you know, just at the end of the day with, you know, spend, you just have to know your numbers inside and out. So if you have other lead sources, and let's suppose you have realtor.com, knowing calls per lead. So I know our rep calls me all the time, say, I got this, this, this, and this. I'm like, I don't care what you have. Just send me the numbers. Right? Cause I know what I need to be paying on our lead sources. And I get it. They're going up in price. I get it. You know, Zillow, everyone across the board is taking advantage of the market. New agents who are spending money, they don't know what the hell they're spending on. So you have to know your numbers. When I tell them, like, I can look at my calls per lead. My look, you're about $6 per lead over. Like, we're not going down that road. You're not going to touch, you know, mess with the roi, you know, so it's. I think it's just knowing your numbers inside and out on what you can spend and where your ROI needs to be to make that lead source, like, crazy profitable, simple, and just, like, repeatable.

All right, let's give Dan a huge round of applause.

Yay. I went over two minutes.

All right, let me just a couple things before we break here. So the whole point of this session, and I think it's one of the things about real estate B school, which is important, and it goes for everyone in this room, whether you're an agent or you're the person paying the bills for these lead sources, or you're on the ops team and you're supporting your salespeople to, like, stop getting in the weeds of these deals, like, go out and convert some. It's all of our responsibility to go really super deep on these lead sources. It really doesn't matter what the lead source is. So to the last question, it doesn't matter what the lead source is. We gave up realtor.com and Zillow 100% about nine months ago, and we haven't looked back. We're spending money on other lead sources, and we're tracking it the same exact way. The point is, if you're in business with folks that their business is to just get the price as high as possible. You better make sure you are. I love, I wrote it down. Anytime you squeeze a lemon, always more comes out of it. That was something that I've never heard that expression. I don't know if it's an expression or Dan Jones just put his name on the quote there. But literally, if you just turn the lemon the other way and squeeze it, I mean, have you ever gotten to the point where nothing comes out of that lemon? So that's the way we need to treat these leads. Is is there more in this thing? And the example, four transactions from a lead, which on 99 out of 100 teams that lead would have been dead. And not on Dan's team, he's like, that lead's not dead. My brother can, you know, Mike can convert it. And he did. And so that's the whole point of it is that more and more, especially in the next 3, 612 months as the market is shifting, you better make sure everyone on your team understands the importance of going super, squeezing the lemon, going super deep on every lead source.

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