How to Convert Leads at the Highest Level - Part 2

Welcome back to the Business Freedom Podcast. This is part two. And I'm calling this series how to Convert Leads at the Highest Level. This is a guy that I've known for about six. No, actually he joined my team. He was on my real estate team probably back in 2010. He joined maybe 2011 on my team for a couple years. Newly licensed, went on his own to build his own empire and did it on his own for a couple years. I helped him and, you know, just an awesome story. 300 transactions last year, out of production for two years and just a cool cat. And so if this is the first time you're listening to the podcast, this is part two. So you want to back up at least one episode before moving too much forward here because it won't make sense. So the only thing I ask is for you to share this episode, share the Business Freedom Podcast and leave us a five star review. This is Inner Circle members only content. And so that is my ask for you. Stay tuned for part two.

The next document we put in here is just our seller questions. They're pretty basic, but the one question, if you're not doing this already, you have to do every single appointment that you set in your office. You have to ask the question. If the numbers make sense, we high five on the marketing. Are you going to be ready to get paperwork signed to get your home sold, get your home listed, Whatever the case is, everyone on your team has to have that language, right? So let's plan on getting paperwork signed if this. Are you going to be willing to do this? Okay, I'm not sure how many of you guys are actually recording your training, but that's probably the biggest thing that we started. Bless you. In 2016, recording every single training call. So everyone has an option to go through and listen and then especially for newer agents to go back in and train. So if you're not recording, there are several apps that do that. We host everything in our Dropbox account to make everything very simple. So if you're not doing that already, you need to start doing that and it's very easy to do. All right, what else we got here? So lead management policy. This is a whole conversation in itself, right, that I'm not sure what it looks like in your world, but a few questions you have to ask yourself is, and I'll give you a few things that we do is how many texts, how many phone calls are going to happen in X amount of time? First 24 hours, first three days. How long do agents get to keep leads? I know, I've had this conversation with several of you and our team came up with three days. What's the benefit? Why the hell are you taking the way lead in three days? You have three days to convert it and if not, it goes into the pond and the whole team has access to it. What are the expectations of that lead in the first three days? How many dials, how many calls does that person get? How many emails are we including? Bomb. Bomb. But that's a lead management policy. That's not a lead manager policy. That's a broad rushing of what's expected of each lead. Right. What does that world look like if you don't have anything documented for your team of the expectations? Knock on the door of that. And that's a really good homework assignment. And make sure everyone's on the same page with what's expected. So follow up on appointments. Lars, I love how you put these cookies in here. That's freaking awesome. So appointments and tracking, that's our second second topic here. So why is this important? So tracking is a pillar. It's a structure of a business. If you don't know how many leads you're getting on a monthly basis, how many leads your agents are getting on a monthly basis, how many appointments were set on a monthly basis, how many dials set MET sign. If you don't know those numbers right, you've got to start tracking. Second, what is the language throughout your office around set MET signed? Let's get back to the whole team buy in. Every person on the team has to buy into the language around set MET signed. Closing coordinators. You don't have a job. If we don't write offers, we don't put listings under contract. You don't have a job. Right. If you're doing your huddle call in the morning high five, you know your other your team members for saying, hey, good job on the three contracts over the weekend. There's no reason why everyone can't participate in SETT MET sign. And if you don't have a culture around SET MET signed, reconsider what your culture is Prospecting. Set MET signed. Here is our scorecard. This is in the member portal. I know Lars has talked about this several times on Monday calls and it took us a while to incorporate this, longer than it should have. And I don't want that to happen to you. If you haven't incorporated the team scorecard, that is a must action item for you when you leave the intensive. This is a way you can coach at a really high level. But you know your numbers around set, met signed. We went through a month on our met to set where we took. Started taking a little bit of a dip and like, oh, let's regroup, let's revisit why we didn't get listings signed, buyer signed, but it has your data and you know who's doing what and what we need to improve on as a team. So if you're not using this, you gotta. I personally ignored it for about two years and we did it a little bit differently. Same concept, but this makes life extremely easy. And Lars has my mind doesn't work this way. I just like looking at the numbers. He's made it very easy for all of us to do that. So in that sales appointment tracker, it does offer, like I said, an opportunity for coaching. What are the next steps on an appointment if we didn't get it signed? If it's a listing, what are the next steps? And we can track that once again, tracking is that foundation of every single business, especially the real estate. And knowing what happened on appointments because me personally, I don't want to meet with 100 buyers or 100 listings to sell 30 houses. 30%, that's not good. Why not meet with 80 and sell 65? That sounds better. But I need to know what I need to work on. And as a team leader, if you're not holding your team accountable right on set, met signed, you're doing a disservice and it's something we can change fairly quickly. And you have your data around lead sources to kind of follow up on how many appointments we're getting as well. So opportunity to improve and hold each other accountable. I love the idea of doing set, met signed. You know, it's transparent. It's three words. That's not simple. When you what the hell is more simple than set med signed. So what happens after an appointment? So the last page, I think it's the last or the second last page on the handout. This kind of goes into a lead management follow up or what happens. So we came up with a follow up protocol and you can see our 1 through 9 here. And we have a buyer loyalty, signed, set the next appointment to preview homes. These two are number one and two. They're by far the most important, right. We want every single person we work with, loyal to us, right. To work with on the buyer side and hopefully the seller side as well. So we need paperwork signed number two is set the next appointment, let's suppose they're a little bit in a rush. That's Fine. We gotta talk to them a little bit. The second most important thing before leaving. A buyer appointment. Have the next appointment. When are you available to preview more homes? I don't care if there are no more homes to see. I don't care. I just want another commitment that you associate yourself with with me to go preview homes this coming Tuesday when you're off. We'll find something to look at. Right. But you gotta have that next appointment. A few of the other things that we do are Starbuck gift cards to every person we meet. We'll get their mailing address and we'll send them a Starbuck gift card. Thank you. We'll add them to our monthly mailer list so they see our agents pretty faces for the next six months until they're ready to buy or list matrix searches set up that says Tiger. We're with Boomtown. It needs to be updated. So search is set up added to suite 16. Top 50 to be determined. Bombbomb videos. We're big on Bombbomb. The DAR is our daily activity record. There's several things you can use but basically it's a daily tracker. So that goes on our DAR. I know our team loves our DARs. Woo hoo. Then all contact information into Boomtown that says Tiger and everyone. So if there's a husband, wife, do we have everyone's contact information? Cause it's nothing we worse than all of a sudden on the buyer side it's like oh yeah, yeah, my wife's been working with an agent as well and we just put an offer on this house and like where, where am I at? Get everyone's contact information. Right. And then finally we have text them. Make sure everyone has your cell phone number and you're communicating. So they have, they have access to you through text, email and then phone as well. So that is our protocol one through nine. But if you don't have something like this to hold your team accountable just to a simple appointment, right. And some sort of measurable on how far how well we did something to consider. Right. You might not have one through nine. Maybe you have top four top five things that needed to happen. Right. But you have to have something like this to help them gauge. But if you don't have a next appointment, you don't have a loyalty agreement signed. We're probably walking down the road of a dead appointment. Right. So this is our email template that goes out for seller appointments. This has been, I hate to say game changer. I'll say game changer. For us to know what Happened to every single appointment. So an appointment is set. This is for our seller side. This is a copy and paste says canned response that goes out to the agent and then we do listing appointment at Mahome Carolinas. So everything is documented. Now in the tracker there is a way to have a form that goes out. Personally I like having an email just so there's a paper trail and continuous communication to know who needs to do what. So I'm not going to tell you what to do in regards to tracking but this is what we do. So we go this goes out. So let's suppose Brendan sets listing appointment. This goes out. You notice the basic information is at the top and then the next two questions, the most important, will all decision makers be at the appointment? And then number two, if everything looks good marketing we high five. Are you ready to get paperwork signed? So it forces if I'm setting the appointment and I'm sending this out, I better have this information because whoever's going the appointment is going to want to know hey, are they ready to sign paperwork or where are we at? So this is the template we use. This is the email that goes out the next day. Either the agent or SRI in our office will send this out. Was it set or excuse me, was it met, was it signed? Additional notes if the isa, if Brandon needs to do anything on this appointment to follow back up agents to do SB&TY's a Starbucks gift card, was that sent out or do you want anything else sent out on your behalf? You know, do you want to do some cookies, brownies, whatever the case is, if we didn't get the appointment, let's go ahead and get next action items. This is what we do for our buyer appointments. This is an email that goes out to buyer appointment. So if we went to my email right now we searched buyer appointment at Moth Carolinas you'll see every single appointment that went out. And the reason once again we do this is you have communication. It might go six, seven, eight messages long. But that buyer never gets forgotten, right? So we have it in the tracker and we have communication and those notes go into boomtown right on the back end as well. So name, contact information, price range, pre approved? Yes, no. And if not, we see how many red flags they have. What's your credit? Most people don't lie about their credit. Some will. How much do you have for down payment? Number three, how long have you been at your current job? Three simple questions. So if you get two yellow flags, hell we're not showing you the house Right. We still want to get you in front of our lender beforehand and then just some motivation questions to make sure we're all going deep on those sort of appointments. This is the follow up email that comes out the day after the appointment. Met signed additional notes. Boomtown agent to do Brendan to do as well. I hate to say crazy simple, that's about as basic as you're ever going to get on a follow up email. And an expectation that if Brandon's going to set you an appointment and sit there fish all day long for appointments, this is the minimum expectation that we have of our agents to say hey we need the communication. We where are we at? And to me with this I feel that we have gone deeper as a team with all of our appointments to make sure and we don't want our agents to work with 100 different people to sell 40 houses. Like I said earlier, why not cut that to 2/3 and sell double the amount on top of that. So that's our follow up. Right amount of leads. I like this one. So I struggled with this one for a while cause I wanted crazy amounts and I just memorized every single person lead that I had and I literally can tell you like what was going with people in 2011, 2012 and like I know their whole family, their situation, you know, they might not ever moved here, but I just memorized and I had like 150, 160 people, right. Maybe more that I was working, talking to. It's too much. Right. So what is the right amount of leads? So we cap our team off at 100 and then most of our team floats around. Actually it's a little bit less than the 60 to 70. It's about that 50 to 60 mark. But if you go deep with 50 or 60 people, that's a ton of houses. And if we continuously add to the better people and push those other c and kind of non buying people we don't have to follow up with eight or nine times. But keeping it simple and having a certain amount of people we follow up with. But the ones we're going to follow up with, we go crazy deep, ask good questions and service that lead at a high level. The lost soul number three Sign calls and sign call conversion. So I've been on a few training calls with you guys and I appreciate it. You guys made me feel not as bad as I should have with some of you guys numbers. But signed calls is probably the one thing that people forget about all the time and it's sometimes some of the easiest business so hopefully everyone's running open house every day, getting some good phone calls on that yard, sign conversion, voice pad or something similar to that to get the phone ringing. But in 2017, we did 11 deals, right? And our business, something that we're not crazy proud of, but it is what it is, it's how we structured and we're going to be shifting that over the next few years. We're 70% buyer business, 30% listing, so we didn't have a crazy amount of listings. So I knew we could do better than 11, and it was still a lot better than a lot of other teams. But it's the one thing, if you start and we'll talk about some of our action items around that is the one thing as well on the signed calls, if you start taking those seriously, answering those at a high level. And when someone calls in, they say, ring, ring. Hello. Hey, I was calling on the price on 123 Main Street. If you're just going to say, yeah, it's 300,000, all right, have a good day. Why even pick up the phone, right? They're there calling us. They're easy conversion. So some of the things we have to do. This is one of the most non sexy things about real estate that if you do this, not only everyone is held to a higher standard, but you will convert on these sign calls. So listening to every single phone call that comes in, I did that a lot earlier this year. I haven't as much in the last month or two. But when you listen to these calls, it's a real eye opener to understand what your team needs to work on regards to conversion. Maybe it's just answering the phone live. You might be surprised when you go into, you know, we use dialog tech and you see like, yeah, we had a 30, you know, 30 calls out of the last hundred were answered live. You know, that's not our numbers, but at least you have that transparency what happens to each call. So I know it's a pain to go through and say, oh shit, we had eight phone calls yesterday, Six ransomware live. Let's figure out what happened on every single call. And is there anything we could have done better to convert that and is it even a dead lead? Which we'll talk about here in a second. So it offers a chance to actually coach or around sign calls. Sign call conversion, then recycling leads. This is something one of our agents, Mike on our team, he had one earlier this year Becca really struggled with. It was a sign call that came in and this lady was a Real bully on the phone. And she wasn't very nice. Becca's like, oof. I don't want to have anything to do with her, okay? And she told us about what she had said and kind of the situation, and we're like, ah, give it to Mike. Everybody's like, ha. Yeah, give it to Mike. He's a bulldog as well. And they'll get along great. Sure as hell. Enough. Like, she wasn't gonna do anything with the lead. She sent it back out, sent it to Mike. He converted, sold her a house. Actually, I think it was a townhome. But then she had property, 10 acres to sell, and then a house with 10 acres, and then he gets a referral out of it as well. So four transactions off a dead lead. Just because you are struggling with the lead doesn't mean it goes to the trash. If you struggle with a lead, it has to be recycled, even if it's just somebody right beside you. Hey, I just talked to this lady. Maybe she's having a really bad day. But she told me she had an agent, and I really don't believe she did. She ended up hanging up on me. She was busy. I can try it again tomorrow, but if you fail again, just slip over to somebody else. That's the kind of recycling the culture of just prospecting and give it another shot. It's not a dead lead. Have some fun with the scorecard. So I like this. We're actually probably going to steal this. This is what Dave Hook did. So we had this conversation probably about two months ago, and this is what him and his team came up with. And this is basically a scorecard for sign calls. And I want to let Dave actually talk about this. I know a little bit about this. He kind of walked me through it. But this is like, having fun with it because I realized this is boring stuff. This is really boring. But I'll tell you this, that we went deep with our lead sources and going deeper with leads, recycling leads, going deep with our sign calls, and it's allowed us, literally with the same. Almost the same exact spend that we had year to date last year in our marketing. We didn't increase. We're up almost 250,000 GCI. That's allowed us to make two or three hires to make everyone's life on the team easier to grow, to have that additional isa, to have that heavy hitter, to set more appointments, to make everyone's life easy. So you don't need to spend more money to do bigger and better things. It's things like this, right. Taking the boring things and having fun with it, making competitions out of it and just going deep. So Dave, if you want to, there's a mic. If you want to, we got a catch box and all.

It's not. There he is.

Oh, look at you.

Yeah. So I just want to give a lot of credit to Dan because what he said in the beginning was that he had a business that didn't have the benefit of, of, of SOI business. And our business has a lot of SOI business. And he, he and his team have built really a machine off of buy side leads. And I just, I wish I see that as a huge opportunity for my team because, you know, when we started our team we didn't have, I mean 90 some percent of our business was from soi and so to follow in his footsteps and use some of these simple scripts and dialogues has been really helpful. I was my team and I sat in a conference room a couple months ago and looked at our sign call conversions from last year and we have five total settlements the entire year. And we looked at our appointments set each month and you know, they were reflective of five total settlements the entire year. And the reality was we had the same amount of signed calls as Dan's team and his team was tripling, quadrupling or five times in the amount of settlements we were getting from sign calls. So it was a huge awakening for me. And so what we did, and I think it's been helpful we just started it is we developed a wildly important goal to just double. So not a huge, we're not where Dan is this year, but just double our sign call settlements from 5 to 10 by the end of the year. And then we're going to go on a little trip that the team picked out. But as a result we developed a scoreboard which in Dan's ninja protocol, the first thing that he said was just a simple script. When somebody calls in, hi, this is Dave Hook. You know, what questions do you have? And is there a good time to preview a home? That's something we weren't asking. It's a really, really simple question. And if you notice on the left there, we really use the baseball analogy. So a single for our team, if you hit a single is. Did you say those words? So John and Sinjan are back here on my team and if a telemarketer calls in, Sinjin is going to say, what questions do you have and when do you want to see a home? It really doesn't matter. Like did you say that? I don't care who it is calling, they're going to get a single. So you can see on the Left, Syngen has 10 out of 10 singles hit. So the agents, whether they said those words on the call is reported every single day now and then. Did they hit a home run appointment? Dan's version of a home run appointment is in there. We don't get those on every call. You can see they're a lot lower. But here's the results of it is in August, which is the first time we tracked it is in 2017 we set three appointments from signed calls and in 2018, here in August we set 18. So huge improvement for us. I'm excited to see what September and October and November and the rest of the year bring. So thanks, Dan.

That's cool, man. That's. My mind doesn't work that way. That would just pinch the system. You know, mine's like, hey, let's just hit it hard as hell, let's change these numbers. And then that's the creativity. Like we're going to pinch something similar to that, which is really cool. So thank you for sharing.

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