The Lead Conversion Challenge | Boost Sales by Focusing on the Activities That Matter Most

Welcome to Real Estate Business Builders. I'm your host, Lars Hedenborg, the founder of Real Estate B School. Bottom line, the real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to financial freedom. Traditional brokerages and coaching are designed to keep you running on the transaction treadmill with no exit strategy. While I didn't have any sales, marketing or business building experience when I got.

Into real estate, I was willing to.

Bet on myself and figure it out because my family was depending. Having served over 5,000 families with their real estate needs, I've made every mistake you could possibly make in this business. Through Real Estate B School, I've helped hundreds of agents and team leaders realize their goal of true time and money, freedom and living a life without regrets. If you know there's another level of growth inside of you and you want to learn how to build a highly lucrative lifestyle business, then you're in the right place. You won't find any fluff or hype here on this show. Just real world tools, systems and strategies that work. Let's grow together.

What is up, Real Estate Business Builders? This is Lars Hedinburg, the founder Real Estate B School. Welcome back to the podcast. Today I want to chat about challenging all of you to boost your sales by focusing on the activities that matter most. I actually did a live presentation, live training in our Real Estate Business Builders Facebook group where I gave away 31 scripts. I think that might help you in your business. So jump over to that group and you can check out our free training there and grab a copy of those scripts. So I'm gonna get into this with a quote and if you guys have been listeners of the podcast, you've heard me talk about James Clear atomic habits. But this quote, I haven't really used this one yet. So becoming the type of person you want to become, someone who lives by a stronger standard, someone who believes in themselves, someone who can be counted on by the people that matter to them is about the daily process you follow and not the ultimate product you achieve. So to me, that's encouraging as I seek another level in my business and my personal life, in my relationships and my wealth, in my time freedom, my location freedom, that is just about the daily process. And as long as you wake up tomorrow, you've got another crack at it. So I thought that was really comforting. The game that we play in real estate is one of a funnel. And if you haven't seen me go through this visual representation, just imagine a funnel. You know, we have different lead sources coming in the top and then, you know, it's, it's critical we, we do the work of a real estate agent. And the first four parts of the game aren't related to servicing clients. You know, when I talk about meaningful conversations as the first step, setting appointments as the second step, meeting appointments as the third step, and then getting them to agree to do business with you, signing new clients as the fourth step. You know, the process of finding them a home or selling their home is the fifth step. You know, so this challenge is to really bring a focus on the first four of five steps in being able to scale a real estate business. So the question I have for you, and this is going to challenge some of you, is am I building my business based on proven business principles so that I can consistently grow my sales and income and live a life without regrets? Traditional methods will have you selling homes on evenings and weekends and not being present with loved ones and putting more focus on the deal that's blowing up than your family or your physical body or your relationship with God. Right? So we want to put your business where it belongs as the thing that serves your life rather than enslaves you. So for me, I can't say it was like very graceful. In the early days, my first 10 months in the business, I sold 27 homes instantly working, you know, seven days a week. I was a new husband. We had our first kid in late, in late 2007, our second child early 2010. You know, my first full year, I sold 44 homes. And so it was, it was sideways. I did hire an administrator in early 2008, you know, realizing that I was, you know, involved in so much administrative stuff, you know, 80% of what a real estate agent does, a traditional agent is administrative in nature. So I learned really early on that the things that I focus on have to be front stage related. And those first four of five steps. My promise here, and if you keep tuning in, is to help you put systems in place to focus on the parts of your business that help you increase your net worth and give you more time off so that you can put the things that matter most in your life first? When I talk about, you know, challenging you to focus on the areas of your business that make you the most amount of money, it's because I know that if I can do that, you'll get a massive return. Return on your time. If you've heard me talk about, we have a simple metric in real estate B school, it's called the business Freedom index, where we just divide the money we make by the hours that we work so essentially computing in an hourly worth. When I first did this calculation, it was based on those 27 homes I sold in the first 10 months in the business. Granted, I wasted a lot of money on things that didn't work and I did not have a great split with my first broker that only lasted that first 10 months. But I only netted 37 grand and I worked about 2,000 hours in 10 months. And so if you do the math on that, it's less than $20 an hour that I made in the first, in the first 10 months. And then I committed to making $250 an hour. So I wanted to make $500,000 as an agent and I wanted to work 40 hours a week, which is 2,000 hours a year. So I did the math on that and I quickly saw that most of my time was being spent doing things that don't make me a lot of money. So focusing on, on the things that are going to generate business for you is just like building a muscle. This is not a natural thing to sit down and focus on generating new business and following up with buyers and sellers that weren't ready to go when you had the first conversation with them. Or even putting lead follow up or lead conversion sequences, you know, email and text sequences and video and voiceless, you know, or ringless voicemail drops. There's so much cool stuff we can do now in our lead conversion and follow up systems. But it's all building a muscle. If you're just not used to doing what I'm going to recommend that you do. It's just like anything else. If you don't go to the gym, first time you go to the gym, you're going to try to throw some weight on a bar, do some reps and you are going to feel like crap the next day. Same goes for some of the things I'm going to challenge you with now. And the good news is most agents won't do this. Most agents will not focus on the things that generate massive amounts of income potential on a regular basis. So you will be in a league of very, very few agents that are going to do what we recommend. So in terms of what you need to know is that this is simple stuff and it's not necessarily easy. You know, it's easier to get distracted by your cell phone, it's easier to run errands during the day, it's easier to justify that. You know, you're the only ones that, the only one that can show home homes to your buyer clients. It's easier to do things the way traditional methods will have us do them. And there are some ugly frogs that will have to eat. If you've ever read the book Eat that Frog by Brian Tracy, you'll know exactly what I mean. The ugliest frog that you'll have to eat every day. As it goes from the book. If, let's say you had to eat a frog every day, the best time to eat it would be when you know, let's say it's sitting on your desk and you know you have to eat it. It's first thing in the morning. So when I talk about new business development, it's first thing in the morning, we have to do do this. And it's where the money is made and where the rubber meets the road in real estate and you being able to make a level of income that you never thought was possible. It's linked back to spending more time doing, I hate to say lead generation or prospecting. I call it new business development. There's so many different ways you can go about developing new business. You just need to manage your yourself to sit still long enough every day to put the the time in and the effort in to generate that business. And we're talking about productivity, not being busy. Like I said before, most real estate agents are like chickens with their heads cut off. They sort of get into their day and there's no rhyme or reason with how they spend their time. And we don't want that to be you. It's impossible to become financially free, but also time free and have a level of stress that's manageable. If you're not focusing on these five things that I'm going to go through on a regular basis. Number one is prospecting. And it's only prospecting because new business development didn't work. But I like to call it new business development. It's time blocking, you know, three hours of your day and focusing on generating new business. The second. So P L A N S is the acronym. So prospecting. The second one is lead follow up. So for those 90% that aren't ready to transact or meet with you, you put them into a lead follow up sequence. You know, text, email, video or ringless voicemail sequence. But you also give them calls so you'll follow up with them. A is for appointments. So these are consultations, buyer consultations, listing consultations, you're sitting down and presenting your services and earning new business. N is negotiating a buyer under contract and negotiating a seller under contract, not appraisal negotiations not repair negotiations. The highest dollar productive activity in terms of negotiations is getting that CL under contract. And S stands for systems building systems into your business. Everything you do is a system, right? You have to envision your business running without you, and that'll shift your mindset around what systems are. And then the next point I want to cover here is, you know, protecting time, daily time blocking, you know, it's not rocket science, but if you're not hitting your financial goals, I would bet a ton of money that you're not doing the activities that lead to making money, more money more consistently on a regular basis. And it's just the way that it works. There's no way around it. I've been at this for a decade, coaching for a decade. I've been at real estate since 2007, helped thousands of folks come through real estate B school. And it's, it's the same. They're not consistent, they're not persistent with those front stage dollar productive activ. And here's the thing, this is definitely coming off, even as I'm saying it, a little preachy. But I realize the struggle is real. I realize that some of you are at a point in your journey where maybe you've got young kids, maybe you don't have the support of a spouse, you're restricted in some sort of way. But don't let that be a crutch. Don't let that excuse get the best of you where you're not going to actually do the work, because you do need to be honest with yourself. I'll see guys that, you know, and this is even outside of business, I'll see guys that, you know, they'll say, man, my priorities are my faith, my family. They'll put those two on a pedestal and then they'll be watching like five football games a week. Now, there's nothing wrong with watching football, but if you're going to be like an incredible man of God and an incredible husband and an incredible father, and you're in front or, you know, you're going to a bar or you're in front of a television, you know, Thursday night, two games on Saturday, two games on Sunday, three games on Sunday and a game on Monday, there's not a chance that you can show up at a high level in those other areas of your life. Now, same thing goes for the ladies, right? Whatever your thing is. For me, I've got my own vices. It was Netflix. You know, I would numb out in front of the TV at night for two. Not oftentimes. Three hours, but two solid hours where I'm disconnected from my spouse, I'm not hanging out with my kids. I had to physically remove the television from our bedroom. Like for me, my goal was to not watch tv, but the system I had to put in place was not having a TV in my bedroom. Another quote from James Clear is you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your system. So you have to commit, make a commitment to yourself to do this work, to focus on the dollar productive activities in your business. The P and the L, it's new business development and lead follow up is going to make you all the money in your business and stick to those time blocks. You know, in real estate B school we teach an ideal week. We literally have a calendar that our members can copy, swipe and deploy, put into their Google calendar and model in their business. And you have to have this, you know, this structure in order to have freedom, which is a little bit of an oxymoron that there's freedom in structure. But I've proven it out. And all of our most successful members are taking massive amounts of time off. They're taking vacations whenever they want because they have the structure in their life to do so. And then also, you know, there's a good book by Steven Pressfield. I don't even know if it's worth reading. It's not a very long read, but essentially it's called Turning Pro, where no matter what your results are in the morning, right? So you guard your morning with new business development and lead follow up. You'll have all the business that you need. But you don't stop after you set your first appointment. A pro does the activities regardless of the outcome. Every day a pro is showing up doing the activities. And there's also one thing which most people don't like, but the last point I want to cover here is that you really do need to track your numbers. You have to have a handle on how many meaningful conversations you're having every day, how many buyer consults, listing consults you're setting every day, how many you're meeting, how many you're signing. You're not in the game of high level real estate sales if you're not tracking your numbers. We've got tools for all of that in our world. And so the only call to action here, and the only thing I'll ever, you know, ask you to do is that if you want to go further faster, you can head over to and I'd consider you or I'd really ask you to consider becoming our next case study. So we have something called a case study program. If you go to rebscasestudyprogram.com, you'll see all the details. It is an amazing program. It's six months where I offer a 10 times return on investment. So you put in X dollars, you're going to get at least 10 times more than you would have if you were in our world. So not what you were already doing, but additionally on top of what you were doing. And if you don't get that kind of return, I will give you double your investment back. So it's a Double your money back 10x return on investment you guarantee. So go to rebscasestudyprogram.com and that's all I've got for you today. So do the work that most agents won't do. This is like half the battle when it comes to growing and scaling your real estate business. Much love, much respect. We'll talk to you in the next episode.

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