Going the extra mile may be optional when it comes to Realtors selling a home or helping clients buy one, but that’s only going to be true in hot market where homes tend to sell themselves. That’s always been the case to a certain extent, but one aspect of working as a real estate agent in Canada where you need to go that extra mile and hustle to the best of your ability is with real estate lead generation. Improving sales lead management is a part of smart workplace methodology for anyone in sales of any sort, but with real estate the viability of your career may depend on it. Especially in its early stages.
Lead management strategies are necessary and extremely valuable, but of course that has to be preceded by getting more real estate leads in the first place. There’s no substitute for genuine hustle there, and it’s a part of why many realtors will tell you this is a profession where you’re working 7 days a week if you’re successful in your career choice. Anyone who thinks they’re going to get rich quickly as a realtor is likely in for disappointment.
But we won’t sway off track here – what we’re looking at today is effective lead management in real estate and what you can do to have a better understanding of lead tracking best practices. As always using a paid real estate lead generation service like ours here at Real Estate Leads is advisable, but once you have a lead on a new real estate client it is only an opportunity. What you do next with the lead will determine if you can convert real estate leads into clients.
Goal is Always Conversion
We should preface here by saying that the entirety of what will follow in this blog entry is not going to be exclusive to lead management in real estate, and instead it takes a more bigger-picture look at it from the focus of sales in business of any sort. Improving sales lead management is something where there is extensive crossover between industries, although we can also agree that there are always going to be certain aspects of it that are more closely tied into working in real estate.
Sales lead management is the process of turning sales leads into sales opportunities. As a realtor, you want to build up momentum in the pipeline to ensure that your commissions from homes sold or bought through you are increasing all the time. But generating sales leads can be one of the most frustrating parts for agents because many leads fall through the cracks or aren’t even qualified for sales contact.
Real estate sales engines run more smoothly when you optimize major processes, including real estate lead management. What you ideally will be doing here is building up momentum in their pipeline to ensure that revenue growth is steady. Managing sales leads will have your organizing and identifying the stage your leads are currently present in, and then following up accordingly with these prospective clients until the point where it becomes clear they will list with you or agree to work with you to buy a home in Canada.
If it becomes oppositely clear they’re not going to do that, knowing when to dismiss a sales lead in real estate is also a very important understanding for you to have. It’s not an easy on to acquire, because defining what a sales lead actually is can be overwhelming although in real estate it is less so because you can define client prerogatives much more naturally. The prospective client is considering either the sale or purchase of a home in the area of the country where you’re working as a realtor.
Anytime someone comes across any piece of information where you are presented as a realtor with your contact information, there is the potential for developing a real estate sales lead. If your lead management strategies are solid then there is a greater chance you convert that lead into a client. But you need to be judicious in the way you evaluate them and proceed with them, because you can’t have everyone who comes across your information being considered as a real estate lead.
More Informed Determinations
There will always be plenty of ‘feelers’ out there who are more just sniffing around the local real estate market, but that’s not to suggest you shouldn’t be in contact with them and bringing them into your potential client lists. But as always a big part of effective lead management in real estate is being able to discern warmer leads from cooler ones.
The good news is that real estate agents can now turn to tools like real estate CRM management software to work with their real estate leads more effectively. More and more realtors are doing this, and you should be too. If you’re not tech savvy enough to use them, it may be a good idea to hire a real estate agent assistant who can handle this part of your business for you and social media marketing for real estate too. But you will need to be the one who decides which leads go into your CRM for real estate catalogue, and so you will do well to have a better general understanding of sales leads.
A sales lead is a potential customer, and yes that’s a very obvious fact for anyone. Sales leads are people who have shown interest in what you have to offer, but what distinguishes one from the other is that they might not be ready yet to buy or sell a home in Canada through you at this time. Any agent will know there are many different factors that go into determining the readiness of people to make that big move in the real estate market.
And after cool / warm/ hot designation is made then it becomes about evaluating sales opportunities and keeping smarter track of your leads and how they may be progressing in one direction or the other, or staying where they are. Real estate agents will be just like other sales managers for businesses with the need to evaluate sales opportunities and trying to close them as quickly as possible. That’s made more possible with understanding the 5 stages of a sales lead management system, and this also part of lead tracking best practices in real estate.
Sales Lead Management 5 Stages
All of this starts with obtaining the lead, and this is why there’s a lot of value in using a paid real estate lead generation service online. The leads you receive will be qualified first, so there will be at least some degree of fire behind the smoke as the expression goes. You then have the opportunity to reach out and do so in a manner that allows you to judge whether a lead is on the warmer or cooler side, but it needs to be said that online generated real estate leads aren’t the only way of doing this, and at times they may not even be the best way.
There are many different ways you can capture a lead. Marketing campaigns, social media advertising, lead magnets, and others will also qualify. Some realtors will offer downloadable checklists and guides in exchange for a lead’s contact information, and when you’re offering incentives to list or buy through you then what you’re doing is offering a real estate lead magnet.
This is a good way of gathering leads that are more likely to convert, as the incentive will be appealing and perhaps what convinces a ready-to-buy / ready-to-sell to contact you rather than another realtor they may have already had some level of contact with. But even still not every qualified lead will convert, and conversion rates for real estate sales will be lower at certain times based on market conditions and other ones.
To combat your sometimes-low conversion rates, having many leads as part of your lead gen process is crucial — and increases lead qualification rate.
Real Estate Lead Tracking
Once you’re done gathering the contact information for your first group of leads you will move on to the second phase of the management system. What comes next is lead tracking as part of improving sales lead management. Your approaches to real estate lead generation will likely have provided you with cursory information on the lead, and often with their first and last name, phone number, home address, email address, and you may have also been able to gather their occupation too.
Good information for sure, but more is often needed. It is helpful if you can gather behavioral data on your leads too and lead tracking in real estate is good for this too. When you track leads effectively, you over time become better with your approach to these leads. Take any assistance you can get with behavioral data, lead source information, and other metrics so that you can better figure how likely it is that person or couple is going to sell their home and / or buy a new one.
Lead Scoring is also a part of this and it should be incorporated into you lead management strategies. Scoring a lead is just as it sounds; you assign the lead a value that determines how likely they are to be converted from lead into client. Having a common lead scoring system that the entire sales team can use is of the utmost importance to ensure all leads are scored on the same criteria.
You then create your own lead-scoring system based on contact information, opportunity size, lead behavior, etc. Regardless of any design strategy, lead scoring is a means of salespeople with prioritizing certain leads over others, and it’s equally applicable to sales in real estate too.
A lead that signs up for your newsletter and gives you their contact information earns one point. Leads that receive an email and respond get two points. A lead that agrees to speak to you on the phone might get five points. You get the idea with this, but of course it will work the opposite way too. Say a lead unsubscribes to your newsletter – subtract three points. Schedule an in-person meeting with you and then don’t show up – down 10 points.
Eventually you’ll tally up all the lead scores and see which quality leads have the highest scores. This is the group you want to target first while managing sales leads as a real estate agent.
Lead Distribution
Continuing with effective lead management in real estate, what comes after lead scoring is lead distribution. Some real estate agents may also call this lead routing, so you can go ahead and call it whatever you like as long as you utilize the approach.
You can execute a drip campaign if you’re still unsure about your leads. Most qualified leads, especially sales-qualified and marketing-qualified leads in real estate (SQLs and MQLs, respectively) should react positively to a well-executed drip campaign. This is a always part of a conventional sales funnel, but it can apply for realtors too. The information and education the lead will receive via this marketing campaign can push them toward either buying from your company or ending the customer journey early.
Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing involves putting greater focus on a rea estate lead’s pain points, and putting less of one on why you’re a better choice for them to work with. This is encompassed in lead tracking best practices too because sometimes the client needs to see certain obstacles removed, and more often with clients that are looking to buy a home rather than sell the one they’re currently living in.
This is best done by building a relationship with the lead and understanding their issues and expectations. You can then present a solution through products and services that are more tailored to the lead. Nurturing and engaging with leads does not only have to be done on the phone. In-person meetings, as is email, are one such way to push the professional relationship along.
Use SEO for Real Estate Lead Generation
Every realtor should be aiming to have their personal real estate website coming up high in search engine result pages when certain keywords are entered into it. Quite plainly it’s of critical importance these days. Search engine optimization, or SEO, determines which websites get to the top and it’s a big part of improving sales lead management in real estate.
Best practices surrounding SEO continue to change as Google algorithms update. If you can learn about which factors most determine your rank as a company, that’s best, as you can make the necessary changes to boost your site. Implementing the following SEO tactics is also always a good idea if you’re not already doing so while managing sales leads.
You should also have an active social media presence and be posting valuable content regularly. And have an expert looking into the page loading speed of your website too, because prospective clients there are going to be just as impatient as everyone else.
Advertising online is advisable to if you want to get more leads for real estate as an agent. Pay-per-click campaigns through Google AdWords is an especially strong and effective avenue for you to look into. You design your ad and determine where it goes and with PPC you can track where your ‘clicks’ are coming from.
But online advertising has to be directing prospects to an attractive and professional looking real estate website. The site has to be ready to capture the information of these leads so you can move on to the second phase of managing sales leads. Consider advertising and redirecting them to your site through social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have their own paid advertising programs.
Adding live chat to your real estate website is a good idea too. A chat widget will greet your leads as soon as they arrive at your website. If the lead has a question about your company, what you do, and what you sell, they can ask the chatbot and get an informative answer.
Social Listening Too
If you have a good grasps of the key search words that your leads associate with your PREC, you can use social listening tools to generate leads. Lead management software offers various social listening tools that you can use. Monitoring conversations around the local real estate market is a way to be more attuned to which leads are more worthy of you attention and nurturing efforts. Add good email marketing practices to this and add these better leads to priority mailing lists and you will be doing well.
Use lead management software helps you create email sequences to reach customers at the right time, and all email communications should be equally focused on the service advantages you offer as a realtor plus addressing those ‘pain points’ we talked about earlier.
Initiate a Referral System
The greater your array of lead management strategies for real estate, the more likely it is you’re converting ever-greater numbers of leads into clients. With this understanding remember that word-of-mouth marketing still remains the most persuasive form of advertising. This process doesn’t involve the leads directly, but rather, your customers.
More experienced real estate agents are increasingly likely to have long-term, loyal clients and if that’s you then you can ask that they turn to their social circle and recommend you as a local realtor. As a way of showing appreciation for their assistance, you could consider offering the customer something in return, such as an exclusive discount code or even a freebie, as part of your efforts in managing sales leads.
CRM software for real estate is best here too. It involves many different people with their own processes and workflows and prevents any part of the process from going off track or being messier. You can edit, update, and track all pertinent information from one common dashboard, for thousands of contacts. CRMs will also work well for helping you score your leads in the way we talked about earlier.
When you’re choosing one look for key lead management features as:
- Call integrations
- Sales team leaderboards
- Sales reporting and analytics
- Lead scoring
- Email syncing
- Customer interaction records
- Automated data entry logging, follow-ups, meeting scheduling, and more
- Contact management
- Advanced view of the deal pipeline
Choose not go with some type of CRM software for real estate and you won’t be getting the best returns out of your lead management strategies. Not to say you’ll be wasting your time and money on ineffective lead management, but it is very likely there will be legitimately strong real estate leads that are getting past you. There’s nothing to like about that, and especially if you are a new realtor who very much wants to see yourself creating a good income for yourself working as a realtor.
Nothing is guaranteed in this business, and there are going to be peaks and valleys for all realtors depending on market conditions and so many other factors. Effective lead management is going to mean you get more out of those peak times, and of course that make the times when the market swings the other way that much more tolerable. You need to be aiming to convert as many real estate leads as possible, and how you first evaluate and process your leads is going to go an integral part of doing that as often as possible.
