There is No Such Thing as a Bad Lead
Some of you in the relocation or real estate world may only have had an arm’s length view of managing internet leads. You may have observed it being managed by another department in your firm or an outside company, or individually by agents and you may have watched the unfortunate management glean little results. The lack of success with internet leads is usually based on the real estate agents who should be responding to and nurturing those leads, but instead, complain that internet leads are bad. I assure you they are not bad. There is no type of online inquiry from a human being looking at properties that is ‘bad’. The inquirer may not be ready to pull the trigger at that very moment or they may not have enough for a down payment at this time, but they aren’t bad. As long as there is intent, it is viable.
I had a front row seat to developing a process to manage internet leads at a corporate level in 2002. That was the year the company I was working for asked me to start up the internet lead management program. I didn’t know anything about internet leads or the online shopper and I had never managed a call center. Zillow wasn’t a thing yet, and there were not any brokers who had figured out how to effectively manage leads. We had a sister company in Minnesota who was having some success with the leads and we were about to develop a new website for each state that would make it much easier for the consumer to inquire on properties in California, so off we went.
The consumer was starting to show interest in looking at properties online. Unfortunately, the agents were not showing the same interest in responding to those inquiries. We started small with just one staff person in 2003 while the website was being developed. The staff person was responding seven days a week to a handful of leads.
We had no way of knowing what happened to the lead once we gave it to an agent. We were hopeful. As we all know, hope is not a strategy. Until the company bought some tracking and routing software a year later, we had no way to get the lead distributed quickly and to monitor the agent and consumer engagement and activity.
Fast forward to 13 years later. We had evolved the program to have nine full time people working seven days a week facilitating over 50,000 online leads a year in five states. We were earning over $4 million dollars in profit annually in the internet lead department from referral fees and millions more in company dollar retained in each company and paid out to agents in commissions.
I had a hard working staff leading the program who were creative and unafraid to try new things. If something didn’t work, we scrapped it and moved on to the next strategy. But it didn’t come easy. A year after our formal launch in 2003, we had a million dollars invested, some of the senior leadership at corporate tried to kill the program. The market was struggling and they were looking for cuts. My boss and CFO at the time went to bat with me and fought hard to keep the program alive. We succeeded and ultimately managed leads for four other states and even managed leads for some other brands. By the end of year two, we were close to breaking even. It was all upward trajectory of profit from there.
The consumer, agent and the lead aggregators have evolved dramatically over the last 18 years. The pandemic has pushed even more consumers online to search for homes. Many have determined living in a crowded metropolitan area or a small apartment may not be for them any longer. Virtual tours are here to stay and may shorten the house hunting time by giving the shopper a more real viewing experience and allowing the process of elimination to be virtual, instead of in person, which saves the agent time.
There is a lot more data science, artificial intelligence and algorithms that factor in, but some things haven’t changed. Many real estate agents still don’t value online leads, so they don’t engage the prospect. If the prospect isn’t interested in their listing that the inquiry was made on or it is no longer available, then they often ghost the client. So many buyers being ignored. To have a successful online lead management program as a broker, there are some things that must take place.
Brokerages need to:
Contact people fast, really fast, within 15 seconds of the inquiry
Make sure your website is easy to use, is engaging and informative so the prospect has a rewarding digital experience
Get some routing and lead management software, and a call center phone system that all seamlessly integrate
Seek out your team of eAgents who understand and will patiently court and build rapport with the online shopper for as long as it takes
Manage the team of eAgents and actively coach and observe, through management software, their interactions with the prospect
When an agent marks a lead dead, don’t take their word for it. Have your call center reach out to the prospect
Constantly monitor the performance of the agent team and make changes to add and remove team members who don’t perform
Monitor leads seven days a week with extended service hours -24/7 is even better
Have a highly trained staff in a call center environment who are tenacious and are willing to try new things to move the needle on conversion. If you want to outsource it, make sure you have control on how your leads are managed, scrubbed and distributed
Offer easy to use marketing tools and scripts for the agents to generate drip campaigns and keep the dialog and engagement moving forward
Provide best practices to the eAgent team to share success stories and training tips
Communicate with your eAgents regularly and provide report cards and acknowledge successes
Have a decent SEO budget to ensure your company website shows up in searches
Make sure your website has your call center contact information on every page and a call to action button
Develop partnerships with outside aggregators whose only job is gathering online leads and distributing them out to brokers. Some are now working on referral fee based models versus per lead fees
Have a strategic plan and someone at the helm that is motivated to achieve success
I hear real estate agents talk about lead fatigue. Those people don’t have a strategy. The field is crowded with everyone fighting for the same leads, but if you have a solid plan, excellent software and marketing, a strong lead management staff and an enthusiastic and dedicated eTeam of agents, internet leads can be a very profitable business line for a brokerage.
