A 4 Word Question That Will Increase Your Business by 40%
Mon, Oct 21, 2019
Lead follow-up is a Rainmaker activity. Regardless of how big or small your company is, ongoing and effective follow-up is one of those activities that will make a difference to your bottom line.
How many of you have had assistants tell you, “the leads are no good” or “I can never get a hold of this lead” only to follow up yourself and book an appointment? Even though I grew my own real estate empire to sell more than a home a day and earn multiple millions a year, lead follow up was never an activity I entirely relinquished. While I certainly hired ISAs to help with the process, I myself set aside time each week to call back leads. Why? Because I knew I’d be handsomely rewarded for the time I spent with booked appointments that would lead to closed transactions.
It is true that some leads are difficult to reach, but a good ISA will have ways of dealing with that. Here’s a simple strategy I employed that “magically” increased the number of leads I was able to speak with on any given day.
Most agents schedule their follow up calls for the evening in order to increase their chances of actually reaching anyone. After all, people are at work during the day, right? Why bother calling when no one is likely to be home and you’ll just end up getting voicemail? This is a good assumption – reaching someone during the day usually is hit or miss, but let me ask you how many calls you actually answer during the evenings after a hard day’s work when you just want some family or “me” time? The flip side of this is how many calls do you feel like making in the evening yourself!
So, here’s the magic. Ask your prospects this 4-word question on the online or hotline vehicle you’ve set up to generate the lead (for a report or hotlist) to begin with: “What’s your daytime number”. Now, not all of them will give you their work or cell number, but in my experience many of them are happy to give this to you if you ask. If you don’t yet have an effective website or persuasive online marketing, if you call a prospect between 3:30-4:00pm, it’s likely their kids or a sitter will be there and happy to pass on the parents’ work number.
Without this information, you really are relegated to evening hours and will only have about a two hour window to make these calls (7-9pm). Once you have a lead’s daytime number, however, your follow up window vastly increases, and my students who’ve implemented this strategy corroborate with my own experience that this simple strategy has increased their business by as much as 40%.
Here’s another simple tip. If you use a contact management system, there’s often a color-coding system set up to help you prioritize calls (E.g. red means hot leads, blue means cool and black means cold). Each day, your scheduled lead calls will be shown with hot leads (red) at the top, blue in the middle and cold leads (black) at the bottom. I modified this system slightly by using black to denote prospects for whom I had a daytime number (keeping red for hot and blue for cool). This way, when you have some daytime hours you can use to follow up leads, you simply jump to the black ones and make some money.
Note: Good agents are able to reach 20-25 leads in an hour. Even if only ¼ of these leads turn into business, you’re at least $20k richer for the trouble.
Also note that my Universal Call Back Script is a very powerful and proven part of my system enabling you to convert motivated and qualified leads in 3 minutes or less!
I cannot overemphasize the importance of attending my 3-Day SuperConference. It is at my SuperConference that the most successful agents in the country are born because they gain the knowledge and the will to push themselves out of their comfort zone. Why not decide to be one of them. Why them and not you? If not now, when? Register now at www.TheProctorRealEstateSystem.com