The Best Real Estate Lead Generation Strategy You'll Ever Learn
Tue, Nov 26, 2019
How to Easily Sell to Strangers (How to automate this ... even if you're an introvert and hate talking to people ... and why this CHANGED EVERYTHING for me!) ... it's not what you think!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: I want to share some ideas with you about what makes a real estate business work if you want to do this well. Let's talk about lead generation which is the beginning of all of this. You can't have a growing business without an abundance of it. So, traditionally when you get into the business you do the typical things: door knocking, cold calling and chasing expireds and for sale by owners, working your sphere of influence, etc.. And, of course, that's only going to get you so far. So, what I realized really early into my real estate career is if you want to be really successful, you have to learn how to sell to strangers.
Now, referrals are great and we definitely have a great system -- a worthy cause referral marketing system -- to help you do a better job of getting referrals from the people you know (your friends and past clients, etc.) but if you really want to grow a huge real estate business, you need to figure out lead generation.
So, of course, the traditional way to do this is with manual, grunt labor. What I figured out real early in my real estate career is that, number one, I hated doing that stuff and I had to figure it out -- I needed to create an automated way to generate leads to get buyers and sellers to come to me. And number two, I figured out that you do that by offering prospects what they want – and that does not mean talking about you and how great you are. It doesn't mean running advertising that promotes your listings … because we know that doesn't work very well. I mean, let's be honest, in all the years you've been selling real estate, what percentage of the time when you get an ad call or a sign call, does the buyer say, ‘Wow, I love this house’ and then actually go over and buy it? That’s not what usually happens, is it? What usually happens is that 99% of the time the prospect eliminates the property as either too big, too small, in the wrong location or whatever. So, what do we do? Well, we learn how to convert those leads. We learn the skill of call conversion and ask them, ‘Well, what are you looking for?’ and then we try to find that perfect home for them. And here’s the thing – the perfect home we find for them is usually not even one of our listings.
So, what I learned to do early in my career was to open the funnel and really figure out what it is that people want. Instead of making a narrow, tiny offer, I learned to make a big, universal offer to prospects. I learned how to offer what they really wanted, and that changed everything for me. I go from being a starving real estate agent selling a couple dozen homes a year … now, hit pause here for a minute. You might be thinking, ‘Gee, Craig, that's not too bad – selling a couple of dozen homes per year.’ But you know this from your own experience. It's really not a great living because you have to give up so much to get it. So, stay with me. I go from an overworked real estate agent to figuring out direct response marketing, figuring out follow up systems, funnel systems, and within 24 months I became the top RE/MAX agent in the world … which was pretty cool because I was still in my twenties and living at home with my parents at the time!
So, that’s what launched me on my path to becoming a real student of direct response marketing, and that’s exactly what we teach agents to do – we teach you to really treat this like a business, to understand the science. And lead generation really is a science.
Let me step back a bit and go back to this idea of offering prospects what it is they really, really want -- in making a wide funnel. You see, traditionally, when you put all your money and effort into traditional real estate marketing, what happens? Not much! So, think about it. With traditional marketing you’re kind of baiting prospects with something they really don't want – i.e. the listing you have. But what if we did this instead. What if we looked at your marketplace and we did some research into what IS selling: what category of home on the market is really selling -- what price range, what neighborhoods? It’s really easy to do this on MLS. People in other industries would love to have access to the kind of information we have as real estate agents. We can get access to sales in different zip codes, on different streets, and we can determine the highest turnover streets and then target them.
This is a very important part of what I call my Triple M formula. You’ve got to figure out the right Message. You've got to find the right target Market and you've got to deliver that message to the right target market using the right Media. If you get all three of those right, you’ll get the right results. So, one of the things I did earlier in my career was to begin to advertise and promote high demand areas. Let me give you an example. In my town there was an area called Glenway Estates Golf course, and what made that area unique was that there weren't many homes under a million dollars, so I advertised a list of Glenway Estates homes under under a million dollars. You see, what we want to do is offer something that's high demand but also make it sound like something the prospect can't just Google and find on their own. These days buyers have access to all kinds of information. So that's the idea -- you do a little bit of research on MLS to find out the unique target areas that have highest demand and then work to make it easy and nonthreatening for prospects to contact you. What that means is that instead of asking prospects to call a real estate agent, you drive them to a landing page or a recorded hotline, some type of funnel that'll automate it. You'll get three times as many prospects that are willing to raise their hand and come into the funnel that way than if you give them the direct phone number.
Now, of course, you can do some branded advertising too – sending prospects to your cell or office number or branded website -- and the argument for branded type advertising where they know they're contacting you, the real estate agent, is they'll be more predisposed to working with you so you'll generate higher quality leads. But we're going to teach you how to do both. You're going to do branded advertising where you’re positioning yourself and your unique selling propositions, and you're going to do less branded advertising where your goal is to actually fly beneath the consumer’s advertising radar.
Now let's talk about what you're going do with these leads when they come in. For now, let's just assume that I know what I'm talking about and we can teach you how to figure out what's in high demand in your marketplace and show you how to compel these buyers and sellers to come to you through your automated marketing system. That’s still not good enough because now you have to follow up with the leads -- you need to have a specific follow-up system. So, what is that system? Well, first of all, nothing beats the actual phone call that you make to the prospect. We have other automated ways that will enhance the follow-up call, that will help you do a better job with follow-up through emails and text messages and direct mail mailings. But let's talk about the phone call that you're going to make to prospects -- that very first phone call. The idea behind it is that we want to determine the motivation and timing of prospects. That's all we’re really trying to do. I didn't understand that earlier in my career. I would be on the phone for 15 or 20 minutes with a prospect and I might know an awful lot about them, but I didn't really know their true motivation and timing. It’s important that you get this script down so you can determine the motivation and timing of the prospect within 2-3 minutes or less.
Here's why that's important. We want to teach you how to generate a lot of leads. And if you have to spend, say, 15 minutes with each prospect on the telephone, you'd only be able to speak to four prospects in an hour -- and that's just not good enough. So that's another thing I spent a lot of time on earlier in my career. I tested and re-tested to figure out the best qualifying questions to ask of the prospect.
What you’ll find when you nail this is that your prospects will fall into three categories. When you ask these series of questions, you need to do it correctly. You're going to determine either that the prospect is ready to buy or sell now (in which case you arrange to meet with them as close to now as possible) – and we teach you exactly what to say and do to make that happen by making the right offer – by understanding what they're looking for and making exactly the right offer. The second category are people that are not ready to buy or sell today. You’re not going to try to force an appointment with somebody that's not ready to buy or sell today, but they might be three months or six months out, so you're going to follow up with them with a very powerful follow-up system. Think of it this way. If I gave you a post-dated check for $10,000 for two or three months down the road, you would keep that check, right? That’s what these down the road prospects represent – a post-dated check -- so you're going to nurture these future prospects. And this is important because most of the buyers and sellers you speak to will represent future business.
So, you’re going to be hunting for now business and you're going to be planting the seeds for future business. And, of course, the third category are the prospects that you determine are just not motivated or their timing's way off into the future (E.g. they say two years down the road and you're not going to follow up with those prospects.) For me, in my database, I only followed up with prospects that were within one year of doing something, so they received my newsletter, my email, my voice broadcast messages, my text messages etc.
So, you see, there's a science to this. To be successful in any business all you really have to do is find somebody that's already been successful and copy them. And this is what we teach -- what's been proven to work, not only me, but thousands of Craig Proctor members over the last 20 years I've been doing this. We have a system for generate the leads, a system to convert the leads, a system for face-to-face appointments, and a system to convert these clients into raving fans.
The average income for Craig Proctor System Members Is OVER $700k. Over 100 members earn OVER $1 MILLION in Annual GCI. MANY earn annual GCI of $2 MILLION. Some are even about to break $10 MILLION This Year. Why them and not you? If not now, when?