What to Expect from Lead Generation

Here is what to expect from your lead generation. Lead generation is not a get-rich-quick approach, so keeping in mind that leads can take six to 12 plus months on average to convert. Now it’s not necessarily going to take you six months. This is just the average. So it’s very likely that you could potentially generate a lead that is ready to transact much sooner than that six-month mark. Now, many of your leads are going to be in that research phase of their home search. So they’re going to require a lot of nurturing and followup to get them to that point of conversion. So again, looking at that six to 12 months plus, we have to nurture them throughout that period in order to gain that transaction. So you’ll need to build trust by following up, educating, and offering value without expecting anything in return.

So this is where many people, not all, will lack is their lead isn’t transacting right away. So to them, it’s not worth their energy. But how I like to put it as every lead in your system will transact. It’s just a matter of when and with who. So regardless of when they plan on transacting, we want that who to be you. And so we can encourage that by essentially adding that value and regular follow-ups. So the regular follow-up, the nurturing, are going to result in a higher conversion rate year over year. So the average is going to be about 1% your first year. So 1% of all your leads within that 12-month period, you should be able to convert. Now, some we’ll definitely achieve higher than that 1%, but the more you’re in your system and the more you’re following up with the leads, the higher that percentage is going to be.

Now, you will get bad leads. It is a given. It does not matter what industry or what provider you’re using to generate your leads with or for. There’s always going to be individuals that provide invalid contact information regardless. So one thing to consider, however, is that not all bad information is intended. So yes, you will get leads where it’s obviously they intended to give you that bad information. However, some you’re looking at it and it looks like it’s valid information, but it’s not working. So leads will accidentally mix up letters or digits in their contact information. And this is just simply because we’re really quick to act these days. We always seemed to be in a rush and your leads aren’t going to be any different. So they’re quickly doing stuff, and so it’s not uncommon that these errors and invalid information is by accident. It’s not intentional.

So [inaudible 00:03:01] that deliberately provide bad information are providing that same bad information on any site that they register. And so when leads often, they’re looking for real estate, they go, they register and they register all over the place because they’re trying to find what they’re looking for, not realizing that basically everywhere you go has the same information. That’s something we are aware of, not necessarily the lead is. But the benefit that you have is you could potentially retrieve valid information via the phone validity tool. So you have that up against your competition. They don’t necessarily have that tool to be able to retrieve such information. So let’s just take a quick look at that so that you can see essentially how this could potentially work for you.

When you receive a lead with incorrect information, it’s not always intentional on the lead’s behalf. So keeping in mind that people are so fast paced these days, that we do things quite quickly and most commonly the result of that is an error. So on this specific lead, we’re looking at a number that’s potentially incorrect. We’ve got a phone number that’s unknown. The system won’t automatically mark it as an invalid number. And then the email in this situation is also invalid. So you can pass to see if you can retrieve valid information with these details here.

So let’s say we’re looking at the email address first. So I’ve seen several cases where a lead will spell their name incorrectly either by missing a letter or two or swapping two letters. They just get them mixed up. Or they spell things like Gmail incorrectly or Hotmail. They get the A and the I mixed up, or in this case where we’re seeing instead of an M at the end, it is an N. So of course the email is going to bounce. So what you are able to do is click on this little edit button here, and you can make the edit that you think matches. So often enough, again, you’ll have the lead’s name, but spotting sometimes those simple errors will assist you.

So once we click the edit and make the adjustment, we’re just going to click anywhere outside of that email box to save those adjustments. Now, what we can do right away is click on this little envelope and that there is going to let us know if the email actually delivers. So you could essentially click on this and wait to see if that adjustment that you made resulted in a valid email. So that’s one trick that you can utilize on the leads that you have. Now, in many cases, when a lead provides an incorrect number, and it’s not intentional, it’s really hard to determine exactly where the error is.

The only way that you can really determine right out of the gate is when it has to do with the area code. So if the area code, in this case, just based on the area, is supposed to be 647, instead in this case, this lead may have been acting quickly and put 674. So what we can do is click on the little edit button again and go 647. Now depends, again, we’re going to click outside the box to save those changes. Now, what we can do to see if we actually obtained a valid phone number is sending that lead a text message from the system. Or of course you can try calling it with that updated area code. So depending on when your lead registered, perhaps they’ve already received an email from you. You could send the follow-up message. So in your SMS tab, just going up to SMS over here, and then clicking on the plus sign, you’re going to see two responses.

So this is the first text message that generally goes out. And this is the follow-up message that goes out. So here we can send that followup message being like, “Hey, I sent you some listings to your email address. Let me know if you got them,” that sort of thing, and shoot that off to that lead right away. In just a moment you’ll be able to see if that message delivered resulting now in a valid phone number. So some changes you can make in the system. They’re easier to spot. Again, if you have an invalid email, but valid phone number, leverage that phone number and vice versa. If you have an invalid email or phone number, but valid email, you’re going to leverage that.

Now for those who do give you a bad number, so maybe you made the adjustment, or maybe it’s obvious it is a bad number, you’re simply going to click on the phone icon to mark that as an invalid number. Now, the advantage that you have is when a lead is deliberately giving everyone bad information, it’s exactly that. It’s everyone that’s getting that bad information. However, if you have [inaudible 00:08:08] and you’re on the automated platform, you could potentially turn this invalid number into a valid number just by marking this as invalid.

So if this lead here goes and they’re still receiving listing emails from you, we could then click on the listing email. And if we view more details, what you’re going to notice is that there’s a little pop up here. So it completely locks the screen. So that lead is then forced to give you a valid phone number. So they can’t just give you another fake number because there’s going to be a four digit verification code that gets sent to the new number that they provided, which they have to then put into their phone or into the screen here.

So if I’m just going to do this here, I’m going to get a four digit code that gets sent to me, and I’m going to have to plug that into the website. So this is just me pretending that I’m the lead. So 4220. I have to now plug that into the website in order to unlock it. So you have that advantage against the competition. And then when we go back into the lead, we’re also going to be able to see that the phone number has now been deemed as valid and in the notes and call section we’re also going to see in some cases number didn’t change. So it didn’t change anything, but in some cases you will see where the number changed from and to. It’s not doing it because I really didn’t even change the phone number. So those are a couple advantages and some tips and tricks that you can utilize to obtain or retrieve the valid information from your leads.

So now that we’ve learned what we can do with some of that incorrect information, one thing to note is that not every lead is going to be ready to talk to you just yet. All right? So learn how to handle objections. So the most common objections are going to be the, “I’m just looking,” or, “I have an agent.” When a lead responds with that, we need to continue to ask questions to dig a little bit deeper. Sometimes you will ask questions for an, “I’m just looking,” lead and actually determined that they are planning a move within the next three months. That’s not someone that’s just looking on your end. That’s somebody that’s actively looking. So you could always ask a lead like that, “How long have you been looking for?” Or, “Do you have any future goals or timelines to make a move, perhaps later this year or next year?”

So offering some questions will result in answers providing you with some level of an approximate timeline. The, “I have an agent,” is also common and it’s very easy for a lead to tell you that they have an agent because the average individual is going to know at least two to 10 agents, just through friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, things like that. So it’s very easy and it’s one of the fastest ways to get you guys off the phone. So again, ask questions. You can ask, “How long have you been working with your agent for?” Something simple like that, or, “Who are you working with? I work with so many agents in this area.” Asking a question like that will reveal the honesty of that lead, and many of them aren’t actually in contract. It’s because they are so early in their home search, they just know that that’s a great way to get you guys off the phone.

Many leads will screen their calls, just like we screen our calls. We don’t answer every single call that we receive. And if you do, I highly doubt it. We screen calls. We don’t answer calls sometimes for people that we know. So we can’t expect that a lead, just because we’re calling, is going to answer. And just because we called them now three times that they should be answering. That’s not the case. And many of them just aren’t ready to talk on the phone, but again, a lot of them are screening. Are you just calling at times when they’re not available yet? So they are not garbage leads. They will eventually answer. So we just have to keep calling and being consistent with our calls in attempt to get them on the phone.

So we do create filters for you in the system that will help maintain that consistency for you because it creates that sense of, we just need to figure out who it is that’s trying to get ahold of us, right? It’s that unknown. We can determine that somebody is trying to get ahold of us. We just don’t know who. So the curiosity will tend to get the best of us. We don’t encourage person leaving a voicemail. Now this is totally dependent on the market that you’re in. Some of you guys in smaller markets may have more success with leaving a voice message, but in larger cities and metropolitan areas, again, going back to the fact that the lead may have registered all over the place and that they’re just in that research phase, if you identify yourself in a voicemail right out of the gate, you may never get that lead to answer the phone because they don’t feel the need to talk to you yet because they’re three months out or six months out.

But regardless, you want to know that information, that they’re six months out, and get a better understanding of the reasoning behind their mood and their motivation so that you can better assist them and educate them and guide them through that process. So some will avoid your communications just by you leaving a message, and some will go as far as blocking your number so you’ll never get a hold of them with your call attempts. So those are just a couple of tips and tricks and what to expect from your lead generation. Again, your trainer that you have here with agent locator can help you maneuver through the system, create a follow-up plan using filters so that you have a consistent flow and follow up plan so that you’re gaining more conversions and less leads end up slipping through the cracks.