02/15/2022
Safeguarding Company-generated Leads: What Gets Managed Gets Measured
With most buyers and sellers beginning their real estate experience online, I only see online lead buying increasing in the future. And it’s not cheap! Companies trust that those expensive online leads are being handled as instructed. If lead generation is a significant expense for your company, let’s verify an appropriate ROI. Adding one more step to the process may provide a higher ROI to both the agent and the brokerage. What is that step, you may ask? Read on to find out!
To ensure agents are successfully incubating online leads, you need to understand what is going well and what can be improved. With online leads, the interaction with a potential buyer or seller is coming at the beginning of, not months into, the process. Yet, agents may still react the same way as they did pre-online. After a couple of emails or calls to the online lead, if they don’t have a response, they mark the lead “dead.” What can you do to ensure your agents are better equipped to take the lead from inquiry to closing? The last step to include in your lead management system is quality control.
As in any industry, when there are exact standards, quality control is the answer to ensure a product or service is performing as expected. How can a brokerage ensure their company’s lead management system is operating as expected? One option is to leverage the services of a Mystery Shopper.
The objective of using a mystery shopper is to identify how an online inquiry is being handled. We know how vital response times are to the online consumer. We understand that the online consumer is months or years away from being actively ready to buy or sell. Wouldn’t it be helpful to hear from a prospective buyer or seller how your agent handled their online inquiry? If the national conversion rate is only 1 or 2 deals out of 100 leads, are you curious to know what happened with the other 98 or 99 leads? Was there anything your team could have done better to convert that lead to a successful closing? Knowing this information could help your agent development team create and deliver more focused skill training that could help the agents improve their lead conversion rate and their bottom-line (and yours, too!). You can also celebrate what is already being done well. This is a win-win in my book.
If you’d like to pursue the mystery shopper technique, I have developed a Lead Response Advantage program that utilizes a highly trained mystery shopper. For more information, please email me (Laurie Popp) at [email protected]. I’ll provide you with the details of the program and how to get started. Protect your lead generation investment through quality control. One of my favorite business sayings states: What gets measured gets managed.
