September 2, 2020
Hassan Riggs
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You’ve finally decided 15-minute phone appointments that show up directly in your calendar are better than live transfers that interrupt your day.
You don't have time to consistently follow up with all your online leads, so your appointment setting rate is low, but you have scheduled a few appointments for yourself.
You’ve also noticed that not all of your scheduled appointments answer their phone.You don’t think it’s a big deal because after all not even the appointments you set for in person meetings have a 100% show-up rate.
Still, you can’t help but think that there must be something you can do to increase your show-up rate.
Well, you’re right! There is something you can do to improve your show up rate on phone appointments, a few “somethings” to be exact.
Of course, you don’t expect 100% of your prospects to keep their commitment, but that’s not the point. The point is that just by increasing your appointment rate a few percent you can have a massive impact on your bottom line.
Suppose you’re a Smart Alto client generating 200 online leads per month.
That’s 2,400 online leads per year & we know Smart Alto can reliably set appointments with 20% of those online leads.
So 20% of 2,400 is 480 Appointments! Amazing right?
Let’s say that a respectable 70% of your phone appointments show up/ answer at the scheduled time.
That’s 336 phone appointments in a year.
Not bad, right?
Now picture this; if you get your appointment show up rate to 90% by following the steps in this article that would mean you’d go on 432 phone appointments in a year!
That’s 96 MORE appointments than you’re getting right now just by making a few simple tweaks to your process!
If you’re an average agent then you can comfortably convert about 10% of those phone appointments to closed deals, right?
9.6 additional closings per year, let’s just call it 10, 10 ADDITIONAL closings per year!
In my market, the average home price is $398,000, and if you’re making hypothetically 2.5% or $9,950 per closing.
Then you stand to make an additional $99,500 per year by making 2 simple tweaks!
Nearly six figures MORE in gross income just by making the 2 simple changes found in this article, most companies would charge you for this kind of information! Get it all right now below free of charge!
First things first, leads aren’t ghosting you because they don’t like you or because they want to waste your time. It’s far more innocent than that.
9 times out of 10 unkept appointments don’t show simply because they forgot, that’s it.
They simply forgot.
They’re busy picking up the kids from school, submitting a report for work, dropping the dog off at the groomer, or letting the contractor in to take measurements, etc.
With how much the average person is subjected to in a given day, it’s obvious that a few things are going to slip through the cracks.
It’s up to you to be sympathetic to their busy lives and help ensure the thing that slips through the cracks isn’t a phone appointment with you.
How do you do that? By leveraging the GOLD STANDARD in lead conversion; text messaging.
In order to guarantee that your scheduled appointments actually show up you’ll want to send 3 different text reminders.
Lucky for you, our scheduling partner, Calendly.com, makes setting these text reminders up incredibly simple.
1. 24 Hours before your scheduled appointment.
A simple reminder is all it takes, no drawn-out sales copy. This is just a quick blip in case they’d already forgotten.
2. 30 Minutes before your scheduled appointment.
Just like the 24-hour text, keep it simple.
30 Minute reminder is perfect because it lets the lead decide where they will physically be for your scheduled call.So many of your prospects don’t want to take your call if they are in a public setting like their work or a grocery store, this gives them plenty of time to get back to their home or at least into private space where they are comfortable discussing personal plans with you.
3. 5 Minutes before your scheduled appointment.
You guessed it, a simple reminder again.
The point of sending a reminder 5 minutes before the scheduled meeting ties in very strongly to the 30 Minute reminder. This time instead of giving them a chance to relocate physically, you give them a chance to excuse themselves from any conversations or step into a private room.
If you’ve been in sales for any amount of time, odds are you’re familiar with the ‘double dial’, a tactic passed down from the 80’s.
A ‘double dial’ is when instead of leaving a voicemail when a lead doesn’t answer you just hang up and immediately call back.
The aim is to trick them into thinking the call is important so they pick up the second time.
For a while this was an effective tactic but like all good tools, the double dial eventually got adopted by scammers.
Nowadays the double dial is the calling card of robocalls and scammers, most phone companies even mark numbers that double dial as a “Spam” caller.
With the double dial out of the picture you’re going to want to adopt something a little more personal, the Screenshot Motivator.
What you’ll want to do is call at your scheduled time, if your appointment is for 5:00 pm you want to call at 5:00 pm.
If they don’t answer rather than leaving a voicemail, here is what you should do instead:
You’ll go into your calendar app on your phone, click on the appointment and take a screenshot of the appointment and text that to the prospect with this wording “Are we still on for the call you scheduled with me at 5 pm today?”.
Notice the language you’re using, “the call you scheduled with me”.
You’re giving them a nudge and reminding them they made a commitment with you and you’re waiting for them.
It’s simple, but powerful.
Often, people will respond to your text message and tell you why they didn’t answer and are running a little behind. You’re almost guaranteed to talk to people in this group.
Finally, you’ll give them a second to see the message before calling a second time, you’ll be amazed by the number of people who answer on this second call.
Let’s take a look at why any of this even works.
Dr. Robert Cialdini, a renowned expert in the science of influence, cites ‘Commitment and Consistency’ as a core principle for influencing others.
In his book Influence: Science and Practice he cites commitment and consistency as a person’s urge to behave in a way consistent with commitments they have already made.
Think about it: when you were a child, your parents likely told you to ‘keep your commitments’ and ‘stick with it’ and ‘never give up’.
We’ve been taught that people who follow through on their commitments are trustworthy, logical and rational. We all admire those people and want to emulate them.
Both of the strategies discussed in this article leverage the Commitment and Consistency principle.
The text message reminders not only remind your lead of their upcoming meeting, but it also reminds them that they made a decision to meet with you at a scheduled time.
This makes them identify themselves as the reason this appointment is happening, it’s passive and if you’re not paying attention you’ll hardly notice it.
The Screenshot Motivator is a lot more blatant, you are directly invoking the Commitment and Consistency principle when you send them the calendar event they agreed to and in a non-confrontational way asking are we still good here
The whole point is to make them feel a little guilty for dodging your call, at the end of the day people want to feel good about themselves and by showing them that you’re still ready to talk when you call back, you’re giving them a chance to keep their commitment.
You’re essentially giving them a chance to feel good about themselves.
If you’ve read this whole article thinking to yourself “That great and all but how on Earth do I get these appointments in the first place?” then you’ve got to schedule a demo with Smart Alto to
day.
We leverage real human ISAs around the clock to follow up with your leads and convert them into appointments that we put directly on your calendar.
We wrote this article because it’s important to us that agents who leverage Smart Alto see massive results, and we know that doesn’t just come from doing our part well.
That’s why we regularly publish content here and in our community. If you want to be a part of the Smart Alto community, schedule your demo today.
The Smart Alto Appointment Setting System guarantees your team never misses another sales opportunity.