January 14, 2021
Hassan Riggs
P.P.S. is the secret to your growing business
Generating online leads is easy enough but converting them to actual appointments is the hard part. And that’s where the money is!
This simple truth isn’t so obvious to everyone.
Thus Hassan Riggs, the Founder and CEO of Smart Alto, created the Fortune Framework as a visual tool for agents to figure out where their biggest opportunities in lead conversion are.
Just by answering those 2 simple questions, you can easily identify your quadrant.
And by its genius design, just knowing your quadrant tells you exactly what you need to focus on.
This simple framework has helped agents make smarter choices regarding what to do about their lead conversion troubles.
If you have very few leads and very few conversions = You’re in Quadrant D3
If you are not generating any leads and not having any conversions then your problem is you.
We Call it D cubed (D3) and what it means is you currently lack either the Desire, the Direction, or the Discipline to begin building a successful real estate money-making machine.
If you have very few leads but a lot of conversions = You’re in Quadrant Sales & Marketing
If you are not generating many leads but are still managing to get conversions out of the few leads you do generate then what you need to focus on is Sales & Marketing.
Why’s that? Because your conversions indicate that you are doing a good job of winning over the people you get in front of, so in order to grow your business we just need to get you in front of more people! Increased lead generation is the prescription for you.
If you have plenty of leads but very few conversions = You’re in Quadrant PPS
The vast majority of future top producers find themselves in this category.
You are generating a high number of leads but are struggling to maintain a high conversion rate among all the leads you’re generating.
You need PPS or People, Processes and Systems.
If you find yourself in this quadrant then the thing you need to focus on is hiring the right People, implementing the right Processes and using the right Systems to grow your business to the next level.
If you have a lot of leads and a lot of conversions = You’re in Quadrant Test, Iterate, Duplicate
This quadrant is the one everyone hopes to find themselves in one day. If you are generating plenty of leads and getting a strong conversion rate then the only thing you need to do is add more fuel to the fire.
In order to grow, you’ll just keep iterating to avoid going stale, testing new ideas and duplicating what is already working
(Watch Hassan teach the Fortune Framework to a private group).
What we focus on here at Smart Alto is helping agents in the PPS quadrant put together the People, Processes, and Systems they need to unlock their business’s true earning potential.
Let’s take a look at what that really means.
The first part of PPS is finding the right people, and by that, we really do mean humans..actual people.
Don’t be fooled by the hype there is no replacement for having the right people in your conversion funnel.
Why Tech Can’t Replace People
It’s practically conventional wisdom, right? The first agents to adopt email and computers were able to get a leg up in their local markets. Agents jumped on online lead gen back in the early 2010s were some of the first to grow the mega-teams we still see today.
But at the same time, there have been some massive flops and some things that have flat out backfired (you know who we’re talking about).
Which brings us to Chatbots, sometimes called autoresponders or (untruthfully) AI.
There’s not a lot of things that virtually everyone agrees with but the universal truth that ‘chatbots are insanely frustrating’ is one of them.
The only time we are willing to put up with a chatbot is when they’re the thing standing between us and our refund or replacement.
This is why big companies like Amazon and Comcast use them for exactly that; because they’re hoping you get so frustrated that you just give up and forget about the refund.
For that reason, chatbots are the exact opposite of a good salesperson.
Instead of getting more people to take the next step, they specialize in deterring people from taking the next step.
How People Win
That’s why you need highly skilled humans who can have a conversation with anyone and, no matter how meandering that conversation gets, keep the focus on you and your services.
In fact, we conducted an in-house study to test this hypothesis. We found that when prospects think they’re texting a real person.
They were 15% more likely to respond.
Consider the fact that getting a response is your very first goal in lead conversion, that 15% increase at the beginning leads to a ripple effect throughout your funnel.
If ‘People’ tells us “who” is going to do something then ‘Processes’ tell us “What” they are going to do.
It’s important to use best practices derived from experience and data to make sure that your people are doing the right things in your business.
Speed To Lead
Studies have shown that lead response rates drop by a factor of 10 in just 5 minutes after the lead registers online.
Pretty much, your leads become unreachable within 5 minutes and you’re 10x less likely to make contact with them if you wait longer than 5 minutes to reach out.
This is a core principle of online lead conversion and it’s called “Speed To Lead”, the faster you reach out to a lead the more likely you are to actually reach them.
It’s exhaustingly difficult to respond to every single lead that comes within 5 minutes though.
Especially when you’re already busy with existing clients, so instead most agents just get to them as soon as they can.
Unfortunately, ‘as soon as you can’ is way too slow for online leads who are 10x harder to reach after just 5 minutes.
Your Availability Is Your Greatest Ability
Speed to lead is just one of the processes you need to implement.
We also have to layer on 24/7 availability.
Your leads don’t all respond to your ads during business hours, right?
That means... you guessed it, you need to be able to respond to online leads at a moment’s notice 24 hours a day if you want to maximize your chance of connecting with and converting these leads.
Many agents hire a “full-time” ISA only to realize that 8 hours a day 5 days a week, doesn’t really qualify as full-time in the world of online lead gen.
Online leads who are searching for homes don’t care if you’re busy with other clients or finalizing an offer for an important deal.
They have needs. And they want you to meet those needs on-demand, and on their timeline.
In sports, there’s a saying that “availability is your single greatest ability”, the same is true for converting online real estate leads.
Your expert local real estate knowledge won’t matter if you are never available to share it with a buyer when she’s willing and ready to talk.
That logic also lends itself to the antithesis “unavailability is your single greatest liability”, food for thought.
Six To Success
You have a few hundred “dead leads” in your CRM.
We all do.
And if we’re being honest most of those “dead leads” we marked dead after making just one attempt.
We’ve all done it.
After all, Speed To Lead is the most important factor in determining whether or not you connect, right?
That’s true but it’s not the whole story.
According to several studies, increasing the number of attempts you make to connect with a lead increases your chances of getting a response.
Did we really need to conduct a study to figure that one out? Everyone knows the fortune is in the follow up.
The data shows that out of every reachable lead only about 40% will respond on the first attempt.
As you continue to reach out and court the lead your chances of getting a response gradually climb, peaking at 90% likelihood by the 6th attempt.
Meaning that by giving up after just 1 attempt, you’ll be leaving a whopping 50% of potential deals on the table.
This is why it should be a standard operating procedure that your leads are reached out to no less than 6 times before being counted out.
Another way to think of systems is by thinking of the tools in your team’s tool belt, these are almost like an arsenal of tactics you can use to increase your conversions even further.
Frictionless Questions
If you recall, the first milestone you want to reach when converting online leads is to get a response.
The best way to do this is to ask frictionless questions via text message.
Frictionless questions are questions that your lead can answer without even thinking.
By asking a question that your lead has to put even a tiny amount of thought into, you are creating friction for them. In order to get a response more often you want there to be as little friction as possible.
These questions are great at producing a response because not only do they not require any thought, they also require very few keystrokes.
For instance, if you ask a lead how many bedrooms they need they only have to tap their phone twice to respond.
Once to tap the number of bedrooms they need and again to top send.
This reduced friction will make it so much easier for your leads to answer, and the easier it is for your lead to answer the easier it is for you to move them further down the funnel.
Text and SMS
Texting is probably the most important system to put in place for your business.
In fact, robo dialers have completely obliterated phone call answer rates leaving text messaging/ SMS as the undisputed champ in Real Estate lead conversion.
Think about it, with tools like “silence unknown callers” it is getting harder and harder to contact leads by phone call.
We know that almost 100% of text messages are read within 90 seconds of being delivered, compare that to voicemails which can be days or even weeks.
Not to mention how easy it is for your leads to text rather than call while working or running errands.
A lot of people will read this article and try to implement PPS by themselves, to which we say “good luck”.
It’s not that we think you can’t, it’s just that we know how hard it is.
Heck, it being so hard is really the only reason we have such a healthy business today.
So why put in all the effort unless you’re starting a Smart Alto competitor?
Instead, just let us hand off the baton at exactly the right step so you don’t have to manage the PPS and we can hand you warm 15 Minute phone appointments right on your calendar.
Here’s the beauty of a 15 Minute phone appointment, it’s specific and inviting, it also get’s you on call with your leads which will make it easier to turn the leads into active clients.
When clients see 15 Minute phone appointments pop up on their calendar they know they are getting PPS in a box, wrapped up nice and neat with a bow.
Schedule a demo today to see how PPS in a box can impact your business.
The Smart Alto Appointment Setting System guarantees your team never misses another sales opportunity.