October 7, 2020
Hassan Riggs
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You’ve built your business on word of mouth referrals and engaging with your sphere of influence.
Or maybe you’re just getting started in Real Estate and want to shorten the ramp up time as much as possible.
What options do you really have?
Cold calling? As if anyone answers the phone for unknown numbers anymore. Hate to break it to you but robocalls ruined that method.
How about door knocking? Not a terrible idea… if it’s not illegal in your area. With many cities creating laws against door to door sales and with “No Soliciting” signs costing less than 5 bucks it’s nearly impossible to actually find doors you won’t get in trouble for knocking on.
That leaves just one option: Buy online leads.
Simple enough right? You fork over a few dollars per lead and then you can start working with these leads to buy or sell a home right?
Not quite!
You need to build a system and implement processes around the right people if you want to have any success with online Real Estate Leads.
Pay for enough lead sources and you’ll eventually see for yourself, a lead who registers on one platform will often be sold to you by another platform several months later.
One lead quality is pretty much identical to the other.
One thing you’ll hear from expensive lead sellers is that some leads have “higher intent”.
At first glance that kind of makes sense right?
A person scrolling through social media who sees an ad they decide to click on clearly doesn’t have the same level of intent as someone who searches “best Realtor in Chicago”.
The person who is actively going out of their way to search for Realtors has a higher intent and will likely be selling a home much sooner than just a casual ad clicker.
But at the end of the day, They’re The Same Leads.
Think about it, the people who click on ads are the same people who ask to contact an agent on Zillow a few weeks later.
It’s not like the Facebook leads you’re buying don’t know that Zillow exists, of course they do.
Because of this duplicate (or quadruplicate) registrations, leads are notoriously hard to convert.
Any given person can easily find themselves as a lead for 4 or 5 different Realtors.
So how do you win if you’re one of those 4 or 5 Realtors?
Follow Up. Follow Up. Follow Up.
Follow up quickly, diligently and consistently.
Weak Follow Up can cost you a fortune.
For agents with ad budgets of $1,000, a good follow up process can be the difference between making $30,000 dollars a year and making $300,000 a year with that exact same budget.
More on that in our article Are Cheap Real Estate Leads Costing You 6 Figures In GCI.
Good follow up is a diligent, consistently implemented system that makes it possible for you to maximize your chances of closing a deal with your Real Estate leads.
There are dozens of components that go into a good follow up system but here are the fundamentals that you need to implement when building your follow up process.
Text Based
As we mentioned earlier, robo dialers have completely obliterated phone call answer rates leaving text messaging/ SMS as the undisputed gold standard in Real Estate lead conversion.
Real humans
It’s imperative that you stay away from autoresponders and chat bots, not only is it insanely disrespectful to your leads but it also loses you money.
In fact, an in house study shows that when we use (and make clear that we use) real humans sms response rates soared by 15%.
(NOTE: Read more about our internal study and why humans are better than robots at lead conversion in our article 4 Reasons Your Calls, Text Messages and Emails Aren’t Getting You In Touch With Your Real Estate Leads).
Speed To Lead (5 Minutes or Less)
As you get further into online lead generation, you’ll hear this phrase a ton. In a nutshell, if you respond just a little to slow you will see your response rate plummet by a factor of 10.
Persistence (At least 6 Follow Up Attempts)
A study on lead response published in the Harvard Business Review said, most sales people give up on leads way too soon. In fact, it takes at least 6 attempts to reach 90% of the leads you can reach.
Highly Engaging
A lot of agents think they can ask the same questions over text that they could at a kitchen table or in an open house and that’s just not the case. In order to get the most out of your attempts you need great scripts (like BANTAR shown below) and frictionless questions that are easy for your leads to respond to. Thus starting a dialogue that leads them down your funnel.
15 Minute Phone Appointments
When you are reaching out to new online leads you need to know what the result of your conversation should be. Too many agents think they are trying to win a new client.
Look if your goal is to get someone to sign an agreement on the first text conversation you’re out of your mind and setting yourself up for failure.
I recommend your target result be a 15 Minute phone appointment, it’s specific and not intimidating and that phone call will make it easier to turn the leads into active clients.
It may not surprise you to know that Smart Alto leverages all of these fundamentals and more, we are a follow-up system in a box for agents looking to grow their business.
Generating and converting online leads does not have a simple one size fits all solution (like most hard things in life).
That’s why Hassan Riggs, Founder and CEO of Smart Alto, created the Fortune Framework as a way for top agents to easily assess where they currently stand and figure out what steps to take next.
(Watch Hassan teach the Fortune Framework to a private group of top producing team leaders and agents around the US and Canada).
This powerful framework has helped tons of agents make data driven decisions about growing their business and exactly what to do about their lead conversion troubles.
To experience the power of the fortune framework, you only need to answer 2 simple questions:
Just by answering those 2 simple questions you can easily identify your quadrant on the framework and by identifying your quadrant you’ll know what you need to focus on.
This is how we help our potential clients decide whether they are ready to hire Smart Alto or whether they need to focus on generating more leads first.
Few Leads / Few Conversions = D3
If you are not generating any leads and not having any conversions then your problem is an internal one. You need to focus on D3.
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.
No Leads / Many Conversions = 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 marketing and prospecting will do just that.
Many Leads / No Conversions = PPS
The vast majority of future top producers find themselves in this category.
They are generating a high number of leads but are struggling to maintain a high conversion rate among all the leads they are generating.
This is a PPS issue at its core: 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.
Plenty Leads / Plenty Conversions = Iterate, Test and 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.
I want you to think of the Fortune Framework like your business’ GPS, it’s designed to get you where you want to go...and that’s a bigger business.
Just like your GPS, you need to know where you are today (“allow Map APP to see your location while the app is open”).
Good news is you can download the whole framework and answer a few questions to figure out where you are and exactly what you need to focus on.
Regardless of where you are on the Framework we write articles and how to’s for every stage of your journey.
However at Smart Alto our service was designed as a prebuilt bundle of People, Processes and Systems, so if/ when you find yourself in the quadrant of “Many Leads/ No Conversions” just know we have the solution for you.
We Hire The People
We always use real human ISAs.
All of our ISAs are fluent english speakers in America or the UK, so you can rest assured that all of the text conversations your leads will be having will be fluid and natural.
Experience Driven Processes
Smart Alto’s founder Hassan made the BANTAR process, a scripting framework that we use as a skeleton of our high converting conversations.
BUDGET
AUTHORITY
NEEDS,WANTS AND EXPECTATIONS
TIMELINE
AREA
RELATIONSHIP TO AN AGENT & LENDER
Systems that Deliver Results
Smart Alto has systematized an entire follow up program that our ISA’s use to make sure you’re getting as many conversions as possible from your web leads.
Even the way results are delivered is an amazing system on its own. Smart Alto sets a 15 Minute phone appointment directly in your calendar with leads that are ready to engage.
No more “live transfers” that almost always cause more harm than good.
The lead will actually be expecting your call and you’ll actually have time to make the call because you control the time slots appointments can be set in.
Smart Alto is your PPS and Follow Up System in Box so you can keep your attention on servicing the clients that matter most!
Ready to use The Fortune Framework to, to find out where you are, and turn your business into a growth machine? We’ve made a downloadable version to print and hang in your office.
The Smart Alto Appointment Setting System guarantees your team never misses another sales opportunity.