Have you ever stopped to look at how your agency gets business? Do you get regular calls or are they occasional? Do you know where the calls come from, for example do, people look you up online or are they referrals? Is one team member more ‘popular’ than others and receiving more calls? Do you need more calls to keep the business ticking over?
Don’t call us, we’ll call you first
The truth is you shouldn’t be sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, you and your team should be actively making contact with potential clients to build rapport and trust so that when they are looking for a property manager or agent to sell their home, they call you.
You need to get out there and prospect and build a database. In a nutshell:
prospecting = contacts = relationships = hot leads = listings = sales = settlements = income.
There are multiple ways to do this, the following are just a few examples.
Get on the phone. Real estate agents need to make hundreds of calls per week, from cold-calling to build contacts to nurturing calls to people on your database to following up visitors to home opens and managing active buyers and sellers.
Door knocking your local area or targeting an area with just listed or just sold hot knocking.
Build strategic alliances with local businesses. Sponsor local schools or sporting organisations.
Send out newsletters and direct mail, advertise in the paper, use social media, run competitions.
It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen
Two keys to success are consistency and persistence.
One newsletter doesn’t build credibility and relationships, ongoing newsletters do. One phone call doesn’t get the listing, but ongoing contact does. Throwing dollars at the local footy team each year won’t pay off, but going to games, attending presentations and functions and being present will build contacts and relationships.
Don’t give up because you don’t get a deal immediately.
Another key to success is having a multi-layered prospecting system (MLPS).
This means don’t just do one thing, do several. It will create multiple touch points with your contacts, building that trust and rapport so that you may one day serve their real estate needs.
Use something like my Prospecting/Marketing Odometer to ensure you select the right activities and spend the right amount of time on each activity. I discuss this in more depth in my seminar and go over the high, medium, and low dollar productive prospecting and marketing activities, how to combine them, and so you know what you should be doing more of and what you should be doing less of.
Once you’ve created your MLPS put it into an annual marketing calendar to help you keep track of what needs to be done when as well as for budgeting purposes.
All for one
Now I’m sure this all sounds like something your agents should be out there doing, but everyone in the organization should be responsible for building awareness of the business, promoting the brand and generating leads. And the truth is you don’t want an agent to do all the work, because if they leave they take their pipeline of leads with them. You want people to have a relationship with your business as well as the agents working in your business.
As a business owner you need to have MLPSs, complete with marketing plan, marketing templates, newsletters, letterbox drops, and scripts and dialogues, ready to go so that any agent can slide right into your business and hit the ground running – promoting themselves and your brand – whether they are new to the industry or experienced. You want to create a partnership with your agents, and they, of course, can add more prospecting activities if they want.
So what do you do if you want to get those phones ringing? There’s no need to start from scratch, we’ve already done all the hard work for you. For more information about lead generation, prospecting and Multi Layered Prospecting Systems, register now for my upcoming FREE half-day Real Estate Brilliance webinar.
