Everyone knows how important it is to get leads, but all of the hard work and investment involved can be for nothing if you’ve got a leak in your sales funnel.
To fix this problem we need to understand what exactly your sales funnel is, how to spot a leak and then we can learn how to plug up that leak so that you can rescue leads and help them on their path to close.
Define Your Funnel
The most basic funnel breaks the customer journey into three segments:
- Awareness: all the people who know about you
- Consideration: the people who are thinking of using you as their realtor
- Conversion: the people who buy or list with you
At this stage, it’s important to understand that not all your leads will make it to the conversion stage.
What you want to identify are the lost leads you can prevent. These are the leaks.
Find the leak
You can’t plug a hole if you don’t know where the leak is coming from.
If you find you're spending money on marketing but people aren’t calling to make inquiries, it means your leaking at the awareness stage. If a lot of people you know are signing with other realtors, that means you have a leak in the conversion stage
Identify the leak, then you can fix it.
Clean your Database
At the minimum, you should have a name and email address for every contact. You may have had a great conversation before, but without a way to get in touch with them, they will be stuck in the awareness stage. Remember, if you can’t get in contact, that person is not a contact.
Thankfully, you can use software to go through your database and eliminate contacts with incorrect, absent or out-of-date information.
Use Smart Marketing
The shift from outdoor and print advertising to email and social gives realtors wider and more targeted reach and also gives them better insight into which ads are working.
Email marketing is particularly effective because it is cheap, everyone has an email address, and smart software lets agents see exactly who is engaging with their emails. By using AI driven analytics, this new breed of software lets realtors identify people at the consideration stage and act before any of their competition. The key to effective marketing is hitting the right person with the right messaging at the right time.
Make the Right Calls
Cold calling is going out of fashion, and for good reason.
The problem is, cold-calls target people at the awareness stage of the funnel, long before they’re ready to convert. If you call people too early, you risk annoying them and putting them off.
Instead, you could look at technology like email marketing, search and social to generate leads nurture your contacts to the conversion stage, where you can use your metrics to make warm calls.
This article was originally written for and published in RISMedia.
