I didn’t get there. I’m talking about the Help-U-Sell Rally in Oakland which starts in . . . five minutes. I was so sick for the meeting in Orange County (head cold), I couldn’t make myself get on the plane to N. CA and decided to let John Powell and Ron McCoy handle the program there. I’m sure they will be fine.
The meeting in Orange County, like the one in Phoenix, was excellent. I was struck by how interactive it was: lots of sharing. It was much more a conversation than a presentation.
We worked through John’s Blueprint for growth, which got everyone thinking; got back to basics with the Five Pillars of Help-U-Sell and then got excited with new programs: The Help-U-Sell Homebuyer Stimulus Program, The new Short Sale prospecting program, and the Help-U-Sell website. But, like last week’s Wednesday Broker Roundtable call, what seemed to resonate the loudest was this:
The importance of Buyer and Seller Data Sheets and the Leads Management program that accompanies it.
John’s Blueprint includes triggers for when it’s time to hire and they are based on closed sides and leads flow. There’s no way you could do it without knowing how many inquiries you’re getting, what’s generating them and how they are being handled.
Growth involves recruiting and the Buyer Pool book — which is made up of the same Buyer Data Sheets — is the agent Value Proposition. If you don’t have it, you have nothing to offer.
High productivity is dependent on Broker control and accountability. If you’re not tracking every lead that comes in the door, you can bet your conversion rates are suffering.
We are a marketing company. Whether we’re doing low cost/no cost marketing, optimizing our websites or sending thousands of pieces of direct mail, we are marketing and cultivating leads. To spend the energy and money it takes to create inquiries and then not record and track them is crazy. I bet, when you take your overhead and divide it by the total number of leads coming into your office, you’ll discover that each inquiry costs between $75 and $100 to generate. Not tracking, and not insisting everyone track is throwing your marketing money out the window.
The ideal situation is to grow your business to the point that you have a licensed assistant answering all inquiries and gathering contact data before passing them on to agents. The assistant’s log becomes the basis for the Broker to followup with the agents, asking: ‘What happened with this one? Where are you with that one?’ But even if you have not grown your office to that point, the discipline of leads management can be installed.
I talked with Ken Kopcho this morning about this. He has run a contest in this office from time to time: each completed data sheet is good for $1 at the last sales meeting of the month. It’s not a huge amount of money, but it does create a competition around improving performance in this key area. He’s also toyed with the idea of giving lottery tickets instead of dollars and I think that’s a good idea. Leads Management and the collection of leads data becomes everyone’s job and while the contest is good for those who do well, can you imagine how naked the poor performers feel when they have to stand up and say they got . . . one or . . . two or . . . none.
There are great electronic tools for leads management. Our current system is built in Excel and it will become part of the Help-U-Sell OMS at some point in the future. However, the basic Buyer and Seller Data sheets are paper and should stay that way. You can’t have an impressive Buyer Pool Book without paper Data Sheets. Plus, if there is a stack of each at each phone in the office and in every briefcase, there’s no excuse for not completing them!
You’ll find the Data Sheets (there are several versions) and a complete leads tracking system in the Download Library under Operational Tools/Leads Management Forms. You’ll also find the University Module on Leads Management there.
Door hangers are really in this year.