The real estate marketing world teaches agents to focus on leads, leads, and more leads. We don’t want to discredit the value of leads, but a high quantity of leads is absolutely useless unless those leads are also high quality.
High Quality vs. High Quantity
So what do we mean by “quality” leads? Well, as you know, many people you come into contact with won’t end up buying or selling a home with you. Only a few ever will. An individual’s needs, location, and perception of you all work together to determine if they do business with you someday:
- Will the lead enjoy working with you?
- Will the lead perceive you as knowledgeable and trustworthy?
- Do you service their location?
- Do their needs fall within your areas of expertise?
In short, an individual that has a high likelihood of doing business with you is a high quality lead. The irreplaceable need for quality leads applies to all businesses, but it’s especially true for the real estate business.
Subscription-based businesses (like Netflix) get revenue from day one. On the other hand, you will spend months (or years!) developing a relationship with your client before you ever see a penny. Unlike a set-it-and-forget-it customer relationship model, you have to forge a trusting, engaging, and caring relationship with each person – being 100% committed to them, and every other lead that you have.
This is why high quality leads are crucial. You barely have the time to follow up and nurture leads as it is. If those leads will probably never transact with you (low quality), you’re wasting precious time and energy.
How to Generate High Quality Leads
The factors that determine whether or not a lead is high quality are largely outside of your control. You can be friendly, professional, consistent, and knowledgeable, but you can’t dictate someone’s perception of you and you can’t determine where they live (or want to live).
The good news is, you can take action to attract the right leads into your network and help other leads remove themselves from the process early on.
The process of growing business relationships into sales is referred to as the “sales funnel”. The top of the funnel (the largest portion) is where your relationships with leads begin. As your leads move closer to buying or selling a home, many will determine that you’re not the best fit for their needs and remove themselves from your funnel. This means that you have fewer leads as the funnel goes down and gets narrower.
An efficient real estate marketing process will quickly give leads the information they need to either filter themselves out or continue down the funnel. To do this, it’s important that you leverage your website, social media, and other online platforms to project a specific and accurate image of yourself.
Your projected image needs to be transparent about what you offer and where you work, but it also needs to be crafted specifically for your target audience – the types of customers that you want to work with.
The second key to building quality leads is to follow up with them. We know that isn’t news to you, but it’s important to remember follow up even with leads that aren’t qualified. You will do your best to disqualify leads before they contact you, but following up with them will build your reputation and help you create a small referral network with other trusted real estate agents, giving you a good ROI down the road.
So the next time you hear another agent talking about how many leads they generate, remember that quantity is only half the equation. A high quantity of leads sounds nice to the ear, but high quality leads sound nice to your bank account. Building solid relationships with solid leads will not only help close more sales, but also produce positive reviews and referrals that generate even more quality leads in the long run.
