We recently published a post about how to keep track of your real estate leads. Keeping track of real estate seller leads is exceptionally important. One of the things we discussed was how using manual tracking would work perfectly for a door knocking strategy while outside of a door knocking strategy, manual tracking doesn’t serve much purpose.
We even discussed how the HVL Solution, the Home Value Leads CRM, could help real estate agents in their quest to track their leads. That’s not the only thing a valuable CRM like HVL’s can do, though. The HVL Solution also includes lead follow-up, which brings us to this post.
There’s a big difference between keeping track of a lead and lead follow-up. Tracking leads is necessary for the real estate agent. A real estate agent cannot effectively follow-up on a lead if the real estate agent doesn’t track the lead.
That’s why we thought it was important to first write about the 3 methods to track a lead before discussing tips on following up with a lead.
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When we say track a lead, we mean using tools to keep tabs on the lead. When we say follow-up with a lead, we mean studying whatever method we’ve used to track the lead and then deciding when and how to follow-up.
We can’t necessarily follow-up with leads without tracking leads while our follow-ups won’t be nearly as effective if we don’t have a method for tracking leads.
Tracking and following up works together. Now that we’re clear on this, let’s take a look at a few tips on making follow-ups more effective.
4 Tips on Following Up with Real Estate Leads
1. Be Persistent
The most important tip is one that most of us already know, persistence most definitely pays off. In fact, unless we’re persistent, we’re going to have trouble turning most leads into actual customers.
That’s the nature of sales in almost every industry.
Sounds easy enough. Once a potential buyer or seller becomes a lead and we put them into the HVL CRM, all we must do then is follow-up with phone calls and emails.
Eventually, they’ll become one of our customers and then all we must do is sell their house or find a house for them to buy. Easy, peasy, right?
It can be. Persistence trumps any other method of turning leads into actual customers. However, most real estate agents fail at this because they aren’t persistent enough.
One of the reason’s they’re not persistent enough is because of fear.
Fear’s a great un-motivator. It can destroy a real estate agent’s ability to do the necessary follow-up required to turn both seller leads and buyer leads into customers.
There are simple ways to get over the fear of follow-up. The next couple of tips address a couple of those simple ways.
2. Create a lead follow-up process
The best way to get over fear of follow-up is for real estate agents to create a follow-up process. Fear in business is mainly about the unknown.
As real estate agents, we don’t know how anybody we follow-up with will react. That could cause us to decide that following up with a specific lead isn’t worth our time.
But, if we create a follow-up process, we’ve taken control over a fear. We’ve written down the steps we’re going to take to follow-up with our leads. What will this follow-up process look like, though?
The first thing to start with is a schedule. Schedule your follow-ups. To do this, you must make sure that you know how hot or cold every lead is that you generate. Hot leads go to the top of the schedule.
You follow-up with hot leads before you follow-up with cold leads. That doesn’t mean you forget about the cold leads. It does mean that you put an emphasis on following up with hot leads before following up with cold leads. That only makes sense.
Make sure to designate specific days for email follow-ups and call follow-ups. You should put a block of time away each of those specific days for those follow-ups.
Remember that in addition to following up, you also should employ a door knocking strategy as well as participate on social media. Everything takes time.
That makes it important for you to really think about your follow-up schedule before implementing it.
3. Practice your lead follow-up process
Once you’ve created your follow-up schedule, you must practice it. This is important, not only because it’s necessary to get into the habit of following your process, but also because you should strive to perfect your follow-up process.
Maybe, emails aren’t nearly as effective as phone calls or social media messages.
Take the time to find out what on your schedule, even down to the hour during the day, where your follow-ups are most effective.
Practice your initial schedule until positive and negative patterns emerge. Then, change your schedule and the overall process to increase positive patterns.
4. Utilize lead follow-up tools
In addition to offering lead generation tools, the HVL Solution also offers lead follow-up tools. Real estate agents should check out the HVL lead follow-up tools and see how they can help them in their quest to create a better follow-up process.
One of the HVL Solution’s lead follow-up tools improves follow-up by setting a time table for specific emails. Home Value Leads also offers an SMS lead follow up feature.
The SMS lead follow-up feature could go a long way in helping real estate agents save time as well as get across the correct message to potential leads.
Following up with generated leads goes hand-in-hand with tracking generated leads. The key is to be persistent.
A way to help stay persistent is to create a follow-up process, a follow-up schedule, and to practice that schedule. R
eal estate agents should also consider taking advantage of the HVL Solution’s SMS lead follow-up feature so that they get across the right messages as well as save time.
Sign up for a free trial today and check out how our automated SMS lead follow up feature works.