Having a diversified lead-generation portfolio is important for any business – but it’s especially crucial for you as a real estate agent. The truth is that the services of a real estate agent aren’t required by the average person on a daily basis – that’s why you need to spread awareness of what you do across a large list of contacts. Make it a point to tell the world about your profession in real estate.
Your best friends in helping you achieve this goal will be your friends & family members who you can engage to spread the word and catch clients for you. In order to guide you, here are 3 key aspects of creating this diversified lead-generation portfolio, or “spokes” as we like to call them:
Phone Prospecting
Phone prospecting is a thing that some agents pass on to their receptionist or assistant as they think that very few real cases come out of making prospecting calls – and frankly, most busy agents simply do not like to spend a lot of time on this activity. It is true that phone prospecting can lead to hit or miss results, but if you are comfortable, you can turn this into a powerful tool for your business.
Your prospecting results will get better over time as you develop your phone prospecting routine, polish up your scripts, and perfect your delivery. Remember to try and double-prospect, as well – when you’re calling expired sellers, if they don’t bit when it comes to listing with you, drill down & see if they’ve already made plans moving to their new location yet – giving you an opportunity to at least pickup a valuable buyer lead.
Your Center-Of-Influence
Did you ignore your family and friends when you started your career as an agent? Maybe you just didn’t want to mix business & family? You may not believe but friends of friends and distant family members spread across different parts of the country alone can give you business worth millions of dollars. Start building your list of connections and use this list to have a head start in your career. In fact, you should add every single individual that you meet on a daily basis in this list as these and their friends and connections are all your possible clients if you are able to spread the word about your abilities as a realtor.
Once you have exhausted your family members and close friends, you need to move towards people at your workplace and individuals you meet but who are not your close friends. This list could include all those people you have met in the last several years. People at the gym, club, coffee shop, school of your kids, your hair salon etc are all your prospective clients. Add addresses, email IDs, and phone numbers to the list of your contacts and work upon it to generate business for yourself.
Your Extended Contact List
Don’t worry when you start to see your list of your contacts growing exponentially. Maybe you don’t have the close relationships with this extended network that you do with your Center-Of-Influence, but you can still generate referral business through the shared contacts in your network. As this list grows, you can easily stay on top of it by dividing this list of contacts alphabetically and calling all contacts each morning starting with one alphabet.
So make calls to all your contacts whose names begin with letter A and then call people with names beginning with B the next week. This way you will not only get loads of business but also make sure that all people in your contact list remember you as a real estate agent even if they do not have a property to sell or buy immediately. A time will come when you will start receiving random calls from people to help them with buying or selling of property with this method of making a contact list.
Remember, it’s crucial to your success as a real estate agent to grow your contact list. You are not selling a product that is required on a daily basis by people. Rather you are offering a service that is required on average once every 7 years. Even if only about 10% of your contact list requires your service regularly, you can generate enough business for yourself provided to continue to work to grow your contacts.
If you have a small family and a small friend list, there is nothing to worry about. You can work upon your friend list by adding friends on Facebook, Twitter, and other social; media platforms. You can also add friends by joining clubs, organizations, charities and nongovernmental organizations. Just think of everyone you meet as a probable client and be at all the places where you believe you will meet people who you would love to have as your clients.
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