You’ve worked your tail off to generate prospective contacts and clients via relentless prospecting, your website, newsletters, emails, tweets, Instagram stories, professional photographs of listings, videos, Facebook ads and stories, partnerships with local businesses and systematic networking and voila, a new person finds and actually contacts you.
“Now what?” you may ask. Art Napolitano, an agent with Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, wrote a piece for InmanNews to answer that very question. Here is, more or less, how Napolitano answered this particular “now what?”.
- Make sure that your response time via in person, online or on the phone, to a new contact is as immediate as possible. Remember, any person regardless of age expects a response from anyone he/she might contact to be immediate. We are all living in the mentality and time zone of “I want it now!”
- In your reply to this new person who just contacted you, be as clear, understandable and specific as possible while simultaneously being as courteous as possible. “Just making sure I understood your message correctly…” or “Just making sure you received my earlier message in response to your email/phone call this morning…” or “Just confirming that I’ll call you at_________this afternoon as you suggested in your voicemail…”
- Be consistently present; be consistently visible. Follow-up with your prospective contacts/clients on a pre-determined basis whether that basis is weekly, biweekly or every other week. Your prospective contact/client wants to be in touch with you as much as you want to be in touch with her/him/them because they want to either buy or sell a house…now. Make it easy for your contact/client. Offer them a specific, targeted time frame upon which you all can rely.
- Potential buyers need more than drip campaigns. They need to hear from you immediately when you see a property match for them. You need to hear from them when they see a property match so ask them. Know from the get-go the items on their “must-haves” list and keep updating that list as must-have priorities can and do change.
- Be present and visible after the sale of a house. Buyers may want an investment property. Sellers may want another house and/or an investment property. No deal is ever completely over.
- If ever you make a mistake, apologize.
