The Major Mistake Real Estate Agents and ISAs Make

At Smart Inside Sales, we like to emphasize that all real estate lead sources can be valuable if worked the proper way. Put simply, it is to your benefit to have your team work every potential source of business, even those that are often considered more difficult or less valuable.

This includes inbound leads, inbound referral leads, expireds and withdrawns, for sale by owners, and even past clients and sphere leads.

Can You Work Every Real Estate Lead Source?

Don’t get me wrong, we realize this isn’t always practical. Depending on the size of your team and stream of leads from certain sources versus others, you may have to focus on the most productive sources at the expense of less productive ones.

If you have a real estate team with multiple inside sales agents, then the critical thing to do is prioritize lead sources for your different ISAs, depending on their skill and experience level. This is where having a larger team starts to exponentially work to your advantage. You can have your newer inside sales agents work the less productive or less valuable lead sources, while your more experienced ISAs work the more valuable sources.

What this does is twofold. This allows you to work all of your lead sources (because even those “less valuable” sources can still generate a lot of business for you) and also allows your newer ISAs to gain experience and hone their skills so they can graduate to also working the more productive sources.

Lead Sources Are Not Created Equal

There is a major mistake that real estate teams and agents often make when it comes to lead generation: ignoring certain lead sources all together. Now, it’s true that lead generating through calling FSBOs, expired, and withdrawns, as well circle prospecting, is definitely a more difficult route than following up with inbound leads.

The reason for this is obvious: inbound leads are people who are essentially coming to you. They have followed the path you laid for them by going on your website, signing up on a lead form, responding to an email, responding to direct mail, looking on Zillow, or by taking some other action that brought them to you.

These leads have exerted at least some effort in finding you and have expressed enough interest in order to drive them to your website and give you their contact information. At a minimum, they are somewhat active and most likely have some problem they are trying to solve. That is what makes them so valuable to you and your team.

But the low hanging fruit isn’t the only fruit on the tree.

#1 Major Mistake – Ignoring Lead Sources

Though not as easy or exciting as inbound leads, the other lead sources we’ve mentioned can give your team tons of business and an edge over your competition. This is especially true because many agents and ISAs don’t know how to go about these types of calls and so will do their best to avoid these lead sources.

Why do a lot of agents and ISAs avoid these types of calls? Because they are afraid of objections. And when you’re circle prospecting (read cold calling) or speaking with leads like FSBOs and expireds, you’re most likely going to run into a lot of strong objections.

That’s because these people either aren’t expecting you to call them at all and so want to immediately get off the phone (e.g. when circle prospecting), or they already have a set plan in mind for how they are going to sell their home.

How to overcome this?

Understand the lead’s perspective, plan, and desired outcome by asking them about it. You can’t learn about the lead’s goals and how they envision themselves reaching that goal if you go right into a pitch about how your team is the best in the area and sells the most houses of any team around. Before you jump right into that, you have to understand the lead’s situation. Once you understand the situation, then you can pitch how your team can help the lead reach their specific goal.

At Smart Inside Sales, we call this the PPO process (for Perspective, Process, Outcome). Although these principles are crucial for working any lead source, they are especially important for non-inbound leads, as they are probably not looking to speak with you or already have a firm belief as to how they are going to get their home sold.

Give You and Your Team the Edge

Mastering multiple lead sources (especially the ones considered more difficult or less valuable) is really the key to gaining an edge over your competition. If you or your ISAs can learn to work the stream of FSBOs, withdrawns, and expireds that are constantly flowing through, in addition to being able to convert some leads through circle prospecting here and there, you’ll bring your business or career to a whole new level.

Don’t make the mistake of only going after the low hanging fruit. Learn the strategy to consistently overcome objections and be able to tap into a whole new resource for your business. It is waiting there, you just have to climb a little higher!