Sales enquiries can go up to 47 hours – on average – without a response. After 1.3 attempts to reach them, that salesperson then gives up on and moves on.
For portal lead enquiries, the research suggests it’s even worse, given that 40% will receive no answer at all.
Estate agents have been given a bad name when it comes to following up with prospects.
However, when you take into consideration that the major portals will generate over 170 million leads in website traffic each month, it becomes easier to understand the problem.
Having spoken to UK estate agents about their greatest challenges, we’ve identified easy-to-implement steps and practices that will lead to smoother sales conversions.
Hours for the average lead to receive a response
Attempts made to contact a prospect before giving up
Times more likely to connect with a lead in the first 30 minutes
How to separate hot leads from lukewarm ones
An agency is only as good as its team. Yet only 8% of UK employees are actively engaged when they’re in the office.
This means businesses are losing out on the 20% boost to productivity that comes with having an engaged workforce, as well as the countless revenue opportunities that become collateral damage.
You could have the best team in the country with the best training programs, but when faced with the inevitability of human error, distractions and a constantly changing work environment, there are other more reliable precautions you can take as well.
A prospecting system like BuildYourMarket is built to add clarity to your sales funnel.
So, once you’ve started sending messages at key moments in a vendor’s journey, you can keep constant sight of their level of interest using quantifiable metrics.
Track inbound leads and qualify them based on their responses to your marketing; whether they’ve simply opened an email, or they’ve called your office and spent the next half an hour talking to your agency.
For more information on the reporting metrics that BuildYourMarket provides, download our guide.
Right message, wrong time
The longer it takes you to connect with a lead, the more likely they’ll be to dodge your calls.
If a follow-up call is made in the first 30 minutes, a salesperson is 100 times more likely to make contact. By the fifth hour, those odds drop by 3,000 times.
Using that same logic, when a homeowner’s status changes to ‘price reduced’, ‘sale fallen-through’ or ‘withdrawn’, it goes to reason that the first agent to pick up the phone will win the second instruction.
BuildYourMarket’s on-market data is updated every 24 hours – every four for new listings – to capitalise on this window of opportunity.
What that means is that the platform’s working at an unprecedented speed to give you more hot leads sooner.
Why did we lose that vendor?
“We saw that property for an appraisal six weeks ago, we didn’t know it had come onto the market.” This came from a recent conversation with an agent who had been targeting a property they’d already lost.
At any given time, there are homeowners on the market who have had a relationship with you.
If we make a modest estimate that between 20 to 30% of these sellers are in your database, then the question needs to be: were we invited to value that home, and if so, why didn’t we get that instruction?
Your CRM contacts are the low hanging fruit, the easiest leads to convert.
You’ve already done a lot of the legwork making them aware of your agency and services, all that’s left is to keep that relationship going for the moment when they decide to switch agents.
Filtering for a targeted approach
If you could target vendors by the price of their property or who they listed with, what would you do with that functionality?
A targeted approach is known to convert far more prospects than blank canvassing at random.
Personalisation is massively important to today’s consumers. Rather than take up too much of your time, however, you can apply specific filters and personal snippets that will form the content of your message.
To find out how that works, book a consultation with us below.
“We’ve found that the consistency of the data from BuildYourMarket is better than any other product. The new information you’re getting on yesterday’s new instructions is far more robust.”