4 Strategies for Assigning Leads to Your Agents

Sales managers face the daunting dilemma every day of how to assign leads to agents. Every real estate brokerage needs to maximize the effectiveness of their sales teams by having the best person respond to fresh leads as fast as possible. There are plenty of ways to assign leads to agents, from manually emailing them to creating an algorithm to assign leads to the most compatible person.

Here are four strategies for assigning leads to your agents that can help:

Speed

Many real estate agents know how vital it is to respond to leads in a timely manner. Online leads can go cold within an hour and a half. You may not want to initially assign leads to the top member of the group, because they will most likely not be available to respond to the lead within the allotted time before it goes cold.

Compatibility

It's important that you place the right leads into the right agent's hands. If you distribute by language, region, deal-size or industry, you are improving the compatibility of your leads. A high compatibility rate means that agents who are responding to leads have the right information and the skills to qualify and convert them to clients.

Grouping leads with similar criteria and giving them to the best possible agent for that type of lead provides a higher likelihood of them forming a relationship and sealing the deal.

Round Robin

The round robin strategy essentially means every team member will receive a piece of the pie in order until everyone is full. There are both pros and cons to this strategy.

• Pros – There are no surprises with this method, since it is inherently fair. Everyone will receive the exact same amount of leads, and because the workload is shared evenly, response rates should be uniform and done in a timely manner.
• Cons – This method is easy, but it may not be the most effective lead assigning strategy. Round robin doesn't take into account the availability, performance, or the specializations of each agent on the team. This method doesn't optimize for conversion. Pushing leads evenly also eliminates competition between agents, because everyone knows they will receive the same amount of leads as the other team members.

The Top Agent

This strategy offers the top producer on the team, or the team lead, the biggest piece of the pie and continues in order of rank. There are pros and cons to this type of strategy as well:

• Pros – If you are favoring one salesperson, this means more leads are put in front of your top producer and this also rewards good work. The more sales you close, the more leads you receive.
• Cons – Those who are lower on the totem pole may feel like they cannot compete with top producers. This may bring down the team's morale. This can also be slower than other methods, because your top producer may not be able to respond to leads in a timely manner because of their busy schedule.

When in doubt, look to your CRM. Many provide solutions for lead routing, which can make this process more manageable and transparent for all involved.

To view the original article, visit the Wise Agent blog.