It's likely that you have heard of the MIT study which revealed how making contact with an Internet lead very, very quickly – in two to five minutes – has a remarkable impact on winning that lead's business. The most startling and often quoted revelation from the study was that you are 100 times more likely to successfully make contact with a lead if you call within five minutes compared to 30 minutes (and 13 times more likely to connect than if you called in 15 minutes).

Wow. It is obvious to any fool that Realtors should always call the prospect back within five minutes, right?

Maybe not.

Looking deeper into the MIT study, we see that it focused on B2B leads. In our industry, almost all leads are from consumers. While some of these may be performing a search while at work (naughty, naughty), there is a substantial difference between contacting a consumer and contacting a business prospect at his or her desk.

To understand how this study applies to the online real estate consumer, we need to look at their expectations and how this applies to lead conversion.

A fact to be taken into consideration is that 75 percent of the time, the prospect will decide to work with the first agent who makes contact (NAR and CAR research). This makes sense because the consumer is going to go through the whole litany of reasons she wants to move, the home she is looking for, the price range, neighborhood, time frame, number of bedrooms, style, and on and on. So unless the agent is totally inept, the consumer will often accept him because she is unwilling to go through this game again and again.

Lesson 1: Being the first to make contact is critical to winning the prospect.

NAR studies have demonstrated the poor response times for Internet leads in the industry, with over 50 percent not getting a response after even 48 hours, if ever. This is the opposite extreme and is obviously not going to result in many conversions. Real estate consumers expect to be contacted within 30 minutes when they have sent in a request.

The question is how fast is necessary.

Lesson 2: The speed of your response should be dependent on the type of lead inquiry received. Not all requests are created equal.

Let's assume that a prospect registers on your website so they can save their favorite homes. This means they like your site and hopefully will come back. But most often, it is too early in the process to have a personal conversation with them. And if your site forces them to register, then it is possible that this is not a lead at all. These are best incubated with drip email and probably not even distributed to an agent at this time. Besides, you may not yet know the type, location, or price of homes they desire, so assigning them to an agent risks assigning the wrong agent.

On the other hand, inquiries for information on a specific property, for a showing appointment, for a CMA, or to be called back are sincere and qualified leads. Here your goal has to be to make contact while the prospect is still thinking about real estate and, ideally, while they are still in front of their computer. That means in under 30 minutes. If you wait longer, you risk calling while they are loading the laundry, mowing the lawn, or cooking dinner – assuming you are able to connect with them at all – and the opportunity for a meaningful discussion to convert the lead is greatly diminished.

Should this inquiry come by text message while the prospect is standing in front of a house holding their phone, it is imperative to make contact immediately.

It is almost impossible to respond in a timely manner when leads from your website and third party providers go to an email inbox. It is likely that these opportunities will sit there for too long before they are discovered (tick tock). Staff then has to determine what type of inquiry has been received and which agent or agents are best suited to handle the lead (tick tock). Then, once an email is finally sent to the agent the whole delaying process begins anew as the lead now sits in the agent's inbox (tick tock). Then, if the agent eventually discovers the opportunity, he will run it through his own personal filters to decide how soon to respond, or whether it is worth responding at all (tick tock).

Can your agents respond in five minutes using this process? Ha! It is unlikely that an agent can even hit the 30 minute target with any consistency. (A future paper will look into the options of deploying in-house incubation and call-center options.)

Lesson 3: An inbox is a lousy lead management system.

Technology can assist in delivering leads in an efficient and orderly manner to your agents. Automated lead management programs automatically process leads to the best matching agent using a variety of user defined filters and distribution options. It can be configured to hold the casual leads in-house and automatically initiate a drip email campaign while distributing only the serious leads to agents. Lead offers are on their way to agents in seconds by email, SMS, and phone, and if not accepted by the agent within a short time window, the lead is then rotated to other agents. Subsequent leads from the same prospect are identified and merged into the existing contact record in the company or agent's CRM account to avoid conflicts. A module in the program will require that the agents confirm in a portal that they have made an initial contact, and then require agents to post periodic updates so lead managers know the pipeline status of every lead and that leads are not prematurely abandoned. The program can even include an option to automatically initiate a call from the agent to the new prospect for certain types of leads.

Lesson 4: Automated lead management speeds lead delivery and reduces lead abandonment.

Automated lead management systems like ProspectConverter dramatically reduce lead-to-response times and increase lead-to-prospect conversion rates. How much can your conversion rate improve? Since your competition is likely performing poorly, it is a wide open field for you. The odds are that you can see at least a three-to-five fold improvement. And if your competition already has automated lead management then your chances of beating them to the punch are that much less if you don't match their technology and methods.

Being the first to call is such a no-brainer element in winning business that this single factor alone makes automated lead management a profitable investment. If you are still struggling with an email inbox and spreadsheet to manage your leads, have no idea what happens to them once they've been sent to an agent, and are frustrated with the poor return on your lead generation investment, then initiating a lead management system should be in your plans. You will be surprised at how economical and profitable these systems have become.

Request that a ProspectConverter representative contacts you.

P.S. Clicking the link above is an example of a "serious qualified" lead.