Why Lead Engagement Should Be a Top Priority
For many years in real estate, the hottest topic (and No. 1 demand from real estate technology companies) has been lead generation. How can I generate more online leads? What sources should I use? And how can I lower my cost per lead? Let's flip things on their head a bit and cover why lead engagement (or lead follow-up) should really be the star and your top priority. Lead Gen… and Then What? Lead generation is important, but with a great wealth of leads comes great responsibility. As more new leads register on your site, the time you are required to spend responding, engaging, and qualifying those leads goes up. And that time is incredibly important if you want to actually convert the leads that you've generated. How important is quick and effective lead engagement/follow up? 90% of real estate agents will give up on a lead after the first four touches, despite the fact that 70% of the time that lead will go on to buy a home within the year, just with a different agent. (NAR) 80% of prospects are deemed "bad leads" by sales teams, and yet still go on to purchase within 24 months (NAR) Responding instantly to inquiries can increase lead conversion rates by up to 391% (Zillow and MIT) We live in a culture of instant. The best and most successful businesses have adapted to those consumer demands and not only meet consumer expectations but exceed them by anticipating needs. When Sara Homebuyer is browsing properties on your site, that moment is your best chance of connecting with her, getting her attention, and moving her further down the funnel to having a conversation with you. But, let's be honest, sometimes it's too much for a busy real estate agent to handle. Many default to hiring an Inside Sales Agent, which can work quite well. However, there are limitations: the time and expense of hiring and training, plus they're still only available 40 hours per week (leaving leads who register outside of those hours waiting for a touchpoint). Another option is using a system that automatically responds on your behalf using a bot or AI technology. What's the downfall there? Real estate is a business of people. It's all about making connections, showing your value, and guiding your clients through the experience of buying or selling their home. 86% of consumers prefer communicating with humans over chatbots. [Forbes] So, when it comes to the first point of contact with a lead, we recommend putting your best foot forward and making the impression your business deserves. Technology and Lead Engagement How do you ensure that: Your leads are contacted and qualified quickly (24/7) Your leads are getting the right message at the right time Your brand is accurately represented Your leads get white glove customer service Agents are not glued to their desk…? Enter the lead concierge service. Lead concierge services, like Success Assurance from BoomTown, handle lead engagement and follow-up for you. They make sure the critical first point of contact happens when and how it should, while allowing your agents can focus on more "dollar productive activities." To view the original article, visit the BoomTown blog.

Why Understanding the Homebuyer Journey Is Key to Nurturing Real Estate Leads
The needs of today's homebuyers are changing, so it's more important than ever to understand the journey your clients take when it comes to buying a home. In a perfect world, the process of guiding a potential client through a new home purchase goes something like this: You capture a real estate lead through your website (or get a referral), you make contact with them within a few minutes, and qualify them as an opportunity. Next, you set up a few showings you have something under contract within 30 days. Unfortunately, it's not that fluid. Nurturing a relationship with a potential home buyer requires much more time before they convert. Your lead nurturing plan could span several months or years (the homebuying journey takes around 11-27 months), so it's important to build a foundation for a long-term relationship. Here are the different stages of a real estate lead lifecycle and what you should know about nurturing leads at the right time and in the right way to maximize your pipeline ROI.‍ Consideration (2+ years before closing)‍ At this stage, home buyers are thinking: What type of home do I want? What areas do I want to consider? Is now a good time to buy? Leads in this stage have likely not actively pursued an agent. So, your first contact should be an introduction, letting them know you're available to answer questions without pressuring them to make a decision. Let them browse, but make yourself known. Remember, the first agent to make contact with a real estate lead is 238% more likely to convert, per a Market Leader report. ‍Online Research (1 year before closing) At this stage, home buyers are thinking: What can we afford in our area(s)? What are the demographics, schools, etc. like in the area(s)? Leads in this stage have started to browse listings, but are not yet ready to buy. Ninety percent of all home buyers start their home search online, according to NAR. They're also more likely to communicate via the web. Make sure your website is up to date and communicates your brand (you) and the unique value you offer. Once they've made contact on your site, send them relevant, helpful information to establish a connection and start building trust. ‍Active Search (4 months before closing) At this stage, home buyers are ready to start touring homes with an agent. They want to know: How many homes have you sold this year? How well do you know the area(s) of interest? How will you help make this process easier? Real estate leads in this stage are aware of what they want and can afford, and want specifics about the buying process. You need to make yourself available for showings and offer recommendations based on their criteria. Timely response in this stage is crucial, so be prompt in your communications. ‍Transaction (1 month before closing) At this stage, home buyers need an agent to negotiate contracts and guide them through the purchase process. They are thinking: How much should we offer for this home? What are the contingencies? Are we competing with other buyers? This is your chance to shine. Provide exceptional service and guidance, resources, and referrals. On average, it takes 23 days to negotiate a home purchase, so be upfront about the timeline and logistics. By establishing trust, you are giving them a reason to work with you again and refer family and friends.‍ Post-Sale (2+ months out) At this stage, home buyers want to know about changes in their home's value and what's trending in the marketplace. Keep in touch with your clients by sending information about the local real estate market and their home's current value. This helps to ensure repeat business and referrals when the time comes to sell or buy again, or when a friend is looking to purchase a home. Connect with them on social media and use automation tools to stay in touch via email and text. NAR reports that 90% of buyers would use the same agent again or recommend their agent to others, so put effort into generating repeat business. The important thing to remember about lead nurturing and the home buying journey is to engage in the whole journey, not just the transaction. Part of an agent's playbook for lead management should include using a tech platform that automates lead nurturing, so you're always engaging with clients and ensures you never miss an opportunity to convert. Because when it comes to engaging with homebuyers, trust and speed win. To view the original article, visit the Inside Real Estate blog.

5 Sales Management Strategies for Brokerages
Cultivating effective sales management for brokerages is a little different than cultivating it in another business. In a brokerage your salespeople are your agents, and they do a lot more than just sales. So it is important to recognize that, and adjust your approach to management based on that fact. Follow the sales management strategies below and you will create an environment within your team that leads to success for your brokerage and your agents.

2 Secrets to More Lead Conversions, Straight from a Top Team's Playbook
Lauren Bowen leads one of the most productive real estate teams at Robert Slack. She's increased conversion rates and productivity while the company nearly doubled in size. The secret to her team's success? They stalk their real estate leads... or, more accurately, they let their lead generation solution do it for them. Targeting the Most Likely Buyers Anyone who has spent any time on the internet has been "stalked" by an online ad. You visit a site once, and for days or weeks after, an ad from that site follows you around the web. This is called "ad retargeting," and marketers love this advertising strategy because it is so effective. The Lauren Bowen Team employs this strategy to great success via realtor.com's Local Expert program. Local Expert users can create three types of ads: For Sale ads, Just Sold ads, and Branding ads. Those ads are then displayed to buyers in your chosen area on realtor.com. Once they leave the site, those same ads are displayed in their Facebook feed. "This not only helps bring a buyer to the house, it also shows the seller that we are putting it in front of numerous buyers for them," Lauren says. Tip: Because Local Expert offers detailed campaign analytics, you can impress your sellers by telling them exactly how many people have seen their home's ad. Dialing Up Lead Volume for a Higher Conversion Ratio Lauren's team may have stumbled on another secret to improved conversion rates when, thanks to the success of their realtor.com program, they decided to increase their volume of leads. This lead to a curious phenomenon. The team's number of lead conversions not only increased—as expected with more overall leads coming in—but their conversion ratio increased as well. That means the team is converting a higher percentage of leads than they were at their previous lead volume. "We've almost doubled our conversion ratio with the same leads," says Lauren. See Lauren THIS THURSDAY at Inman Connect NY Want to hear more real estate lead wisdom from Lauren? On Thursday, she'll be sharing her expertise during a panel discussion on the Team Track at Inman Connect New York. Check out her panel, Lead Distribution: Who Gets What?, on January 30!

Are you wasting your Lead Generation Dollars? Check out this new end-to-end Lead Conversion system from BoomTown
Lead generation is a critical part of a successful sales process. While many spend thousands on lead gen every year, few have figured out how to maximize the conversion of those leads. We hear horror stories from consumers that tell us it can take as long as three days or more for agents to respond to one of their inquiries. If you want to make sure that every one of your lead generation dollars are maximized, BoomTown has just announced a new service called "Success Assurance" that combines lead generation with lead qualification and lead nurturing. The end result? Brokers can deliver transaction-ready opportunities to their agents to significantly increase their chances of closing more transactions faster. Check out the press release below: BoomTown Announces Two New Solutions: Success Assurance and Marketing Central New solutions will allow clients to enjoy even more ways to fuel their pipelines and ensure no opportunity is left behind CHARLESTON, S.C., July 24, 2019 -- BoomTown, the leading sales and marketing platform for real estate professionals, is excited to announce two new solutions, Success Assurance and Marketing Central self-service advertising. Success Assurance offers the perfect mix of tools and services to handle lead generation, lead qualification, and lead management, serving transaction-ready prospects to agents. Specifically, Success Assurance: Combines BoomTown's CRM technology with RealContact's texting capabilities, and a new calling service Acts as an extension of a real estate team, with an ISA-like concierge responding to new leads 24/7, within 90 seconds Enables agents to work with transaction-ready leads Leads are engaged and nurtured for up to one year from registration Clients can customize scripts, monitor conversations and jump in at any time. "In just ninety days we've already seen 170% ROI," said Joe Garafolo of Waterfront Realty Group. "Knowing someone is reaching out right away is a huge relief and not having to waste time with bogus leads is very important for top-producing agents." BoomTown is also introducing Marketing Central, allowing clients to generate more leads and listing opportunities through a self-serve advertising portal. Marketing Central offers clients the ability to: Build advertising campaigns through channels such as Instagram and Facebook to highlight active listings, promote open houses, and showcase successfully sold properties Create dynamic ads for real estate (DARE) to generate content that a lead would be most interested in Prove value to seller clients by showing how many prospects have viewed a listing "Marketing Central allows brokers to easily leverage ads to generate more listings and increase lead volume, and Success Assurance provides the teams and tools to handle lead generation, initial lead response, qualification, and nurturing for up to one year, maximizing ROI from lead generation efforts", said Grier Allen, CEO & President of BoomTown. "Success is seen by both growing your database and ensuring your leads are responded to quickly and nurtured effectively, so we're excited to support our clients' growth with these powerful new solutions." Learn More. About BoomTown BoomTown exists to make real estate agents successful. 40k+ of the industry's top professionals trust BoomTown to grow their real estate business with easy-to-use technology that creates opportunities and turns them into closings. Capabilities include a customizable real estate website integrated with local MLS data, client success management, a cutting-edge CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system with custom marketing automation, personalized advertising and lead generation services, and a mobile app for agents on the go. BoomTown's service offerings extend far beyond technology with coaching services from peers who have catapulted their growth with the system, lead qualification services to contact, qualify, and nurture leads, and dedicated advisors to offer personalized support at every step from onboarding and training to optimizing your business and planning for strategic growth. Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Charleston, SC, BoomTown has additional offices in Atlanta, GA, San Diego, CA, and San Francisco, CA. For more about BoomTown visit boomtownroi.com.

3 Steps to Convert Rental Leads into Buyers
There are a lot of misconceptions about renters, foremost among them is the idea that all renters have bad credit and aren't worth the time to work with. But that's far from true. Most homebuyers started off as renters while they grew their savings and credit scores. Most years, roughly 34 percent of all home buyers are first-time home buyers. Furthermore, a lot of renters are already more prepared to buy a home than they realize. All it takes is a little education and they may be ready to sign a mortgage instead of a rental agreement. Find out more about converting rental leads into buyers below:

Real Estate CRM Tools to Personalize, Process and Nurture Leads
Real estate is often a highly personal business. The emotions that come with finding the perfect property forge strong relationships between real estate pros and clients--but maintaining those relationships after closing day can seem daunting. Nurturing prospects is also a crucial part of keeping your business healthy and growing, but in the chaos of closing deals, those valuable contacts can slip between the cracks. Real estate customer relationship management software helps maintain and deepen those connections using the following tools.

Leads Are Easy, Converting Them Is the Challenge (and 5 Ways to Fix That)
In today's real estate market, finding leads really isn't the problem, it's converting them. There are multiple ways to help you cultivate your list. But it's what you do with those leads that really matters. Even in hot real estate markets, you'll find plenty of potential clients who need nurturing. How are you going to nurture them all the way to the closing table? Advances in real estate platforms and smart CRM tools mean that agents and brokers have ample opportunities to stay on top of their leads. Artificial intelligence, behavioral automation and other smart technologies can help agents really master the capture-to-close part of the sales funnel. With so much going on behind the scenes, what should agents and brokers expect from their CRM platform?

[VIDEO] Conversion Miracles: 3 Percent to Double Digits
Top team leaders share how they beat the average 2-3 percent conversion rate and push closings up to and through double digits. This video is a recording of a lead conversion panel from this year's REALTORS® Conference and Expo in Chicago.

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:

3 Clear-as-Day Signs It's Time to Hire an Inside Sales Agent
If you've read Chris Smith's The Conversion Code, you may already know these two statistics: For every home that was sold in 2011, there were .65 leads generated online. For every home that was sold in 2014, nearly eight online leads were generated And if you've been paying attention to the number of new portals, lead gen sites, landing page offerings and the explosion of Facebook ads in the last three years, you know that those numbers have only continued to explode in the years since. Going strictly off the numbers, you have (less than ) a 1-in-8 chance of converting a lead you generate online. Are you really doing enough to win a lead's business from competing agents? The answer, likely, is no. And that's okay — because it's never too late to change a failing strategy and turn it into one that works better for you and your business. Inside Sales Agents: How real estate companies are turning cold calling on its head to build relationships with leads Cold calling is nothing new, but it does conjure up a negative image of someone in a headset, calling from hundreds of miles away to aggressively push a deal on an unsuspecting customer (whose name they invariably pronounce wrong). Within real estate, however, we're seeing an exciting shift in how cold calling can be used to shore up new business. Rather than hiring "dialers" who explicitly sell a product or service the minute a lead picks up, many real estate companies are leveraging "inside sales agents" (ISAs) to build relationships with new leads over time. And when the average lead can have eight (or more!) agents working them due to online lead generation, it pays off in spades to be the business that is eager to make a connection before asking for a sale. Here are three signs it may be time for you to hire an inside sales agent. Sign #1: You hate the follow-up (and it shows) Do you hate following up with new leads? The good news is you're not alone. Forty-four percent of salespeople give up after just one attempt (Scripted). The bad news? Eighty percent of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth attempt to contact a lead (Curaytor). If your first call is an aggressive attempt to win the deal, and you aren't willing to call back again, you are unlikely to get anywhere with unqualified, dime-a-dozen online leads.ISAs have the right tone and delivery, and because they're paid to build up relationships with leads, they are able to focus on naturally qualifying leads over time. Imagine the difference between talking to an eager professional who wants to get to know you better, and a Realtor who is clearly hoping for a quick buck on the first call. Who would you prefer to talk to? Sign #2: You're busy (really, really busy) with active clients Calling, texting and emailing new leads isn't easy. It's time-consuming and it creates a strange paradox: Knowledgeable, successful agents often have a harder time converting new leads than rookie agents with plenty of time on their hands. By hiring an ISA, you can spend time on your active clients and most-qualified leads while allowing a professional to build a relationship with brand-new prospects and leads who aren't quite ready to sign a contract yet. Sign #3: Lead conversion just isn't your thing Real estate is a unique profession that requires dozens of skillsets. A typical agent has to master everything from marketing and brand-building, to contract-writing and hard-line negotiations, to market statistics, to staging and interior design. Oh yeah, and then add in that small task of maintaining great relationships with everyone in your sphere and converting leads with the ease of a Fortune 500 company. Not every aspect of real estate can be "your thing." It's important to recognize your weak spots and outsource related tasks as soon as possible. If you simply can't or won't prioritize lead conversion, even though you're paying for new leads, then it's time to release yourself of that expectation before you burn through any more money. Inside sales agents can be extremely affordable and if you hire the right resource, your ISA might be pre-trained on best practices and pre-loaded with scripts so you don't have to spend weeks creating the right documents and onboarding processes. Starting on day one, a great ISA can do what they do best — qualifying and nurturing prospects and leads — and so can you. Ready for an ISA who converts predicted, nearby sellers? What if you narrowed your sights to predicted, qualified sellers in your area? With SmartZip Outreach, you can do just that. Our algorithms predict the homeowners most likely to sell in your area and our highly trained ISAs call to build a relationship and qualify their moving timeline. Meanwhile, you can focus on a short list of ready-to-sell homeowners waiting to hear from you. Reach out today to get a killer deal on SmartZip Outreach. To view the original article, visit the SmartZip blog.

3 must-ask questions when hiring an inside sales agent
Telemarketers. Virtual assistants. Lead scrubbers. There are many terms used to describe "inside sales agents," an industry role that has taken off over the last few years. But few of these descriptors fully encapsulate the role of an inside sales agent (ISA), which is to: Respond to inbound calls or online leads promptly — before they move on to another agent or real estate source Talk with prospects and leads to determine their likelihood of buying and selling Nurture these contacts until they are ready to talk directly with an agent Track engagement and develop a deep relationship so the transition from ISA to agent is smooth, personal and conflict-free As you may expect, not all ISAs are created equal. Some have strict rules and limitations, while others work to become a part of your team's culture. Some simply track their engagement while others make sure to alert you immediately if they talk to someone who they've determined is a "hot" lead. Below are three questions to ask yourself when hiring an inside sales agent to work for your business or team.

How One Brokerage Cured their Weak Conversion Rate (and Brought Their ROI Back to Life)
When Pat McCandless and Chris Earl bought Stephens Real Estate in 2013, they became the instant owners of one of the top firms in their area. They knew, however, that the company could perform better. "Our reputation is excellent," says Pat McCandless. "But we did realize our support systems were out of date. In order for our agents to maintain our standards of service, we had to update those support and tech systems." One major underperformer was their online lead generation effort. Their ROI was weak, with leads converting at just half the industry rate. Obviously, something was wrong—but what? McCandless and Earl had to dig in deep to find out.

Pull the plug or double down? Why one brokerage invested in new tech to get more value from their low-conversion paid leads
Stephens Real Estate describes themselves as a "traditional, full-service brokerage." And everything from their location — in the heartland of Lawrence, Kansas — to their business model does seem pretty conventional. But when new broker/owners Pat McCandless and Chris Earl stepped in to run the firm in 2013, they knew that continued success would require that they innovate and invest in technology for their agents and clients. Here's how they created an office technology culture that didn't interfere with the company's longstanding traditions. Q. You recently had to choose whether to invest more or pass on your primary online portal contract. What provoked this? Pat McCandless: We purchased the company in January 2013, and for the first year we really just focused on not interfering in any way that would derail their longstanding success.  We are one of the top companies in the area and our reputation is excellent. But we did realize our support systems were out of date; in order for our agents to maintain our standards of service, we had to update those support and tech systems. Q. What systems are you talking about, and how did you first learn that your systems were no longer efficient? Chris Earl: Two weeks before renewal of our contract with realtor.com®, our sales representative, Richard McDonald, came to explain changes to our existing offering. The program we had been using was being transitioned and we weren't able to renew the contract for our web leads in its current form. Surprisingly, Richard did not recommend we go forward with a different product. He had conducted an analysis of the response rate we were providing for leads, and it was less than ideal. Some leads were responded to quickly, others were not and some did not receive any response at all. Our conversion rate was at 3-4 percent, when it should have been 8, 9 or 10 percent.

The Results of Digital Engagement Part I: The Business Challenges Addressed through Better Engagement
Welcome to the first part in our series: The Results of Digital Engagement. Through this series, we will feature real estate and relocation companies using digital engagement to better their business. But first, let's explore this idea of engagement. Engagement helps your agents convert more leads at every phase of the sales process. To keep visitors, leads, and real estate prospects engaged, consider infusing data into how you generate new business. Connecting each person to content they care about creates a more personalized experience at every phase. View our exclusive white paper on the power of digital engagement here. Business Challenge: Visitors don't stay on my website Adding helpful information to your site like property reports, an AVM tool or a mortgage calculator is a great way to keep people engaged so they stay on your site longer. The longer they stay, the more likely they are to return and provide their contact information. Business Challenge: Visitors leave my website before leaving their contact information Offer easy ways to capture more online visitors wherever they are in the real estate process. Put lead forms in front of your online tools to capture the information of more visitors and give you insight to where they are in the buying and selling process.

Digital Conversion Rates in Real Estate: What’s Considered 'Good'?
If you're in real estate and you have a website, landing page, or Facebook page – it's nice to know how many people visit, but it's even more important to understand how many people convert. What is a good conversion rate in real estate and what are some easy steps you can take today to improve? First – what are we talking about? What are we talking about when we talk about digital conversion rates? We are looking at the total number of visitors who complete a lead generation form divided by the total number of visitors to a page or website. Essentially, these visitors are going beyond just viewing your page. By releasing their contact information, they become a lead for your agents. The average conversion rate across industries is 2.35 percent according to WordStream. Inside Real Estate claims that number is closer to 1 percent for real estate. That means if 100 people visit your landing page, one person will leave their contact information. If you're not sure what your conversion rate is, check out our conversion rate calculator to help figure it out.

3 Tips for Creating a Top Producing Team
In a 2016 survey, Real Trends reported there were between 35,000 and 50,000 real estate teams in the U.S., 26 percent of which were formed in 2015. The report also stated "teams in real estate create the opportunity to deliver information, guidance and customer service to clients without having to be a superhero individual sales associate who works 75-plus hours each week." It's time to embrace the notion that building elite teams within your brokerage can yield much success! According to this same report, "30 percent of brokerages had teams that produced over 45 percent of their company's total sales volume in 2015." The report goes on to suggest that by "guiding the leadership and structure of a team, brokerages regain some balance in the team/broker/owner relationship." Supporting teams within your brokerage can be challenging; it will take time, resources, dedication and sometimes tough decision making. Here are three action-oriented tips to assist your teams on their path: 1. Focus on Lead Generation and Management Lead generation, nurturing and conversion play a major role in real estate success. Although your agents are busy, dedicating time to maintaining a healthy pipeline is extremely important in order to see growth within the business. In a world where technology and mobility are ingrained in nearly every facet of life, your company should capitalize on the tools available to simplify your lead management practices. Not sure how to get started? Download our free guide for five simple tips to improve lead conversion.

3 Tips for Managing Your Realtor.com and Zillow Leads
Purchasing leads through listing portals like Realtor.com and Zillow is a great way to get your hands on some contact information that might be useful. The thing to remember is that the information can only be useful if you can pull it up when you need it, and if you effectively nurture those leads to fruition. Lead nurturing is an exercise in patience. Most research shows that converting a lead requires a minimum of five "touches." Considering the nature of real estate—the fact that transactions are quite rare for the average person—it stands to reason that moving from lead to sale can take considerably longer. It all depends on the lead's situation when initial contact occurs. Past customers are our best source of referrals as well, so staying in touch after the sale is just as important. Occasional contact with some morsel of relevant information is often all it takes to keep your name in a client's mind. It's critical to have a comprehensive system for managing leads, all in a central location. Unless you're using your CRM to manage these leads, you're likely not making the most of that investment. When leads are stored in separate accounts on various listing portals, they can't be categorized and manipulated in many useful ways like they can on a CRM platform. By syncing those listing services with your CRM, you can import the leads directly into your database. This has several advantages right out of the gate: #1. Single log-in When everything is in your CRM, you don't have to log-in to multiple sites to get the information you're looking for. This saves considerable time and aggravation.

Are you tired of losing clients to the competition? (9/13 and 9/15)
September 13 and 15, 2016 at 2:30 PM PDT Today's consumers are flocking to third party sites for visually appealing listing alerts. But what they don't know is that the data is bad and they're being sold to the highest bidder as a lead. With Cloud Streams, you can compete with those sites and keep your clients from straying! Cloud Streams is quickly becoming the leading alert and collaboration tool nationwide. Keep your clients close with Cloud Streams. The topics we'll cover include: Cloud Streams setup Overview of the Cloud Streams user interface and agent dashboard How to create a stream for your client How to have your client create their own stream How to comment and discus properties within a stream Register now!

From Cold to Sold: How to Get Leads to Respond (9/7)
Wednesday, September 7, 2016 at 10:00 AM PDT You may have HOT leads hiding in your database! Join us for Power Hour to learn how to quickly find dormant leads in your system and unique strategies to get them to engage with you. Plus, take away scripts from top agents proven to generate a response. Your next sale may be right at your fingertips, join us to learn how! Join the webinar to learn: Tips and scripts that get results How to effectively target newsletters and mailings How getting out of your comfort zone can boost your business Register now!

Brokers Find Gem of Seller Lead Generation and Conversion
For many years, WAV Group has studied the effectiveness of broker websites. This research has included understanding where broker website traffic comes from, the effectiveness of listing syndication, the strategies of search engine optimization and marketing, lead conversion by lead source, and broker website rankings in their competitive market. Through this research and discovery process, we impart many best practices that brokers and their vendors can use to develop strategies and roadmaps for ongoing success. For the most part, the strategies have been around active listings for most brokers, but a few firms have long known that off market data can develop a trove of opportunity for firms. We began to notice the impact of off market data by studying online share of voice using comScore, Hitwise, and Nielsen. There are pretty significant differences between these companies in terms of methodology. For the most part, only Hitwise was able to detect regional broker websites. Nielsen and comScore do a very good job of covering the national audience, but they miss local websites that do not have enough traffic to be scored nationally. One thing that we recognized is that ZipRealty, Redfin, and sometimes Movoto performed very well against the national portals and with few exceptions; they were the top broker websites in the top demographic market areas (largest cities) of America. What do portals and brokerages like ZipRealty and Redfin do differently that allows them to be online marketing champions? Traffic to broker websites comes from a few discrete sources like typing in the URL, organic search results, paid search results, social media, listing syndication, etc. Generally, the more data you have on your website, the more landing pages you have for consumers to find information, and the more traffic you get.

4 Old School Lead Conversion Tactics That Didn't Kick the Digital Bucket
Like virtually every industry, real estate has been profoundly altered by advances in technology. They influence how we list and value properties, communicate with clients, and handle transactions. There are tools for every aspect of the business, and customer relationship management (CRM) software can provide an all-in-one platform for tying it all together. A valuable aspect of improved communication with clients is our ability to tailor our message. With available data, we can determine which prospects are likely ready to buy or sell, and what channels might be most effective for reaching them. Relevance is key to lead conversion, just as it always has been. There are strategies that have stood the test of time and still apply in the digital age. #1: Building Relationships Interacting with potential clients, whether in person, online, or by phone is still the only way to establish trust and create a relationship that will eventually result in conversion. Whatever channels you use, strive for "permission based" contact. Marketing guru Seth Godin defines permission marketing as, "the privilege...of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them." Making sure your message is timely and relevant is easier when you categorize your leads. You can group them by demographics, by date of contact, location, industry, etc.  This allows for more sharply targeted communications that are tailored to the interests and needs of a specific group. People appreciate getting information that helps them. Using CRM, you can track property ownership details, like tenant movement and lease expirations. This information all helps you to judge when a lead is warming up and will likely be interested in hearing from you. This is not a new tactic, it's just souped up via technology tools.

3 Ways to Use Data You Have Today to Better Understand Your Customers
If you have an effective real estate website, it will engage visitors, guide them through their buying or selling process, and ultimately convert those visitors to prospects for your agents. But what if your website could do even more? What if your site and the tools you use to drive people to your site could inform you about the thoughts, desires, and values of your future customers? Websites don't have to be one-sided. If you really start to understand how people interact with your company online, you can access a wealth of information that will help your agents prioritize leads and close more deals. 1) Analytics Use web analytics to gain insight on how people find and interact with your website. Analytics can be overwhelming – there's too much information here. But if you look at just a couple of key indicators, they can help you prioritize messaging, segment your visitors by interests for more effective outreach, and ultimately increase conversions. Hot Days: Identify which days of the week are most active. These are the days your customers are telling you they are interested in thinking about their future home. New versus Returning: You can easily break down this information based on new or returning visitors. Returning visitors may be deeper in the sales cycle and might have different tendencies. Demographics: Who's viewing your website? Using analytics, you can determine the location, age, and gender of your viewer. Understanding your demographic is essential to curating and targeting your message. Interaction: Using analytics, you can see what pages people stop on, and for how long, their navigation history, and with what kind of device (e.g. mobile/desktop, Windows/Mac, Chrome/Firefox). This kind of data is invaluable in customizing and optimizing the value of your website.

The NEW, Groundbreaking SEE Strategy (7/6)
Wednesday, July 6, 2016 at 1:00 PM PDT Discover how top performing agents are achieving explosive growth without sacrificing their free time. In this session: Find out how a top Realtor grew his business from $14 million to over $80 million in 2 years Learn proven scripting strategies for lead follow up and texting that will increase engagement SEE how the SEE Strategy will help grow your business in a way your clients will love! Register now!

Are you tired of losing clients to the competition? (6/21 and 6/23)
June 21 and 23, 2016 at 2:30 PM PDT Today's consumers are flocking to third party sites for visually appealing listing alerts. But what they don't know is that the data is bad and they're being sold to the highest bidder as a lead. With Cloud Streams, you can compete with those sites and keep your clients from straying! Cloud Streams is quickly becoming the leading alert and collaboration tool nationwide. Keep your clients close with Cloud Streams. The topics we'll cover include: Cloud Streams setup Overview of the Cloud Streams user interface and agent dashboard How to create a stream for your client How to have your client create their own stream How to comment and discus properties within a stream Register now!

The NEW, Groundbreaking SEE Strategy (6/6)
Monday, June 6, 2016 at 10:00 AM PDT Discover how top performing agents are achieving explosive growth without sacrificing their free time. In this session: Find out how a top Realtor grew his business from $14 million to over $80 million in 2 years Learn proven scripting strategies for lead follow up and texting that will increase engagement SEE how the SEE Strategy will help grow your business in a way your clients will love! Register now!

Convert More Seller Leads Into Clients (5/25)
Wednesday, May 25, 2016 at 10:00 AM PDT What is the secret to getting seller leads to respond to you? Find out at today's Power Hour! Engaging sellers and successfully converting leads takes strategy and consistency. In this live webinar, you'll learn how combining those elements with the "Seller Lead Conversion" campaign—available in your Marketing Center—can generate remarkable results. This first class in a two-part series will introduce these customizable email templates and will offer insights into: Internet seller leads and what those sellers value Using the 7-Day Plan of Attack to engage your leads Specific email and phone scripts that will help you turn seller contacts into appointments Register now!

3 Metrics for Identifying Quality Website Leads
All leads are not equal. Some are better than others. To successfully understand the difference of the leads generated by your company, you must have insights into consumer behavior. One key matrix is to look at the frequency of visits to your website. Consumers who visit once or twice a day are better prospects than those who visit once a week or once a month. Daily visitors are deep in the buying cycle. Saved searches allow you to dig into what the consumer is focused on. Some consumers have very broad saved searches, like all price ranges in multiple towns. That consumer is not a very high quality lead. A consumer that has narrowed their search to a particular neighborhood, school district, or a tight price range of plus or minus $50,000 is likely to be close to buying. Another indicator of lead quality is saved favorites. If a consumer begins to track properties or save them to their favorites list, you begin to understand that they are honing in on buying targets. Encourage agents to reach out to the consumer by email and ask them if they would like you to refine their search. Consumers with saved favorites can also be offered a tour of the home or homes they like. Brokers can train their agents on how to use these signals to find the best prospects out of all of their leads. This information is available on most IDX solutions, but you may need to remind agents where this information is stored in the back office solution.

Broker Best Practices for Converting More Leads
As a broker, you build value with your sellers and with your agents by acquiring and developing buyer leads into transactions. Lead generation is hard work, and it is expensive. The single most important factor that drives up the cost of leads is lead responsiveness and lead conversion. This is a pretty elementary factor to understand, and I am sure that you have a sense of how it is working in your business today. If you are not checking the pulse of lead responsiveness and lead conversion in your business today, start right now. Pull up the number of leads generated three months ago. Look at the average responsiveness of your agents. Run the names of the leads created against your sales to find matches. In an instant, you will see what is happening. The reality for most brokers is that lead conversion is not that great, but if you just make it a little better, your return on investment and broker dollar will increase enormously. A lot of brokers are mad about lead responsiveness and lead conversion. The path taken by most is to send leads to a lead team. This is a highly effective strategy, but it challenges the relationship with listing agents. Listing agents expect that they get all of the leads on their listings. Be careful when you are taking leads away from listing agents. There is a better path.

Top Producer Nails Lead Conversion
Top Producer® is one of the most modern CRM solutions in the nation. It has been developed over decades to deliver success to agents. As the name would suggest, it is for top producers – or, more clearly, agents who plan their work and work their plan. Agents who are working their sphere of influence and have an online footprint with a website, IDX, and online advertising are generating consumer engagement. That means that you have a sales funnel and that you need to be working it every day. Wouldn't it be nice if you had an assistant that would hand you the list of your top five prospects every day? That is what agents requested from Top Producer, and it's available as a feature called Follow-Up Coach. Top Producer CRM will act as your virtual assistant, surfacing your top five prospects each day.  Better yet, it totally works on mobile so you do not even need to open your computer.

Real Estate Brokerage CRM and Leads: Working in the Old vs. NEW
Why is it that you run into so many old-fashioned "CRM" systems? And then there are the quasi-CRMs with a little bit of lead management, and then there are the standalone, sweet-technology systems (like call tracking or auto-texting). What a brokerage, successful team or large real estate company truly needs is high integration and high automation around some very simple tools that make your life easier. But, at the end of the day, those tools still need to help close transactions and kick out some reporting. Well, it turns out that you not only need the right system or solutions, but you also really need the right mindset around those tools. More specifically, it is about making sure you mentally commit the team to the new way of doing things. For today's post, we have brought together some of the ways that working leads and contacts in an old system or process contrasts with the way they can (and should) be worked in a new technology system. Scenario 1: What Actually Happened to Your Lead OLD: Lead comes in, you manually pass or email it out to an agent, and create a task for yourself to follow-up with the agent in a week. One week later, you email the agent for an update. New: Lead enters the system from any source, and distributes out to a single agent or group of agents. Once the lead is accepted, automated emails and text messages can begin going to the lead, and the agent can click-to-call, click-to-text, or email the lead immediately – which activity is tracked in the system. One week later, the lead manager checks the prior week's leads, and views the leads activity alongside the agent's auto-logged activity. No self reporting, no "All these leads stink," no BS.

Is Your Brokerage Wasting Your Real Estate Leads and Face Time?
We talk a lot about how to drive more real estate leads and more visibility. One question you might be facing right now is whether you really are taking advantage of the leads and visibility that you currently have. Let's say you are currently getting leads from Trulia, Zillow, Realtor.com or another real estate portal or network. You also get leads from your sphere of influence or referral base. You may even do some pay-per-click or have some naturally-generated leads on your website. The question is, what real conversion rate are you seeing right now and where are your inefficiencies? If you are busy tracking leads in your email and on scraps of paper, the typical conversion rate runs about one-half of 1%. The trick to taking advantage of the leads you have, as well as driving more conversion out of new leads, is all about well-placed automation and strict tracking. There are four things you should have in place in order to achieve the highest conversion rates on current and new leads. 1. Complete Real Estate Lead-Generation Strategy This seems like a total no-brainer in a lot of ways. There are, however, many brokerages who look at their strategies and realize they have been relying on only one or a couple lead sources, but only one channel. The reality of real estate lead generation is you need to make sure you have the right channels and that you are getting high enough quality to drive your bottom line.

[INFOGRAPHIC] Nurture This Way: The Best Tactics for Nurture Campaigns
Did you know that over 79% of leads from marketing do not convert into sales? Or that over 65% of marketers have no established lead nurturing systems? Did you also know that leads who are nurtured make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads? All of these stats put some things in perspective, right? As we've stressed the value of personalized relationships, these do not just come out of thin air. You have to build these relationships up and/or nurture them. When leads aren't ready to buy, they aren't ready to buy. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink...but you can send them consistent messages that provide them with timely pieces of content that add value and relevancy to your service. This is where the nurture campaign comes in. We've covered everything you need to know on nurture campaigns through our Naughty by Nuture eBook, but we wanted to outline it in a more visualized way. On the next page, you can find our Nurture This Way infographic with the best tactics for nurture campaigns.

5 Best Practices on How to Follow-Up with Clients
We consider ourselves follow-up experts. Granted, sometimes these follow-ups are delayed, or they may not contain all of the right words — but we're human. We've written about how to write an effective follow-up email, generated templates for the best follow-ups, and what to do after a follow-up. Although these have been for a much broader audience and for best practices, we understand that advice isn't a one-size fits all sort of thing. A follow-up is essential in staying top of mind and getting referrals to new clients. Following up is also a must for existing and past clients; it expands your network and cultivates the one you have currently. With the influx of even more places to communicate, how should a you follow-up with clients? Knowing the right time, place, and how is extremely important. We'll dive into the best practices on how to follow-up with clients. Existing Clients 1. Projects You were hired because of your insights and guidance as an expert in your field. However, sometimes clients may slip through the cracks, or your own communications to them may make them fall by the wayside. This is your perfect opportunity to reengage with your clients to make sure you are following up with what they needed you to do in the first place.

4 Tips on What to Do After You Send a Follow-Up
You have read a ton of posts and articles on following up with leads. You have become a master of the follow-up... Now what? Following up with your leads is a huge step towards sales success, but many people don't know what to do after their initial message. Getting a response or closing a sale are the best outcomes from a first follow-up email. Frequently, though, your follow-up email will be sent to the trash and deemed unworthy of a response. Properly engaging your leads gets them filtered into your sales cycle and potentially turns leads to a sale. With so many people telling you how to follow-up, you need to learn what to do when your follow-up works and when it fails, and next steps to consider. 4 Tips for What to Do After You Send a Follow-Up 1. Answer Questions Customer responses show engagement and that they are interested in what you have to offer. Industry research shows that between 45-50% of all inbound sales are not followed up with after the original point of contact. Based on their response, you can better gauge the customer's needs and set up a plan of progress towards the sale. Setting up times for calls, video meetings, or a way to further discuss things would be a logical next step for sales. Well informed clients will feel more confident in their purchases. According to the Harvard Business Review, companies that respond to queries were 7 times more likely to have meaningful conversations, but most companies are very slow to respond or will not respond at all. It was found that companies that responded within the first hour to questions were 60 times more likely to qualify a lead than if they waited 24 hours.

5 Reasons You Should Your Track Leads (And How To Do It)
We don't think we need to convince you that the quality of your lead generation strategy is important for finding new customers. Or that effectively nurturing leads throughout the various stages of the sales pipeline is invaluable to building your business. But knowing how to best track leads can have a huge impact on your team's productivity, as well as your bottom line. So, what's the best method for sales lead tracking? Check out the advantages of automating this process and, we think you'll agree that, if you're not using sales tracking software, you're missing out on some fantastic benefits! How to Best Track Your Leads: 1. Better Organization It's spring and the top thing that has been on my mind has been to organize. It's the essence of spring cleaning. However, one, year-round thing that has always been a priority, at least for me as a marketer and I'm sure anyone on the revenue side of things, is to always keep our leads organized. When you use sales tracking software, organization will no longer be easier said than done. By having all of your lead information readily accessible and categorized by the different pipeline stages, your team will be able to better utilize their time on closing deals and providing excellent customer service. We've all been there though, from post-it notes to a dry erase board, having a proper, scalable, and organized software or system to track your leads is essential. So what is the best way to organize your leads?

Does It Make Sense to Buy Leads?
Should you buy leads? Maybe. There are two things to consider: Will you do the follow-up and nurturing that is necessary to convert them? Do you have the cash? The first question seems obvious, but it is trickier than it looks. Most agents will answer "of course" to the follow-up question without really considering what it takes to convert an online lead. According to Robert Clay, founder of Marketing Wizdom, 8 percent of salespeople get 80 percent of the sales (non–real estate specific). Why does this happen? Well, Clay says it generally takes five follow-ups after the initial contact before a sale, and most salespeople give up on a lead after two attempts. Persistence pays off. Calling prospects twice and not hearing back does not mean the lead is dead. When a customer cannot get preapproved because of poor credit, insufficient funds, or any number of other reasons, that does not mean the lead is dead. Even if they are still telling you their name is Mickey Mouse, the lead is not dead. Now I ask you again: Will you take the time to follow up on and nurture these leads until they convert? Because if you are thinking, "That seems like a lot of work," then I say, "No, you should not buy leads." Don't waste your hard-earned cash.

And the Lead Goes Round and Round
I had a rather interesting conversation about lead management and lead sales today. The story went something like this: A broker enhances listings and purchases zip code leads from a portal. The broker believes that there is some form of exclusivity on the leads generated through the system insofar as the lead is only distributed once. In his case, he distributes the leads as they come in to one of his agents. To test the system, the broker had a staff member go to the publisher site and generate a lead. The lead came through to the broker as promised. However, the broker (pretending to be a consumer) also got a call from a mortgage company to pre-qualify for a loan. During the call with the loan officer, they suggested that he work with one of the mortgage company's network of agents and asked if he needed help finding an agent. To the broker, that caused the lead to be "sold" twice. He was rather upset. The portal takes the lead that they provided to the real estate agent and also sells that lead to the mortgage company. In this case, the mortgage company also has a lead network where they take leads that they generate for mortgage and provide that lead to a real estate agent partner. So the same consumer lead went to the publisher's broker partner and the mortgage company's broker partner. One lead just became three – one to the publishers premium broker, one to the mortgage company (unbeknownst to the premium broker), and again to the mortgage company's real estate agent network. The poor consumer gets hit three times just for asking if the fireplace is wood burning or gas.

The Real Estate Guide to Following Up and Prospecting
If you don't hook the visitor on their first visit, that's no reason not to keep in touch. Perhaps they're just in the research phase. Perhaps they didn't find their dream home yet. There are many reasons it takes people many weeks and months to settle on their home purchase decision. Conventional wisdom says you need to follow-up with prospects for six months or more to finally reel them in. Following up is worthwhile, too, as the cost of getting an initial visitor to your site is far greater than marketing to someone already in your database. So how should you be following up with past traffic? Here are a few effective ways: Obtain your past traffic's information before they leave Yes, this is obvious. But you'd be surprised how many sites just let you walk away without any call-to-action. 78% of home shoppers visit more than three sites before reaching out to a person (NAR and Google's "The Digital House Hunt" Study). Providing lead capture forms is a great way to obtain your traffic's contact information before they leave, enabling meaningful, effective follow-ups. For example, offer highly demanded, localized content such as "South Beach, Miami's 2014 Home Shoppers Guide" to home shoppers who enter their name and email address. By doing so, you obtain their contact information as well as their area of interest.

Options for Lead Distribution
In our last post, we discussed the imperative of being the first to call, and of making contact with qualified leads quickly while they are still searching for properties, and not hours or days later. This action alone can dramatically increase the number of qualified leads which convert into valid prospects and clients. We are often asked by our new customers for advice on which lead management process is the best. Our answer is, "It depends." It depends on your company's culture, your promises to agents regarding leads, your willingness to initiate new processes, the quality and experience of your sales staff, and the resources available to manage leads. If I were a broker and setting up an automated lead management system, one of the decisions I would have to make is whether to send leads instantly to my agents, to qualify them first in-house to filter out the obvious tom-foolery, or to have my in-house staff incubate leads until they are hot and ready to buy or sell a home. Let's look at the pros and cons of these three options in more detail. Send all leads immediately to your agents By sending all leads immediately to the sales staff, a company is able to put the lead into the hands of a qualified expert that can answer any questions posed and move the lead along the sales pipeline. After all, this is what you pay your agents to do. This process has no out-of-pocket cost, and smaller companies may not be able to afford staff committed to lead qualification and incubation.

The Real Estate Guide to Understanding Visitors
One of the areas everyone is hungry for but few have good access to is solid information on visitors and leads. Many times, when a form is filled out on a website, the agent receives some basic information such as name, email address, and perhaps a specific listing the person was interested in. That person is contacted and a conversation ensues around what are you interested in or what interests do you have. What if this information was already attached to the lead? What if you knew their interests, search preferences, and how they changed those preferences throughout their search? Once the user is engaged in a relevant search experience, they provide immensely valuable insight into what's important to them and precisely where they want to live. Here's how to obtain and leverage such information to start a meaningful and fruitful conversation out of the gate: Capturing Valuable Information About Your Visitors Information capture, in many cases, seems to be an afterthought. What I mean is that a flow is defined and pages are built, then analytics are integrated into those pages. However, if you turn this around and think, "What do I want to capture as visitors make their way through my site?" you will most likely think of different and perhaps better ways to create the flow and pages altogether.

The Top 8 Factors For Increasing Real Estate Leads and Conversions
Succeeding in the real estate business boils down to gaining more leads than everybody else, and then ultimately converting those leads into sales. Your real estate leads probably come to you from all sorts of places--from ads, referrals, online, your brokerage, or through a service you pay monthly for a set number of leads, or per lead. However they come through, leads are the starting point to every transaction you'll generate. So, the more leads you have coming in, the more sales you will have the ability to close. But getting leads is only the first half of the equation. Once you have them, you must be able to convert them. Your conversion rate is one of the most important elements of your business because it's turning your leads and contacts into closed transactions that result in you and your brokerage earning more money. It also means happy clients, and potentially getting referrals off the excellent service you provided. Improving your lead conversion rate is the other half of growing your real estate business, and there is always room to improve in this area. And in our research, your lead conversion rate is dependent upon the quality of your incoming leads and your ability to respond to them effectively. To help you be more successful with leads and conversions, we've assembled a list of the top 8 factors critical for gaining leads and improving your conversion rates on those leads. We invite you to read through the list and examine how they apply to you and your business!

Product Review: Lead Manager
I was going to write an overview of VoicePad's new Lead Manager interface. During the course of my conversation with them, however, I discovered that the most compelling subject isn't the Lead Manager itself – it's the data that populates this backend interface. After all, any lead generation and management tool is only as powerful as the leads that fill it. In the case of VoicePad's Lead Manager, these leads are better than ever. The company now has the ability to associate an individual (name, email address, and/or phone number) with a property view on a VoicePad mobile website. "This allows us to identify and track what were previously anonymous Web hits," they explain. In the course of the conversation, Lead Manager itself – in a way – becomes an afterthought, simply a place where these valuable mobile leads can be tracked and displayed. Randall Standard, CEO of VoicePad explains, "In the mobile environment, consumers can request property information without identifying themselves as on a website (by providing an email address that is sent to an agent as a web lead). We are able to identify consumers by a phone number and track all of their mobile activity, which is much more than a web lead could ever reveal. From the Lead Manager, for example, an agent can see that a customer called to get property info four times; requested info by text six times; viewed 64 properties on the agent's VoicePad mobile site; and indicated seven as favorites. The agent sees who shared the mobile site via text. How often buyers are searching for properties and where they are. This detailed insight helps agents craft their follow-up strategy and gives them an intelligent way to reach out to potential customers."

Agents Only Get 12 Leads a Year
Returning from the Real Estate Connect Conference (aka Inman NYC), you would think that any agent or broker who is not 100% dedicated to cultivating the online customer is doomed. Yet surprisingly, nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, if you read between the lines of a recent press release from Realogy, the global leader in size for a real estate group, your take away might be that online marketing and lead generation is a complete distraction and waste of time and money. Headline: Realogy's LeadRouter System Delivers Record 3 Million Online Leads to Its Affiliates in 2013, an Increase of 13% from Prior Year About Realogy Holdings Corp.: 244,000 independent sales associates Do some quick math and you will see that each sales associate gets about one lead per month. This is in no way a critique of REALOGY. Their LeadRouter system works just fine, and it manages leads from 20,000 offline and online sources. That is quite a wide swath of marketing. Simply stated, lead capture and lead routing volume is not enough to build a business on. It's not even close. At Inman, I stood next to Ben Kinney. His "team" sells about 500 homes per year at a production volume of $100 million in a very competitive market. His secret – 50 calls and 50 emails a day. His goal for lead conversion is to close two transactions out of every 100 leads. Most agents are lucky to do one closing from every 100 leads.

Agent Responsiveness Study Reveals Critical Flaws in Real Estate Lead Response
A new whitepaper reveals that failure to respond to leads in a timely manner is a major problem for many real estate professionals. The whitepaper is the result of the collaboration between partners at leading consulting firm WAV Group and Weichert Lead Network, the Internet lead generation arm of Weichert, Realtors®. What they uncovered was remarkable and could help real estate professionals achieve new levels of service and prosperity. In the whitepaper, WAV Group details lead responsiveness results from a sample of 384 different brokers across 11 states. Researchers posed as consumers and inquired about listings on broker websites, Zillow.com, realtor.com®, and Trulia.com. They found that: 48% of buyer inquiries were NEVER responded to. Average number of call back attempts after the initial contact was 1.5 Average number of email contact attempts was 2.07 Average response time was 917 minutes (or 15.29 hours) Victor Lund, partner at WAV Group explains, "These numbers reveal a staggering failure of real estate professionals to serve the consumer. But this failure actually represents an important opportunity. If brokers and agents take steps to rectify this problem, and respond more effectively to consumers, they are opening the door to a great increase in revenue."

First Out of the Gate: Manage Online Leads and Respond Faster
According to the latest NAR Profile of Homebuyers and Sellers, the number of home buyers using the Internet to search for a home increased this past year to 92%. We all know why buyers are looking online--it's convenient and the information is available any time of day, with the click of a mouse. So it's not surprising that response time is consistently cited as one of the most important factors to buyers when working with an agent. "Today's Internet consumer is expecting a response certainly within the hour but, more likely, within 15 or 20 minutes," said Bradley Miller, One Cavo founder and president. That is why so many leading real estate companies have instituted lead management programs to help their agents respond to clients fast. Yet even with lead management tools, real estate professionals ignore or are late in responding to almost 75% of customer leads, according to a study conducted by PCMS Consulting and One Cavo. According to the same study, half of agents did not respond to Internet leads at all! Managing online leads is a challenge for businesses in every industry, not just real estate. It's widely known that online leads go cold fast, so response time is key. The Harvard Business Review conducted a study analyzing over 1 million sales leads received by 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies. Companies that contacted potential customers within an hour of receiving an inquiry were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as compared to those that contacted the prospect even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer. It's so important to be the 'first out of the gate' and respond to those leads fast!

Lead Consolidation: Two Forgotten Words in Online Real Estate Marketing
If you are anything like me, you are tired of hearing about the latest and greatest app you have to learn how to use, or the next best service to buy. My mind is going through "technology overload," making it difficult to stay current — and many times a good idea or service may go unnoticed. Let me start off by saying I am frugal when it comes to spending money on tools to grow my business. It might not always be a positive trait to have, but on the plus side, if I buy into something it has to be good — so listen up. Last month I was at a technology summit where a real estate panelist mentioned a new service called "FiveStreet," which was revolutionizing his business by consolidating his online prospects. I have been on the quest for something like this for more than three years, so hearing that this product is available got me a bit excited. If your business is anything like ours, we get 15-25 inbound leads a day. It has been a constant struggle to manually input all the data, respond to all online inquiries in a timely manner, properly track them to see where they all come from, all while being able to route them to the proper team of agents. We've tried our hand at various CRM tools, and we boast about being equipped with tools to serve our business. But one thing I have noticed over the years is that many of the CRM software providers don't fully communicate with the real estate syndication websites. There is always a missing piece to the puzzle. This FiveStreet service seems to be the missing piece of the puzzle that can tie it all together.

Real Estate Lead Generation for Brokers: Data-Driven Lead Conversion
The fact is, the effectiveness of real estate lead generation programs for brokers and teams is 100% reliant on how they track and report to drive higher conversion rates.  Great lead conversion rates are kinda like the Jack-A-Lope of leads for many brokerages and teams. It is this legend they talk about, they think they have seen once in the wild, and it's fun to talk about around camp-fires. When we talk with teams or brokerages that are managing at least three agents and working on lead tracking and conversion rates, the very first question we typically ask is how you measure and report. The way you measure and report your leads can have up to 70% or more total impact on your lead conversion rate (ie. if you currently are at 3%, you could potentially be at 10%). There are some keys to real estate lead conversion that agents, teams and brokers alike can implement. Some of these can be accomplished by simply changing the policy or practice you follow, and others require that you have the right automation and tools built into your lead conversion process. Visit the next page to see the Top 3 Factors in Improving Real Estate Lead Conversion.

Product Review: WOLFconnect
Mobile and cloud-based technologies have dramatically altered the real estate landscape. Tools like digital signatures and transaction management software have not only affected how agents work, but where. It's the where aspect that can be challenging for brokers. With many agents working almost exclusively from their home office or on the road, brokers often struggle to keep everyone connected and to maintain a cohesive company culture. Enter WOLFconnect. WOLFconnect is a virtual front office system from Lone Wolf that gives your staff access to the resources and social aspects of your business that were once only available in a brick-and-mortar office. Through WOLFconnect, members of your brokerage are able to stay informed, connected, and productive no matter where they are. Here's a quick glance at some of the features available in WOLFconnect: Lead Management and Distribution Listing Management Electronic Deal Sheet Showing Tools and Feedback Drip Marketing Photo Album Voting Tools Online File Cabinet and Documents Integrated Listing Data with the brokerWOLF back office management solution CRM Tools eConcierge Vendor Database Event Management/Online Calendar Full Message Center brokerWOLF Reports for Agents Inter-Office Notification Tools

Moving Is An Emotional Experience
Guest contributor Jose Perez of PCMS Consulting says: Some of you may know that I just moved from Atlanta to Miami. My wife and I are recent empty nesters, and decided to downsize from our big suburban house in Atlanta for condo life in Miami. Although we have bought and sold many homes over the years, for some reason this move was the most emotional, complicated, and stressful of our lives. Because it was the first move since I started PCMS — a company dedicated to the innovation and reinvention of the brokerage industry — it was also the most enlightening as it relates to the real estate professionals and brokerages we have come into contact with since we decided to move. So far, our experiences have confirmed the fears we all have: Our industry just does not deliver a consistent consumer experience. Let's go back about 20 months when we went to Miami to see our families for the Christmas holidays. My wife and I met in Miami and our parents live here, so we have very deep roots in the Miami area. Our plan was always to move back when the kids were grown. As we sat on the balcony having coffee one morning in South Beach, we looked and each other and said, "What are we waiting for?" At the time our youngest was a senior in high school so we figured we could make a move within nine to 12 months. Our real estate search began that morning in December 2011!