REAL ESTATE B-SCHOOL HIGHLIGHT: How to Maximize Response Time with Your Leads

Schedule a FREE Strategy Session

Transcript:

Getting Face-to-Face With Buyers. I’m going to show you a study done by MIT, Lead Response Study. When you Google it, there are two links. Go to it and read it by yourself and with your team.

The second link is a SlideShare presentation. The first one is a static document, 3 years’ worth of data across 6 companies generating web leads, and it gives you the terms and the definitions of the study. But it gives you a summary of the best days to call – Wednesdays and Thursdays, 4-6 p.m. are the best times to call to contact a lead.

8-9am and 4-5pm are the best times to call to qualify a lead. 4-5pm is the best time to call to contact and qualify a lead over 11-12am by 109%.

It’s all chat-driven, so it’s really interesting stuff.

Internet leads are in chart 3 that you can show your team. Response time analysis by 5-min increments. So we figured if the first 20 hours sliced up by hours were important, we should look more precisely at the first 3 hours sliced up by 5-min segments. What are the results?

It’s even more eye-opening. Begin calling for just one hour. So the odds of calling to contacts lead decreased by over 10x in the first hour. The data actually disappear. So in 5 mins, look how much it drops off to 10 mins.

That is lead to contact, and lead to qualify is just as dramatic. You can see how much it drops off here.

So what’s the bottom line? The odds of qualifying a lead in 5 mins vs 30 mins dropped 21x. And from 5 mins to 10 mins the dial to qualify odds decreased 4x.

So just from 5-10mins it decreases 4x. So if you or your agents are seeing that buyer internet leads are crap, and you’re not responding within 1-2 mins, your words are a waste of breath, because you’re not working those leads the way they must be worked.

If you think of an internet buyer, it’s not that they’re going to transact with you at the moment they hit submit. But they’re at their computer, and they’re searching for homes on your website. 100% of the time when I’m on the internet and I hit submit, my cell phone is right next to me.

You’re not getting them 10-15 mins later when they’re off the site. But you want to get them when they’re on the site and they’re right next to their cell phone. If they don’t answer the phone the first time, you’re calling a second time. So make sure anytime I get a call from someone, 90% of the time if someone dials my phone twice and they’re not in my phone, you need to overcome the feeling you have that they’re going to be annoyed, but they’re going to answer the phone.

So dial that phone twice. And tell your agents to do the same. And it just starts the relationship. If you think it’s a 5-8 contact process to get someone to do business with you, you want to get yourself the best chance of getting them on the phone the first time out of the gate.

I would read this study word for word with your team. You read it word for word to yourself, but also read it to your team. There’s a bunch of examples at the bottom here. They tested these principles firsthand. So they had their president sign up with a lead provider for a mortgage. And he got the first one called in 30 mins, the last one called on a lead 3 days later.

And then there’s some other interesting stuff up here. They had one ref filled out a lead from a top provider at 8:30 a.m.. His first call was in a minute, his second call in three minutes, his third in an hour and 45 minutes. So in the first two hours, he got three calls, but in the first five minutes he got two calls.

So pretty interesting study. Definitely jump on that. Your team or even yourself - you won’t know the power of internet buyers and the opportunity there unless you fully understand that lead.