Are Seller Leads a Thing of the Past in This Competitive Sellers' Market?
Years ago, I worked in a successful independent company with a lot of successful agents. One day I walked into the board room to be met with a bunch of snarling agents, beating their fists on the desk. Why? Because they were breaking up territories to send home evaluation letters to sellers to gather seller leads.
Now being young and not really understanding what was going on, I got stuck with the worst territories. I'll never forget, my first sellers listing was a trailer park. In the next meeting, everyone said, "Oh, the CME thing isn't working. And my broker turned to them and said, "Well, young Oddo over here just took the old bear. He just got the listing and he double ended the sucker from that silly mailer you're saying doesn't work."
What I learned from this strange experience was two fold:
- The concept of seller leads and home evaluations is not new, it's simply a digital version of the same concept.
- It's a longer conversion cycle, and because of this, it takes much more skill to nurture these people.
Why Are Seller Leads More Difficult?
It takes so much longer to build trust in a client needing to sell vs needing to buy, simply because they're wanting to sell the single most valuable asset that they own. The skill of building trust and nurturing that lead is vastly different than simply showing people houses, and that skillset has to be developed.
Additionally, lead generation systems can convince a seller to fill out a form just as easily as a buyer. However, the trouble comes when agent's don't understand the skills that are necessary to nurture them. Even more, many sellers interview other agents as well. In a nutshell, buyers are more "now" money, and sellers are more rare, but far more desirable because once they are working with you, it is significantly easier.
How Can You Improve Those Skills?
The number one thing you can do is ask questions and listen. Ask your clients why they decided against going with another agent. Ask them for feedback on how this process went. Most people are super gracious. And they'll tell you, especially if you ask in a way like, "Hey, look, it's not going to hurt my feelings. It's totally fine. I just really am dying to know." And then guess what, next time you incorporate whatever improvement gained out of that level of insight into your next presentation.
Step 1: Personal Discipline
If there's an agent out there reading this and they're like, "You know what? Yeah. I want to do it, I'll get to it." Here's a quote from Elon Musk, "If you give yourself 30 days to clean your home, it'll take 30 days. If you give yourself three hours, it'll take three hours. The same applies to your goals, ambitions, and plans." This is how every agent that I know who is successful in the real estate business on a massive scale, including myself, shortcut their way to the top.
Successful agents understand these principles. They understand the need for consistent lead generation. For increasing their skill set through repetition. They work with leads, and when they're finally ready to move to the selling side, they are consistent in refining their skills. Eventually, they get really good at these presentations, and they can get in and out in less than an hour.
And when you divide that over the duration of time in the year, the amount of money they make per hour is staggering, staggering, $500 an hour, $1000 an hour, $2,000 an hour. It's crazy and it's so simple. It's so simple to put together, but it starts with that understanding personal discipline and being able to generate leads at will and screwing it up over and over and over until you get to success.
Step 2: Wait and Adjust
If you really want to have the seller be the part of the process for you, which you should, you just have to start and know that it's going to take them out a little minute to, to ramp up.
I would say six months if you've never done this before. Six months of generating consistent seller leads, speaking to those leads, getting their motivation and timing, giving them a pitch on why they should meet with you if their motivation and timing is soon, giving them a pitch on what you're going to do for them if their motivation is later, and then following up with them at half the time or whatever they tell you, and being consistent with it. That's it.
You have to be able to do this on a consistent basis. You can't just have one or two up to bats a month, you need to do it over and over and over and over to really hone that skill.
And you're going to fail a lot, but once you get it dialed in like a well-oiled machine, man, that's just how you dominate and then you've got a system that you can delegate and you've got a real business at that point.
Wrapping Up
If you'd like some help with that stuff, that's what we do here at Market Maker. We do all those things we're talking about for you. Go to marketmakercall.com, check it out, see if your territory is available. If your area's available it is exclusive of one agent per zip code. Marketmakercall.com. We were super late today, jake. Let's get out of here.
We got it in. So as we always say, you are always just one preposition appointment away.
Every day.
