Slow and Steady: How Successful Real Estate Agents Grow Their Business

December 1, 2016

Esther Lee

There is no gimmick or easy button that can catapult you to the top of the mountain of real estate success. Perhaps you can cut corners to reach a limited “success” for a time, but unless the foundation of your business is solid, this quick “success” will be short-lived. Slow and steady wins the race. Here’s how you can take a step back and map out the course of your business plan before sprinting off aimlessly. Know where you are going, and what the steps are to get to there.

The Goal: Steady Cultivation of Leads. Not Instant Gratification.

Instant gratification in lead conversion is rare, and that should not be the goal behind your business process. Yet that’s what many real estate professionals seem to expect from their lead generation and CRM systems. They purchase a CRM system based on the suggestion of a peer, leave it up and running for a few short months, then complain that the CRM doesn’t work.

Ben Kinney – Ben Kinney Real Estate Team
Move away from the mindset of immediate gratification, and focus on investing in your past leads, even if they don’t immediately purchase a home. Internet leads give you a source of business today that grow into additional business in the years after.

By nurturing these leads from the beginning, you’ll end up with tons of future business. Not only from referrals, but from those who weren’t ready that first year, but will buy or sell their home in the next few years.

Continue to make a good impression by providing relevant content that shows your value as a trusted real estate professional, and they will remember you when they are ready. Ben is still closing deals from leads he initially received 7 years ago because he was able to cultivate them through BoomTown’s Smart-Drip programs.

Fake Name and Wrong Number? No Problem!

We’ve all been there. You get leads who register as “Donald Duck,” “Joe Schmoe,” or even unrepeatable names like “*Bleep* You.”

It’s easy to feel negative when people give you incorrect phone numbers or invalid info. Sometimes it’s hard not to take it personally. But be patient. Take every lead seriously, including those who aren’t ready to buy, and even the ones with fake information.

According to RISMedia, 50% of online leads don’t convert for 12-24 months. So even if you’re receiving a steady stream of leads, half of them might not convert for another year or more. Leads take time to nurture before they have conversion potential. It’s important to stay persistent and consistent to keep the lines of communication open.

When real estate professionals grumble that their technology system “doesn’t work,” it’s because they are not seeing an ROI. In other words, they are not converting the leads they are generating.

Mike Grbic – Select Homes Team Real Estate
People have to appreciate the lag time. You have to stick with it for a year, year and a half before you actually start hitting an optimum level of return, and start really seeing the long term benefit of that. We’re still closing deals that registered on the site 4 years ago.

Smart Prospecting: Lead Follow Up Beats Lead Generation

There is no point in generating more leads if you are struggling with lead conversion. Lead generation in itself will not make you succeed. It’s what you do with those leads that add to your success. A good rule of thumb is to spend 20% of your time generating leads, and 80% of your time cultivating them. Put more effort into lead follow up, rather than lead generation, and you will see a tenfold return, even if it’s gradual.

At BoomTown, our success teams preach and coach the notion of Smart Prospecting. Tools like our Opportunity Wall, Insights, or Best-Fit Leads bring the most opportune leads to the surface. When you know who to reach out to, and when, you can have more targeted conversations, increasing your chance of connecting and converting with that lead.

We advise teams to make smart prospecting a consistent part of your work routine. Some may even suggest spending 3 hours a day prospecting and following up with leads in order to be effective. This may be too much time for some, so adjust accordingly to your own team’s needs.

There are a lot of agents who will only prospect for leads when their pipeline is empty. When they are working with clients, they will let their other lead follow up fall by the wayside. Only when they have no current clients and are “hungry” again, will they put their attention back to prospecting.

This “feast or famine” mentality is not sustainable, and is not the way to build a successful real estate business. You’ll only tire yourself out and never have a steady pipeline of potential opportunities. With smart prospecting, you’ll always have prime opportunities to work smarter, not harder.

Carefully Laid Out Processes For Success

On top of your lead generation technology, you want to have carefully laid out plans and processes to lay the foundation of your successful business.

Defined systems and processes are a necessity for growing success. When your lead generation starts filling your database with tons more leads, but you don’t have a set process for how those leads are handled, they are more likely to fall through the cracks before ever converting into a client. You’ll need to outline a step-by-step game plan for the path the lead will take through the sales process.

Who makes the first contact with the lead? The agents themselves, or a lead scrubber (like and ISA)? How soon should that first contact be made? What is the first channel of contact? Phone call, email, or text? How often should you make follow-up touches?

Action Plans in the BoomTown system allow you to create a template for lead follow-up. You can customize a course of action that incorporates schedules emails, to-do’s, and follow up tasks, or select plans created by other BoomTown users in the Sharing Library.

Learn More about Action Plans

Mike Grbic – Select Homes Team Real Estate
It’s one thing to generate the leads, it’s another thing to convert them into closings. You have to have a team that’s trained to handle it, and you need to have systems in place so agents actually make the phone calls and be held accountable for ROI. The other thing real estate agents need to understand is that it might take an average of 8 months to incubate leads.

By doing this prep work, and holding your team accountable to the systems you’ve put in place, you’ll be planting the seeds of your continual and growing success.

Inspire Agents To Adopt and Adhere

You could have a great system for lead generation, and the most precise processes in place, but these things will only improve business if your agents adopt the systems and adhere to the processes.

If agents are just going to collect leads and never call them, never work the system, or learn the follow up processes, then you’re never going to see the results you want.

Agents are busy and have little bandwidth to learn another new technology product. There’s already too much that takes up their time and attention.

7 Tips to Drive Agent Adoption of Systems

Create innovation teams

Appreciate the importance of good design

Gamify activities (like lead notification and response)

Push for agent sweat equity

Find proven technology

Train effectively<

Focus on the agent’s personal brand

Learn More: Inspiring Change Agents: 7 Tips To Drive Agent Adoption of Technology

True Leadership Leads to True Success

Once you have your technology systems and follow-up processes in place, it’s your job as the team leader to help demonstrate the value of those systems and provide training so your agents achieve maximum ROI.

It won’t work if you don’t.

Too many real estate professionals imagine technology to be a magic button that instantly makes their business better, when in reality you have to put the work in to get the results you want out.

Mike Grbic – Select Homes Team Real Estate
It comes down to your leadership within the team. You could have a great technology product and provide help videos and training, but ultimately it’s hands-on training with the team leader or trainer that will get agents to use the system to it’s fullest potential.

It becomes an issue of training and coaching your agents more than anything else. Your business is only as effective as you allow your team to be. It becomes more of a people development issue than a technology issue.