Systems Lead Management Summary for Client This document is a summary of Lead Management with Best Agent Business and coding for database fields and contact types using Top Producer (TP). This document should be shared with everyone involved with any aspect of lead management, such as anyone on your team. If any questions/comments, email leads@bestagentbusiness.com. Copyright 2008, Best Agent Business www.bestagentbusiness.com Fax: 240-751-4247, Email: steve.kantor@gmail.com Version: 8/5/2008 Overview... 1 Checklist of Steps... 2 Hottest Clients and Hottest Leads... 2 New Leads... 3 Backlog of Leads... 4 Calling... 4 Emailing... 5 Weekly Reports... 5 Weekly Report Formats... 5 Weekly Questions... 6 Printing Report Weekly and Reply to Email... 6 Deadline for Weekly Fax to BAB... 6 Updating Report with Notes... 7 Advanced Lead Management... 8 Database Field Usage... 9 Fields in Database Proper Usage... 9 Contact Types... 10 Overview Lead Management is one of many teams within Best Agent Business. Almost all of our clients use our services for Lead Management. Our Lead Management systems are the result of over 100 interviews with agents who have sold over $1 billion in their career. This is from the lessons learned of Billion Dollar Agent www.billiondollaragent.com. The basic goal is to stop wasting leads and maximize the value of every single lead to close more sales and generate more revenue and net profit. We believe in systems. Best Agent Business has over 200 pages of written systems to run all aspects of our business including Recruiting, Accounting, Marketing, Sales, Database Management, Lead Management, Listing Management, Publishing, and more. If you have always wanted systems for your business or to improve your current systems, you have come to the right place. 1
Checklist of Steps This is the list of steps involved with Lead Management with Best Agent Business: Kickoff call and defining your first goals Database Management kickoff email and your answers Business Database Spreadsheet (BDS) to get top level view of your database Lead Management kickoff email and your answers Lead Management Summary this document for client to read and approve Calling Identify hottest clients and hottest leads New leads Backlog of leads Weekly reports Action plans Hottest Clients and Hottest Leads As part of Database Management cleanup and to quickly identify the most important leads to be called, we focus together on grouping the following people for calling: Hottest Clients This would include all clients who are under contract with a pending deal which should close in the near future, active sellers with a current listing, active buyers with a signed buyer s agreement or you are in process of showing property. These groups include: Client Under Contract, Client Active Seller, Client Active Buyer. Hottest Leads This would include buyers who are within 30 days of showing of property or sellers who are within 30 days of a listing appointment or listing decision. These groups include Buyer A and Seller A. 2
New Leads All new leads should be sent to BAB starting now. The most critical step is to make sure that 100% of leads are captured and sent to BAB for proper entry and coding in the database. Lead Management is run 365 days a year. Any lead sent to Lead Management will be processed and entered in your database within one day. For example, if you send a lead on Monday 10am, it will be entered by Tuesday midnight, often sooner. We are open for business seven days a week. This is done a few different ways: Email leads@bestagentbusiness.com You can send all new leads or database updates to leads@bestagentbusiness.com. All emails to leads@bestagentbusiness.com are processed by the team member responsible for your leads and for that day of the week. The email is also copied to the Team Leader of Lead Management and also to Steve Kantor. When you send or forward an email, it is important to note the following information: Type: Buyer or Seller lead Rating: New Lead or ABC rating Next Call Date: Date for next call Agent: If you have more than one Agent on team, which Agent to assign lead to Phones: All phone numbers you get Address: Mailing address Notes: Detailed notes we can add to database and next steps Here is example of a short one: Buyer new lead Next call 7/20/2008 Left vmail Here is a longer one: Buyer A Agent Julie Next call 7/27/2008 Cell is 312-333-4444 other phone below is home 123 Main St., Los Angeles, CA 93421 Barbara is moving to DC area in 3 months with govt job paying about $120k and can put 20% down on 300-400k condo. Wants to be downtown. Fax You can fax lead sheets to BAB fax number at 240-751-4247. All faxes are received as efax PDF and reviewed by Steve Kantor and forwarded to Lead Management or other teams. If possible, it is even faster to scan the documents and email to leads@bestagentbusiness.com because it will get there faster and you can include more notes in your email rather than needing a cover letter for the fax. You can use the BAB 3
New Lead Sheet or your own form or even just write on a blank piece of paper. This is for phone call leads in office or when you are on the road. If you would like a New Lead Sheet just email leads@bestagentbusiness.com and ask for one. Backlog of Leads Many clients have a backlog of leads which they have not entered into any database. We discuss with you about any backlog and gradually enter into your database or convert from another database. Calling Calling of leads is critical to sales success in real estate. The most successful agents spend 2-3 hours every day calling leads. In a week, that means 10-15 hours of calling. To decide on the best Lead Management system, we need to know what your calling plan is. Calling of leads includes calls to Clients/SOI, buyer leads, seller leads, and any coldcalling to FSBO or Expireds. Calling of leads does not include calls made to current clients who are active which would include any seller with an active listing or a buyer who is already at showing stage, or any transaction under contract. A lead turns into a client when a seller has signed a listing agreement, or a buyer has signed a buyer s agreement or you have taken a buyer to show property for the first time. If you do not want to waste 20-80% of leads like most real estate agents, please choose from following mix of options for calling: Agent/Team Leader: You call the leads for X hours per day and week. We need to know how many hours per day you will be calling, so we can send the best possible leads for calling during that time. For example, we recommend to start with 2 hours per day from 9-11am, or 10 hours per week. If you miss a morning, you make up the time in the afternoon or on weekend to meet 10 hours per week. In 10 hours, you can make about 100-150 calls and reach about 20-40 people live on the phone. Best Agent Business: We have a Callers team of assistants who can do inside sales agent calling of leads to qualify and resolve the leads and escalate warm/hot leads to you for the next steps. This can either be done as a portion of your monthly hours to allocate, or you can upgrade at anytime. For example, for $995/month of calling, that would cover 50 hours or about 500-750 dials and reaching 100-200 people live. As a rough estimate, you should budget about $5-10 per lead to reach live and resolve/qualify. Buyer s Agent: If you have a buyer s agent, we can organize the database and their calling. They should spend 3 hours a day or 15 hours a week calling. We have systems which can hold them accountable. Referral Agent: We can manage delegating groups of 10-20 leads at a time to referral agents and tracking their results. 4
Other Callers: If you have local people you want to hire part-time for calling, we can manage their calling efforts and hold them accountable. Emailing For leads without a valid phone number, we can help organize emailing of leads to get them to raise their hand and qualify or resolve the lead. We recommend a monthly email touch to all Clients/SOI and buyer/seller leads. This can be a rotation of market statistics reports or general gift of personal or professional knowledge. We have expertise in trying a variety of emailing approaches for custom personal emails to try to get new email only leads, or older email only leads, to reply and opt-out of any interest in buying a house, or state that they have already bought a house, and state they are still interested in buying a house. If still interested, our goal is to determine whether they are NOW or FUTURE business and take action as needed. Weekly Reports Weekly Reports from Lead Management are a critical aspect of our systems. Based on your evolving needs, we generate and send you a PDF report every weekend sometime from Fri afternoon to Sunday midnight. Usually, the reports are all sent by Saturday midnight so you can review on Sunday to plan and organize your week, or make calls while sitting at an open house during down time. All studies have shown, and the top coaches in the industry agree, that the majority of agents will make more dials per hour and be more productive in calling if they call from paper reports and make notes, rather than making calls from database and updating the computer themselves. By calling from paper, the focus is on calling. You can note the leads you need to send emails to and send emails in the afternoon rather than your key calling hours in the morning. Also, by calling from paper and being away from the computer, you avoid getting distracted by reading email or surfing the web or doing anything else on the computer. We highly recommend you try this approach. Weekly Report Formats If you are a single agent, you get reports from the entire database. If you have a team or other buyer s agents or referral agents or other lead callers involved, they will get their own reports and you will always be copied. If your plan includes calling of Clients/SOI, then one set of reports will be a group of Clients/SOI. 5
If you do not have many leads, your report may be a combination of Buyer/Seller leads. Often, we split out Buyer leads and Seller leads for reports. If you have a large backlog of leads, we will always focus first, in sequence, on A, B, and then C leads. Depending on your situation, New Leads may be the highest priority or right after A or B leads. Once we have hottest clients clean, we will also produce a Client Active report which is a nice short phone list of all your clients who are under contract, listed, or buyers at showing stage. Sometimes, as part of database cleanup process, you may get reports to review and update to help cleanup the database. Weekly Questions For each weekly report, please take one minute and Reply All to the Question of the Week. This is a series of questions related to Lead Management to constantly improve your business, our service, and your net profits. If you do not reply to the questions, you will be missing out on significant additional value from Best Agent Business. Printing Report Weekly and Reply to Email We suggest you print the email first, then answer the question, then open the PDF and flip through a few pages to make sure it makes sense. Then print the report and immediately write the description of the report on the first page and staple or clip together. Top Producer does not have ability to add a custom report title. You should write on the top the title, such as Buyer AB. Every week, you should Reply All to Weekly Report, as needed, to offer suggestions for improvement. For example, if there are too few or too many leads to be called for one week, tell us. If you are confused of why certain names are appearing, tell us. If you have any questions or suggestions, always Reply All. Deadline for Weekly Fax to BAB We must receive your weekly fax updates of the report by Friday 12pm ET. If we receive by then, we do all updates on Friday afternoon and your new weekend report reflects the changes. If you skip a week or are late with your fax, the system will not flow smoothly and you may seem the same information on the following report. We recommend you set a weekly auto-reminder for either Thursday afternoon or Friday morning to fax weekly report to BAB. 6
Updating Report with Notes Please write clearly and use block rather than cursive writing if that is clearer and you can write using block letters. If your writing is unclear, our team may email you and ask questions. Please do the following for updating reports: DELETE: If you want to have a person deleted from database, write DELETE in block letters and cross-out the entire record. DUPE: If you see two names of same people, just write DUPE and circle both records and we will combine the records. Delete old contact types: As part of cleanup, if you see old or wrong contact types that are no longer needed, cross them off. Type and Rating: If the type/rating of the person changed, for example from Buyer New Lead to Buyer A, then write clearly the new type rating, such as Buyer A and circle it. Please circle it to make it clear. Next Call Date: All people should have a Next Call Date. You can abbreviate this by NCD. The easiest is to cross-out the last Next Call Date and next to it write a new one, like 8/15/2008. Phone: Always try to get a cell phone in addition to a home phone. Address: If you speak to a lead or have substantial email interaction, always get mailing address so they can start to receive monthly mailings. 7
Advanced Lead Management There are a number of Advanced Lead Management steps which we implement once th4e basics are done. The basics take between 30-90 days to fully implement since it is a combination of work by BAB and work by client calling and updating backlog of leads. No implementation of advanced lead management is done until basics are complete. The basics include the following: Database is 100% clean for Clients/SOI/Buyer/Seller for ABC ratings Calling is organized and flowing with defined hours per week All ABC people have working email address All AB people have working phone number All A people, and hopefully others, have mailing address All people who should be called, such as AB, have a Next Call Date All people are assigned to specific Agent if client is a team of agents All new leads are being sent to BAB via email and fax All AB leads are current in terms of information and call cycle Any backlog of C leads is defined clearly with goals and budget of time and cost to resolve in future months Lead generation marketing budget is reviewed and tuned based on lessons learned from review of closed clients from past two years and lead management results from completing the basics 8
Database Field Usage Best Agent Business has expertise in Database Management. Steve Kantor, President of Best Agent Business, was the founder of Gnossos Software, a database product company which started in 1986 and was sold in 2004 with about 200 clients and revenue of about $2 million. Steve helped design, create, and manage, over 100 custom databases for a variety of business applications. The core product was called Keep In Touch and was a CRM product for political software, similar to how Top Producer is a CRM product for real estate agents. Database Management is not the expertise of a typical real estate agent. We encourage you to trust Best Agent Business and our expertise as we implement the best database management system in the real estate industry. If you have any questions or concerns, just email steve.kantor@gmail.com. Or, if you just want to understand the reasons behind certain systems, just ask. Fields in Database Proper Usage Contact Type: Salutation: Address: Phone Number: Email: Source: Always update as appropriate. See section on Contact Types Contact Type is used for TP. Other databases will use other fields. If missing, add Mr. or Ms. or M. if unknown. Always ask for full address if missing and on phone. Having the address helps to find out more information about lead. Reason to ask for address is that we will mail them information on company and their information requested. Some people will react positively to physical mail rather than just email. It is also a tool to differentiate from other agents. If lead has a bad phone number then delete phone number from lead and make note of bad phone deleted. If phone becomes invalid, the bad phone should be pasted into contact notes and phone field left blank. If lead has a bad email then delete the email from lead. If the email becomes invalid, the bad email should be pasted into contact notes and email field left blank. BAB tracks down proper email and verifies by sending a test hello message. As possible, the source field should be completed to identify the original marketing source of each client. We work to cleanup the list of previous Sources and define a new clean list. Next Call Date: Contact Notes: If it is Live Call and Lead is Interested or better, then you should assign a Next Call Date to insure follow-up. If BAB assistant is making notes or adding to database, such as a new lead, they should put BAB FRSTNAME LASTNAME: as in BAB Kim Davis: CONTACT NOTES HERE. 9
Contact Types These are the Contact Types to be used in the system to code the database (DB) in Top Producer (TP). In TP will be the following Contact Types. Agent updates lead in TP to proper contact types after each call or BAB updates from faxed notes from Agent. Agent Assignment If more than one agent is involved with sales, such as a team, each lead should be assigned to specific agent. Format is Agent FIRST LAST. This is also used to track referral agents when leads are referred out to an agent. This is for team leaders, buyer s agents, referral agents, and other callers such as BAB. Agent Mike Jones Lead assigned to Mike Jones Agent Unsure If it is unclear who is Agent or older lead and needs to be reassigned. Agent BAB BAB calling team are calling these leads Clients Client A Client B Client C Client D A client who has provided a referral or done a second transaction. A client who you think would provide a referral or do a second transaction. A client you are unsure about referral/repeat. A client you do not want to contact or do business with again. To be safe, remove address, phone, email from these records. They are kept in database to have proper total transaction details for business history and to remind you of type of clients to avoid in future. SOI Sphere of Influence SOI A SOI B SOI C All of these people should be people you have met. They may or may not remember your name but you have met them. A person who has provided a referral. A person who you think would provide a referral or use your services for their next real estate transaction. A person who you are unsure whether they would refer or use your services. Client Active Client Under Contract Client Active Seller A buyer or seller under contract with pending deal A seller client with active listing. 10
Client Active Buyer A buyer client who is actively looking at properties and you are in middle of showings and they will likely make an offer in next 90 days. If someone has done showings but now colder lead, move back down to Buyer A or Buyer B. New Lead All new leads are marked as New Lead and remain until Agent has reached lead via phone live or solid email response to qualify the lead. All leads should be qualified within one week of receipt, preferably within 1-2 days. Searching for these leads will find new leads that have not been qualified. As a lead is qualified, Buyer New Lead is removed and replaced by other contact types. Very few leads should have Buyer New Lead code. Buyer New Lead Seller New Lead All new leads will start as Buyer New Lead so it will be easy to see leads that have not yet been contacted A new seller lead. Not Interested When you qualify a lead on phone or email and they are Not Interested, it may be because the buyer is Lost and has already bought a house or other reasons. Buyer - Lost Buyer Seller Lost Price They bought a house with another agent. Be enthusiastic and congratulate them. Find out when they bought house, how they chose their real estate agent instead of our company, and who was real estate agent. Wish them many years of happiness in new home. Get address of new home and find out when they are closing on deal. Listing lost due to another agent taking listing at a price which is higher than client would have listed the home. On call cycle to check for expireds. Seller Lost Compete Listing lost to competition, fair and square. This is useful to note truly lost listing appointments and learn from lost appointments. Buyer Dead Lead If the lead is resolved and dead for a variety of reasons. BAB reviews dead leads monthly and codes in more detail based on notes. If not interested in buying, determine whether a dead lead or should be a Buyer C for 12-24 months in future. 11
Seller Dead Lead This is very rare. If a seller did not list, they are a likely lead in the future or perhaps SOI. Interested The lead is interested in buying a house, open to talking, and timeframes are based on estimated timeframe before first showing of property. All Buyer ABC leads must have a Next Call Date. It is suggested that Next Call Date is roughly one week for A, 2-3 weeks for B, and one month for C. Buyer A Buyer B Buyer C Seller A Seller B Seller C 0-30 days until showing starts. Hot lead. Should be in process for pre-approval. 30-90 days. Warm lead. Pretty sure they will buy with someone 90+ days 0-30 days to listing decision. You may or may not have already had listing appointment. 30-90 days to listing appointment 90-365 days to listing decision If they decide not to sell, you often move them from Seller C to SOI C for ongoing marketing. Unsure if Interested or Not Interested Some leads have been reached live and qualified, but the notes are unclear. Buyer Unsure This is used for lead management cleanup for older leads. If there is no note showing the lead was ever qualified, or the last contact showed interest but was so long ago or unclear what is current timeframe, or the notes are not clear enough to be sure of timeframe. During cleanup, many leads are in Buyer Unsure group until reviewed and reached live. Seller - Unsure Advanced We have more advanced lead management contact types for marketing areas such as FSBO, Expired, Farm Marketing, Client Marketing, Vendors. As the need is identified, we will provide special systems for these areas. 12