One word that will always grab the attention of a salesperson is the word ‘LEAD’. And then they expect to get the listing.
In my role as Customer Success Manager with homes.co.nz I meet and talk with a lot of managers and salespeople. I recently had coffee with a young energetic sales manager of a large sales team. I had raised the fact that on homes.co.nz our Premium Agents can get leads through the green ‘appraisal’ buttons strategically placed across the homes.co.nz website. We had a moment as we realised we had both experienced the same reaction from salespeople when fed a lead, this being the expectation that by ringing the lead would automatically result in getting a listing for the property.
We had both been educated to the fact a lead was something that needed to be nurtured, sometimes over many years, building a relationship with that future seller until they were ready to sell. Most often, as nurturing a lead requires keeping in regular contact with them over the ‘lead in’ time, the result would be they would list solely with you and not interview another salesperson at all.
We found ourselves reminiscing over our training room experiences and our use of the A, B, C categories we applied to our database clients. C as a contact, to B, will sell in the future to A they were getting ready to list their home, most likely with you as you had nurtured that relationship through the A, B, C.
The manager I was having coffee with said salespeople when gifted a lead through the company system thought they were being given a listing and verbalised their disappointment when they found after ringing the lead they weren’t ready to sell ‘now’ and also didn’t expect to have to compete with other agents for the listing. From my perspective homes.co.nz sends many leads to salespeople through our website with a common response being, that tool doesn’t work because they weren’t ready to list their home.
Perhaps it is time to go back to the tried and true real estate practise of nurturing leads and away from the ‘I want it now’ philosophy that more often than not in real estate leads to disappointment.
