Part III: What to do with leads; Suffering a slow real estate business death? How to implement a turn-around

Part 3: You have a lead, now what?

Monday, August 7, 2006

By Sean Cutright
Delta Media Group

If your real estate business feels like it is suffering a slow death, there are several things you can do to improve your situation. Not the least of which, though, is improving your Web-based technology—the vehicle on which your business can race around the track or sputter out on the side of the road.

In our last two articles we reviewed how search engine optimization can help drive consumers to your Web site and what kind of lead generation will best capture those consumers after they are there. These key Web site features help to maximize your traffic, leads and converting those leads to closed sales.

Now that you’re making sure your Web systems are set up so customers find you online, submit leads, and give you those leads instantly, the final piece of the Web-based puzzle is to make sure you can follow up with those customers that submitted leads. This is the part of the system that takes all the smoke and mirrors and turns it into a bottom-line figure—closed transactions. By making sure your Web site and Lead Management system has an ample contacts and customer relationship management system, you can better market to your customers, more surely help them buy or sell their home, and retain their referral business.

The contacts system should not only provide a customer’s information, but also show you their pipeline of actions and requests on your site, as well as your follow-up to those requests. It is also beneficial to have the capabilities of viewing what the customer has viewed and saved, and when. Make sure the system provides customer relationship management in the way of automated drip marketing and other features you can send to your customers or groups of customers. If you’re a broker, make sure you can do this for all your company’s customers so you can monitor that none of them are being neglected. A customer working with your best agent should be treated the same as one working with your worst agent, because the customer generally views an agent’s poor customer service as a reflection of your company, not that agent. If and when they find a different agent to work with, they will look outside your company and start on a new slate. Just imagine the negative things they’ll tell their friends and family!

Look at your business in comparison to a car race. You can practice your driving endlessly. Work your shifting and clutch speed. Hug the turns and master how your car performs at each RPM. But when it comes time to race, if you’re driving a family sedan that is not tuned to race, you’re done before you started. You need for your Web site and Lead Management system to be capable of operating at the level you want to perform or else your best performance still won’t stretch far above mediocrity.

Sean Cutright is a professional newspaper journalist and graduated from Kent State University’s esteemed School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He currently serves as the Public Relations director and the Midwest account representative for Delta Media Group, the nation’s leading real estate Web site and Lead Management systems provider.