Surf's Up - How to Master the Real Estate Marketing Pipeline

If you’re not familiar with the sales funnel – also called a marketing funnel or pipeline - it’s a popular way to organize, track and improve marketing activities.

At first glance, it appears that the real selling and closing gets done toward the bottom, but your business will experience far more long-term success when you learn to fill the top of the funnel. Let’s take a look at what’s involved in each stage and some of the best practices from real estate and other industries on how to build a high-performance program to build sales, referrals and repeat business.

Key questions:

- Today, how many prospects do you have at each stage of the funnel?

- How many prospects need to be in the funnel to reach your financial goals?

- What activities are required to move prospects through the funnel?

Why work the top of the funnel? Because most of your competitors don’t. It’s easier to focus further down, where core real estate transaction skills come into play. But if you step outside your comfort zone and master the top of the funnel, you will do better at the bottom – and at the bottom line. What you are really doing at the top of the funnel is creating opportunities to sell at the lower levels.

The NAR estimates 50 percent of consumer emails to real estate professionals are ignored. Ignoring prospects until they are ready to buy or sell can be a costly practice. In a tough market, you can’t wait for selling opportunities to simply appear, or the market controls your earnings. No real estate professional wants his or her earnings to be dependent on changing market conditions.

Mastering top-of-the-funnel activities also means that you get better at developing qualified leads. In time, you begin to ask better questions, evaluate prospects better and move more quickly toward the sale. You will also be able to key in on high-return prospects and activities and not waste time on filling your funnel with low-return “suspects.”

Lots of real estate pros get tripped up in these top layers and prefer to focus further down the funnel. After all, prospecting takes time and resources and it’s disappointing when leads don’t work out.

But if you don’t take the time to prospect and farm, you miss out on ownership potential. You will be dependent on someone else – brokers, referrals, third-party vendors – for your leads. Since the home selling process takes 9+ months and the buying process takes more than 16 months, you may have to consider a longer time horizon than you’re using in current business practices.

Getting there faster

One way to streamline these early stage activities is to develop a prospect rating system that enables you to quickly sort your leads. Even if you simply rate them A, B, or C leads, you actively work the A’s, put the B’s into some incubation process and throw out the C’s. Working only the A’s is short-sighted, but many agents feel it’s all they have time to accomplish. The risk is that you may not get a chance to develop the skills to “warm up” leads to make them better.

Using the funnel also helps to order and prioritize your tasks. For example, you might set a goal of contacting your 'A' leads weekly and your 'B' leads monthly. It seems obvious, but many real estate pros spend time selling to 'B' leads who are not ready to buy and 'C' leads, who may never be ready. And remember, automate the higher levels of this funnel as much as possible so you can spend your personal time and resources on sales at the bottom.

Again, lots of people talk about getting qualified or unqualified leads, but without a systematic approach, you will never know how many can really be converted into new business, repeat business and referrals. A few criteria you can use to qualify are:

Motivation – What’s prompting the buy or sell transaction? Does the prospect walk the walk? Expressing interest in buying or selling and taking steps are two different things.

Budget – If the prospect can’t afford to buy a house or pay for your services, it’s not an A lead. If buying or selling expectations are unrealistic, it may not be an A lead.

Timing - Is there a timeline, such as a relocation or retirement date in the picture? Ask questions to assess motivation to buy or sell.

Match – Ideally, any potential buyer or seller is your client. In reality, your client base is best built with your specialties…neighborhood expert, waterfront, luxury buyers, condo specialist or e-PRO. Your real estate experience is one thing clients recognize – and the closer it matches their needs, the more willing they are to pay for your expertise.

Positioning – Why do people choose a real estate professional? They are looking for local and industry knowledge, ethical conduct and responsiveness. Position yourself as the solution and you will likely get the sale.

This can be called personal branding, or creating a strong value proposition – the important thing is that you and your materials clearly outline the results prospects can expect from choosing your services.