What Is The Best Way To Automate My Follow Up?

Read Transcript for “What Is The Best Way To Automate My Follow Up?”

 
Once you start getting leads in using the techniques I teach, you might feel overwhelmed – don’t – here’s how to handle all of those leads and follow up with them.

“I’ve been using your techniques to bring in buyers sellers and investors and I can’t believe the results! Everything you’ve promised is happening. I got 32 calls yesterday. I’ve gotten over 200 buyers to call me in the past three weeks and I’m going absolutely bonkers! But all of this success has created a huge problem for me: I’m completely overwhelmed and I can’t get back with everyone, let alone do the proper follow up. I’m leaving thousands of dollars on the table. What do I do?” – Ken B., frustrated in Minneapolis.

Joe: Well, Ken, you’re in a situation that most realtors have never ever seen in their lives who have never had this many leads before. This happens to all of my new students, whether they’re investors or real estate agents. It happens to everybody who starts using these techniques. Leads start coming in all the time and it’s very difficult to follow up with them.
 
Joe: So, you’re going to need a couple of things. One, you need to automate the process. That’s going to be the most important thing and the cheapest thing to do. You can also outsource it. You can bring in a licensed agent to help you work this process. You can bring in other people to help you call these people which sometimes works as well, but before you do that, learn the automation process.
 
Joe: One of the things I teach is how to use websites for buyers sellers and investors, so that the leads (the people that are coming in are going to your websites) are reading about what you do, what you can offer them and teaching them the whole process and showing them why it makes sense for them to do it. If you have websites do that for you, it saves you a huge amount of work up front, so that the leads that finally get to you are leads that are actually qualified to do what you want them to do.
 
Joe: Once they read the form, it gives them an opportunity to fill out the information, and if they’re a buyer lead, it lets you find out about their qualifications, what they’ve got for a down payment and all of that information. They put it right in the form and they click send and it sends it to you as an email.
 
Joe: That’s how you get the lead. But you want to be able to follow up with this lead, in other words, a quick phone call to them to find out where they’re at and if they’re ready to go right now, etc. and then it puts them into an autoresponder series.
 
Joe: An autoresponder is a sequential email software that sends out emails in a sequence over a period of time, and those sequences (I’ve already written them if you’re getting involved in my program) educates them about what they need to do, it sells them on the idea of doing it and builds a relationship between you and them so that they know who you are.
 
Joe: I can’t stress how important this process is – If these people understand who you are and they trust you and they see you as an expert and they’re educated about the process, they’re going to be a lot easier to work with and you’ll have to spend a whole lot less time with them. The autoresponder series can actually teach them this whole process and get them excited about it and then, when they’re ready to buy, they just call you up and say, ‘I want that property.’ You’re going to be sending out blasts with the properties that you get for lease options.
 
Joe: You can also do this with sellers. When you have a seller that you’re working with (and you should all be doing this with your listings) an email should be going out to them every week telling them what you did.
 
Joe: It doesn’t need to be something that you wrote for them specifically. You can have a series of generic emails that teach them about pricing, because we all know that if they have a property listed with you and it’s not selling, then it’s because of the price. So, if you educate them about that process and show them the statistics and why properties are selling and why they’re not, and do it in a generic way (which I’ve already done although you can do it yourself – this is not rocket science) and then that goes out to them once a week, they’ll feel a lot more confident in you as an agent that you’re actually doing something for them rather than just disappearing.
 
Joe: When I was an agent, I was mainly a listing agent, and so we had a ton of listings, and one of the things that I found out, after not too long into the business, is that I started dropping listings; they started canceling on me because I never called them back. I believe, and I still believe to this day, that if you get a listing and you price it properly and you put it into the MLS, it will service itself – it will sell if it’s priced properly. If it’s not priced properly, it’s not going to sell. So the goal is to try to get it priced properly and then go out and do all of the marketing that you need to do to bring in as many buyers you can, but the likelihood is that it’s going to sell through another agent, or through a co-op agent.
 
Joe: So, the goal is to try to get it priced properly. And I knew that it was just going to be a matter of time before they either drop their price or somebody came along and bought their property. The problem was that I kept losing listings and I didn’t call my listings back, so I kept losing these listings. This was before autoresponders and email.
 
Joe: I created a series of letters and every week and my assistant would send out a letter to my listings. Every one of my listings would get a letter from me in the mail and it would say, ‘Here’s what we’re doing on your property. Here’s the kind of ads we’re running,’ and all of that kind of stuff. It was a generic letter. I sent it out to every single one of them. I didn’t change it or modify it for each one of them. The only thing we did was that every month, we’d send out a CMA with the current comps on it.
 
Joe: We’d also talk about the statistics of pricing, and I went through a whole series of statistics of pricing so that when they got that and they knew that I was on top of the thing, what would happen is that instead of a month or two months down the line, getting a call from them saying, ‘Joe, we’re going to cancel our listing. You’re not doing a thing to get it sold and we’re angry. We don’t understand what’s going on,’ and they’re there making their payments, nobody’s showing up, or they’re only getting two or three showings, it’s not getting sold, and they don’t realize that they just need to lower their price, etc. etc.
 
Joe: So instead, now, with the letters that I’m sending out, it’s educating them about this process and once they get educated about this process, instead of getting a call canceling, what I’d get is a call saying, ‘Joe, you’re right.’ I’d say, ‘Well, what do you mean, I’m right?’ ‘You’re right. We need to lower our price.’ I’d say, ‘Oh, right, do you want to lower it $5,000 or $10,000?’ Then we would lower the price and we’d get the property sold.
 
Joe: Once I implemented this follow up process, which I didn’t have to do anything except set it up, I never lost another listing for that reason ever again, and believe me – I had a lot of listings. You can use this same technique. Good luck with it.