08 May

Artificial Intelligence Can Help Agents Who Are Not Following Up on Leads

Real estate is like most industries: following up on leads is critical. The difference in real estate is that there are almost 2 million Realtors fighting over about 5 million homes that sell in the U.S. each year. What this means is that following up on leads is a matter of career life or death!

There’s no doubt about it, following up on leads is a monumental task, it’s frustrating and exhausting. If you lead a team of agents you’ve probably heard every excuse imaginable why they’ve slacked off. But when you understand that your odds of converting a lead goes down by 21 times if they haven’t heard back within 5 minutes, you know that something must be done to be more responsive. When you have the proper systems in place and everyone is trained and committed to using them, your team can totally dominate when it comes to lead follow up.

How will you know if your agents fail to follow up?

This is the question most brokers and team leaders are trying to answer every single day. Well, you can get the answer you’re seeking by looking at your company’s metrics, specifically your lead conversion rate.

If your company has low conversion rates, it really isn’t sustainable. Even if you’re generating many thousands of leads each month, if you only convert 1%, there is no way you’ll see a positive ROI on the time and money spent on lead generation.

What typically happens is that when a Realtor starts building a team, they experience a boost in the number of leads being generated. But if you look closely, this is often accompanied by fewer lead follow-ups, which will eventually diminish the conversion rate.

The problem is that if you’re going to grow your team, you need your agents to be in the field, not sitting at their computers. So, how can you respond to leads 24/7 within 5 minutes when you need to be out in the field most of the time?

Why is it so hard to follow up on leads?

For busy brokers and team leaders, lead follow-up often seems like a moving target. It involves a whole series of processes that need to be constantly monitored and tweaked. I often hear agents complaining that they have too many leads to effectively follow up on. Many end up hiring an Inside Sales Team, but this often proves futile when the volume of leads approaches a thousand a month. Humans cannot handle this many active conversations and be expected to provide quality service.

With Advanced Tools & Systems You Can Improve Your Lead Follow-Up

You may be using automation with your real estate CRM, you may also have an Inside Sales Team made up of humans or artificial intelligence, your team is well trained, and you’ve incentivized them to follow up on leads. This being the case you feel like you’re poised for success when it comes to following up on all leads, right?
As your team starts growing with more agents, sometimes it’s difficult to consistently keep up with the leads. Agents may not respond as quickly as they may be in the field showing homes and failing to follow up increases.

Lead Follow-Up is No Easy Task

Following up on leads is difficult, and no one claims otherwise. Only the very top agents will win this battle. And those agents are continually upgrading and tweaking their systems and tools. Only by implementing the best training and investing in the most advanced Artificial Intelligent systems like many industries have like the medical industry using artificial intelligence, will you be able to dramatically improve you and your team’s lead follow up. Check out a few companies that are offering agents AI that could help your business!