Three Strategies to Build Better Relationships with Your Leads

In your time as a real estate agent, you’ll likely speak with your fair share of prospective clients that tell you now is not the right time.You’ll quickly learn, if you haven’t already, that taking these objections in stride is one of the factors that can make or break your real estate career. Different agents have different strategies when it comes to the “not right now” prospects: some try to end the conversation as soon as possible because they’d rather speak to a prospective client who is receptive. Some agents encourage the prospect to reach back out once they are ready. In both of these cases, the prospect has a very slim probability of wanting to establish a relationship. In order to have the best opportunity for success, you’ll want to take advantage of these strategies when prospecting.    

• Reach Out ASAP

  Strike while the iron is hot! If you have received information about a prospective client, whether through a personal referral or through lead generation, you will want to get in front of the client as soon as possible. Establishing contact early will give you the ability to check in periodically with your prospect and begin building trust. At the end of the day, working in real estate is a relationship-based business-if you can’t build rapport, someone else will end up closing the sale. Even if you aren’t able to get a commitment to work together, making contact is one of the first hurdles you can encounter in client acquisition.   

• Reach out until you get a response 

  Anybody familiar with real estate knows it can be difficult chasing down prospects, but reaching out until you get some sort of answer is the best plan of action. Getting a response lets you know what next steps you can take. Going hand in hand with the strategy above, you will want to front-load your outreach. Calling, texting, emailing, are your main tools to connect. Getting creative by calling from different phone numbers, texting right before you call to pique interest, and using different creative strategies like this can help you connect. If you’re unable to establish contact after two weeks of high regularity outreach, scale down your outreach but continue to reach out. If you don’t get a response, you don’t know for certain if the prospect can benefit from your services. Of course, if you are able to disqualify a prospect because their information is incorrect, this strategy doesn’t apply.   

• Figure Out How You Can Help 

  Once you are able to make contact, your primary focus should be figuring out how you can help. In order to best do that, you will need to market yourself and your expertise correctly. Some prospects make this easier said than done. A certain portion of prospects you make contact with may genuinely not have an interest or need for real estate services. However, in many cases you’ll find that you can offer your services, as long as you take the right approach. Keep in mind, the prospects you connect with do not know who you are. So, they may not be as forthcoming or willing to share their real estate needs as you would like. Some of your prospects may still be off-put by the process itself. Keep that in mind, and don’t take hesitation personally. Instead, focus on cultivating your reputation and help in any way you can. That way, when the prospect is ready to seriously consider a transaction, they’ll reach out to you instead of someone else.  Ultimately, prospecting comes down to timing and your approach. So, focus on upping your odds of engagement by reaching out regularly and putting the prospect first. Once you have your outreach and relationship establishing skills down, your next step should be to build professional partnerships with collaborators so you have more value to offer to your prospects. Interested in more strategies for engagement? SetSchedule’s Meet the Agent podcast gives you a glimpse into the minds of some of the most creative and successful agents working with the SetSchedule system. You can watch Meet the Agent episodes here.