I believe that the numbers expire from the DNC after 5 years and many people will probably forget to renew them so will come off the list. Even if it were to happen, you could still do mailings or knock on doors.

Good question. It's not anywhere near that high in my area. The DNC is new here. I'm going to the Mike Ferry Superstar Retreat next week an will ask aound what they do.

THIS IS A LITTLE EMBARRASSING;

Obviously, my strength is prospecting.
One of my weaknesses is follow-up.
Because most of my leads are generated during the day, you'd think they would be home during the day but only about 35% are home for follow up calls in the daytime.
Because I generate 1-2 leads per day, approx 2-300 leads per year and because I do not like to work evenings or weekends unless I have appointments, you can imagine what happens....the leads start to accumulate. At times my Top Producer database would grow to over 200 leads and obviously this becomes unmanageable.

My coach and I have been working on getting this down considerably. The current goal is to be below 50 and eventually below 30, with the understanding that the higher the production goal, the more selective I must become of who I consider a lead.

I currently have it down to 90 odd leads...continuously adding and deleting leads. The hard part is hitting "delete" on leads I know eventually will list because they have to sell, just now is not the right time for them. Ie: illness, new home will not be ready for 8 months, waiting for divorce papers, waiting for green card, waiting for job transfer etc. and then there are the plain old ones that changed their mind and those are the easy ones.

Most start out as being as "any day now" leads or "we will list next month for sure" and upon following up, plans change, husband or wife says not this year etc. thus the accumulation effect especially over the Christmas holidays and over the winter months when few are willing to list until the spring when the weather gets better or it gets closer to spring so they can get a summer closing when the kids get out of school.
For me...this has been my achilies (sp?) heel for over 10 year...keeping my database down so that I can focus on the hottest leads, separating the wheat from the chaff.

The rule of thumb is that supposedly I only need to carry 5-10 listing leads to get to 100 deals, or some say 7-30 day leads. So less leads means higher production where my subconscious mind always figures more is better.

My challenge is different than many higher producing agents as I believe most of their leads are incoming calls generated from their massive marketing campaigns and when they call they usually are ready to act. The majority of my leads are generated from outgoing calls...mine and I must time it right with a call back to get the business.

Any one else have a similar balancing act with too many leads, trouble separating or deleting or ditching leads? Staying on top of them?

I interviewed a heavy marketing agent in my market few year ago. He would go on 30 or so evaluations a month to take 10-15 salable listings and would receive over 100 incoming calls per month. Obviously a good filtering/qualifying system there.

lucky,

i would appreciate if you would not plagiarize before i type something:-)

wow....if that is not my achilles(<<<looked it up) heal as well.

after reading that post i started to look through my leads. i too have over 200 expired leads and a little over 100 leads from my pay perclick campaign. the pay per click thing is pretty new for me so i dont have solid numbers and would not put my livelyhood on the pay per click leads that i have. time will tell and i am slow to respond to a changing something that has proven itself to work like the expireds have...i am not working them out, but working something else in as i have brought on another agent and need to increase productivity and that starts with more prospecting

here is a story i remember very vividly....in the summer of 09, i was doing my usual prospecting...got a lead...nothing new...followed up with the lead....normal thing...take electronic note of the conversation recording date info so that i can reference things of familiarity in future conversations....put on my normal follow up i played the same game taht you play in regards to followup and timing....the last followup call i had with him, he told me taht he had appointments set up with 2 agents...one the evening that he called....after all of the follow up and mail, he called someone else...no worries...i asked for the appt, got it...dropped off my prelisting package in person the night i scheduled the appt.(tuesday)...interviewed against 2 other agents(seasoned not rookies, 1 was a broker with 24 yrs in business)...i won and got the listing...sold it in 9 days...he bought a house about 2x as much in sale price and settled about 20 days after i sold his home...he referred me to his neighbor 2 houses down and she is literally going on the market this week! she is going to be the next sale in the neighborhood...i would be my commission on it...so, 3 sales for over 1 mil in gross sales from a lead that would not have made it past the 7-30 day rule...

i know how you feel about the lead follow up though...i just changed and increased my time because i want ot increase my salary...i now have 3-6 blocked solid for prospecting and follow up times...2 blocks for me, but both 3-6pm...

i dont like to hit hte delete button because tehre are to many times that i actually make a note that looks exactly liket this

****ask for appt, if i dont get it delete...

and i get the appt!!!! what if i had written taht note the last time and they said no, i would have missed out on the deal that turned into 3 and that happens enought to warrant it.... waht i have found myself doing is moving leads farther out...

used to be taht i would cut a time in half...if someone told me they wanted to move in a year and i talked to them today i would have todays conversation...call back in a week for thanking them for taking the time to talk and remind them that if they ahve any questions, they can give me a call on the number that i send...send a postcard.....follow up 30 days later and make sure they got teh postcard(they know me by then) then move to the 6 month mark and ask if they still ahve the goal of moving in a 6 months...then move this to the 9 month markt...then to the 10 then 11 then go for the appointment if they.....each time i check to realign goals and ask probing questions to see if the timeframe is sooner or later...bottom line is that i too have to many leads to follow up on, so i ahve started to space tehm out more so taht i can make sure to hit them all because i dont like the delete button on my leads...the schedule that i follow is one that i have dictated that nobody knows except for me and it is based on the notes adn probing questions that i have....it will be different for everyone based on the way that the conversation goes

bottom line is that i do need to use the delete button more often.

my coach says...waht would someone pay you for your leads?

i think i will bring this topic up on my next coaching call! thanks for bringing this to my attention as it is something that i would like to follow up on with my coach.

i share the same feelings as you do in regards to having to many leads

i feel taht hte 7-30 day timeframe would put many leads out of my pipeline and most of my leads that are listing today are leads taht are more than 7-30 days from initial contact so i dont think i would feel comfortable using that method, but there are others that know better than i

if i could work a seven to thirty lead base, i would love it, but i dont know how to get that into place other than realignment of the timeframe that one has and much of lead follow up is timing ...

my prospecting has 2 timeframes....lead generation and lead follow up
i put both of them into the 3 hour block of time that i have...

thanks lucky for this most interesting post you have put up. i know my thoughts are jumbled, but there is a lot to think of and i was kind of thinking out loud on this one

delete

The 7-30 day lead concept is perfectly tailored for an agent who generates listing leads thru marketing. Because of my follow up calls and mail pieces, many of my new listings are a result of them calling me for the interview. Once they have the motivation to call me, they usually list in 7-14 days. The issue with prospecting is that we generate a lot of crap! Once a prospect summons the courage, motivation etc to call me, the crap part is eliminated. In most cases the are identifying themselves as a motivated seller and the timeframe is near. This is the beauty of marketing for your business be it websites, blogs, ads in newspaper, flyers/geographic farming....all are designed to make the phone ring with incoming calls to bring in business and some work better than others in different marketplaces and are dependant on saturation.

That's why Mike Ferry keeps it simple and says to work the 7 day lead only and ditch the rest.
A friend/agent from my town who is #1 individual agent for Re/max Canada said to me a while back "don't you just love rhe 30 day leads?". That's all she works. She let's the rest of the agents work the more difficult time consuming ones.

ESTATE: your business is slightly different than mine as you are working expires who have already expressed an interest in selling so it is more efficient yet more limited.
My thoughts lately is to reduce the amont of leads to something like 50 or less by only keeping 30 day leads and increasing my prospecting to 150 or 200 contacts per day to keep the 50/30 day pipeline full as well as adding some marketing to supplement and work synergistically with my prospecting ie: ad in the local paper monthly to build credibility and increasing incoming calls. Just a thought.

Anyone here attending the. Las Vegas Superstar Retreat next week?

I was going to as I wanted to meet my coach with Mike Ferry in person as well. Will skip this time though but will definitely buy the MP3 when it comes out as I do with every one of them and listen during my morning workout.

Lucky...remember during the 2010 One On One retreat Mike Ferry talks about the stock broker who trained salespeople and was called the "Cold Called Cowboy" who built his business single handedly based on Cold Calling only? I think you may very well be the "Cold Call Cowboy" of Real Estate. Your numbers are both inspiring and impressive.

I really appreciate all you are doing and sharing your methods on this forum. They are predictable, duplicatable, and based on "massive action" which I like quite a bit. I moved away from this forum sometimes ago and now am back and "hooked" on it thanks to your post. I wish there were many like it. I spoke with Jimmy a couple of years ago and he shared with me his pre-listing package and his tips as well. Same approach, same devastating results...

However, I truly think your method and Jimmy's is something that not everyone finds palatable. Many times in my company when I suggest calling (expired, Fsbo's, Cold calling the agent's eyes glaze over with sheer panic as if you ask them to shoot their relatives) I personally think it appeals to only one kind of temperament. I know many agents, some very good, who would never do this, which is perfectly okay as the beauty of our business is that there's many different ways to earn a good income in Real Estate.

What you have done though, is given me a blueprint on how to run my business, and for that I am very grateful. You see I was making calls before same as you but not seeing a breakthrough because I was keeping them at 5 a day...yes I know, very embarrasing. Now that I realize what it takes to get a lead, thanks to your post I realize how much more I have to step it up. Have fun at the retreat and maybe you can share some tips when you come back. Looking forward to your future posts in this thread.

Danton

Thanks Danton;

At the airport now while typing this.

Yes, if we're not calling FSBO, EXPIREDs, and we rely on flat out cold calling our town 3-4 times a year then volume is required. I realized this several years ago when I would study the turn over on certain streets , say a street of 200 homes for example. I realized if I was lucky, and found 50% home, I would 100 people. Then I asked myself, of that 100 contacts, how many would sell for sure in the next 30-60-90 days?

This is when I realized that a good amount of volume is required.

Just sold a house for $820,000. I generated the lead from calling. the buyer recognized me from a previous listing I had which he offered on a year ago and he did not get. He had a falling out with the agent and wanted me to find him a home.
There were multiples on this home....I also interviewed for that listing and did not get it because I told the seller I had potential buyers. She said she did not want an agent working for the buyer. Anyhow, made $20,000 gross and hope to sell his house for $650,000.

It works!

Really curious though guys- how do you get lists of numbers to call? Do you just sit down with the phone book and compare each number to the DNC? Is there an internet source that can let you search for phone numbers by address? Do you buy lists from somewhere?

This is a great question. I wanted to ask the same thing but I will share with you my source. Estatereal and Lucky may use different ones though. If you are calling Expireds, a good service might be "REDEX", they offer some FSBO phone numbers. What I do for calling in general is go to:

Whitepages.com and sign up with a FRee account. Under "reverse address" enter ONly Street, City and State and not house # and you will be getting a list of all people listed quite a few of which will have phone numbers. Now, this will get the job done but it's a bit tedious.

Your NWMLS also has a service called "The Realist" where you can run a report of people in a neighborhood that have their phone number listed.

EstateReal and Lucky...I would be curious what other sources you may be using. Lucky I know you have an assistant that does this and scrubs the numbers. Do you mind detailing how she does it?

It would be a huge help.

Danton

Okay...found another one...

phonenumber.com (same as white pages but displays phone numbers in front page and has 10 at a time...) you click on "reverse address" enter just street, city, and state and will pull up all prospects in that street.

Danton

Lucky--what type of counter do you use?
Thanks!

i have not bought a list in a while. i did have one at one time, but would want a new one if i were to use it again. i paid like 200 dollars for the list of all home numbers in the state. it was in the form of a csv...i could search by zip, street, name, number. it was unfiltered so you would have to use your own program to scrub the dnc numbers out. pretty easy really. i did not have a dnc program. i did it like this.(somebody helped me)

import my list
import the dnc numbers
any number on there that shows up twice gets both deleted.(i had a friend really good with csv to do it for me)

now you have a scrubbed list that you can search any way you want.

at the time i was using cheetah dialer. single line power dialer with an analog phone line. works pretty good. yes, you cna use it with magic jack!

i dont have hte name of the company that i used ot get the list. i did a google search to find one that provided the list for about 150-200 bucks. my list covered the entire state because there was no way to get just specific counties or zipcodes. pretty cheap if you ask me. the dnc information comes from the dnc website

here is how it works now. redx will pull all listings and get numbers an scrub. not the best idea because it will pull foreclosures and shorts and i dont wnat ot waste time calling any of them. i do an manual export from teh mls using teh search criteria that i have put into my mls. i have it as a saved search so that when i go in every day it will just pull the information from the last time i have done the export.

so, export from mls.
import to redx
export from redx
import to dialer
make calls on didaler
all contacts get deleted from teh redx!!!!!!!!!
once i make contact they either get totally deleted so that i never dial them with my dialer again or they get put into my calendar if they are good to go
at the end of teh prospecting time i delete all the nubmers from my dialer and thats it, the next day i start over again.

i feel that there are to many systems we have to "hold" our information and it becomes a pain in the rear changing tjhe way that your leads are stored(i only know because i have changed htem before). just my opinion.

for instance. my dialer will store leads as cold, hot or dont call back. why would i want to do that. the second that a new dialer comes out and i have a better product on hand i wont be able to keep the formatting in regards to hot, cold etc....

the less you can keep in less systems the better. all leads regardless of source go into calender.

just typed the nubmers up while talking to my coach yesterday based on waht lucky brought up the other day regarding numbers.

74 buyer leads
280 seller leads

i do have otehr people working the leads with me. all are generated by me, but i dont work all of them.

i have used yellow pages in teh past if i wanted ot target a street.

type in the name of the street with no address and it will pull all of the numbers on the street.

*make sure to check with the dnc list before calling