The majority of leads in real estate don’t automatically convert into appointments or sales. Most of the time, they just end up stuck somewhere in the conversion funnel. If you want to get them out of the funnel, a bit of help is necessary.

In this episode of Keeping It Real Anna Krueger shares some of her tips to learn how to successfully turn leads into appointments.

Tips to Convert Seller Leads to Appointments

Here are some tips that can help turn a seller lead into an appointment:

Keep the Seller on the Phone

The problem is most seller leads don’t expect to be called and would often brush you off. When the seller says they’re busy, follow this 3-step process:

1.    Pattern your greeting with gratitude, saying, “I’m glad you told me.”

2.    Ask them when it’s better to call back.

3.    Ask them, “Hey, what’s got you thinking about moving?”

Asking these questions usually earn you a response, which you can use in turn the next time you call them. The most important thing here is to keep them talking even though they said they were busy. Why? Because if they were actually busy, they would ask you to call some other day.

Maximize Chances of Sellers Answering the Phone

How can you do this? Here’s what a Harvard study says, “If you call a new lead six times in six days, once a day for six days, you have a ninety percent chance of them picking up the phone or calling you back.” Most agents found they often just needed to call twice. In this sense, you simply need to be tenacious and keep calling the lead until they pick up.

 Use SMS and Email

In addition to calling six times in six days, take advantage of text messages and email. You don’t need any lengthy email newsletter for this – just a blank one with a single subject line that says: “I left you a voicemail.” Just this, and you can already get tons of calls back.

Use Voicemail

The goal of the email is to get them to listen to the voicemail you sent, which is a more personalized way of telling them your purpose. There are two strategies you can utilize here, which are:

1.    Don’t leave a voicemail –  The first call you leave, don’t leave a voicemail. Many of them will call back out of curiosity. 

2.    Leave a voicemail –  The structure is to tell them about the benefit of your team and a specific time to call you back. Create different voicemails about this, and you can increase the chance of them calling back.

Personalized, One-on-One Video

Another strategy you can’t miss is the use of videos. You can insert it into the emails as a visual version of the voicemail. One tip is to call each lead by their name, which calls on their emotions and makes them feel closer.

According to Anna Krueger in her real estate class BOLD, “Logic makes people think, emotion makes people act.” This shows that if you know the seller’s emotional reason for moving, you can make them act way more than simply telling them the logical stuff.

Conclusion

There are many other strategies you can utilize to turn your real estate leads into an appointment. However, really the most critical key is to hold onto their motivation. When you know what made the seller want to move, then you’ll know the right words to convince them.

If you want to turn your leads into appointments, it’s crucial to have the right platform to track them all. Such software is vital in scoring leads, nurturing leads, optimizing conversion rate, engaging customers, and more. One of the best ones on the market today is Real Geeks, which is an all-in-one real estate solution.

Here is a full transcript of our conversation: 

Frank Klesitz:

Hi, everyone. Thanks for coming here. My name's Frank Klesitz. I'm the host of Keeping It Real, where you're going to hear from Anna Krueger today, who worked on a top performing real estate team for years doing internet lead conversion of calling the people that saved their searches on your website or registered to find out what their home is worth most likely. When people put that information into a web form you get this lead, internet lead, and maybe other leads too like from Realtor.com or Zillow, and whether they were generated from Facebook or pay-per-click on Google or Bing, the point is that someone online, some stranger, has put their name into a form.

Frank Klesitz:

Maybe not necessarily to request to speak to you, maybe they put their name in for some other reason which is important, and now you reach out. Let the games begin. The typical conversion rates in the industry are maybe what, two to three out of every 100? Anna knows how to get that up by proactively following up correctly and exactly what to say to convert, while you're here, to convert more of those internet leads, we all know what we're talking about, to appointments of people who actually want to buy or sell a home.

Frank Klesitz:

I'm really excited to interview Anna today. We're going to go for about 30, 45 minutes. Before we do, before we get you on here, Anna, I want to let you know that you can go to KeepingItReal.com, so KeepingItReal.com and you'll see all the shows that we've done for years in the past of interviewing top agents around the country of what they're doing to actually sell houses and make money.

Anna Krueger:

Awesome resource.

Frank Klesitz:

Go ahead?

Anna Krueger:

I just said awesome resource. People should be checking that out.

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah, and what's cool is you can go back there and watch all the different patterns. It's not really necessarily watching one interview, it's watching all of them and finding the principles and where you'll find truth of doing all this. All right?

Frank Klesitz:

You can also subscribe to the iTunes. On iTunes, Keeping It Real on iTunes, you can listen to these on iTunes, we put them up there. Also, the backing behind this is Real Geeks, a wonderful CRM. Go check them out, RealGeeks.com, get yourself a demo, because they provide the websites and the lead generation that we're going to talk about today for the follow-up. Go check out the Real Geeks Facebook page and the Facebook Mastermind group. We also post the replays there. With that, that's all you're going to hear about anything to buy. The rest of this is going to be entirely what do you have to do to convert more internet leads to appointments?

Frank Klesitz:

Let's get started. Here's the premise. Let's just start right from the beginning. Someone has ended up on the agent's website and they've put their information in that they want to know what their home is worth. Let's talk seller leads first. All right? This is probably a homeowner that wants to know what their home is worth so they put their address in, and after they put their address in they probably ended up putting their phone number and email address and other information in to find what their home is worth. And they got some report. Now that lead went to the viewer here, who's watching this interview with you. Walk me through, step by step, what they need to do to make contact, identify needs and bring that to an appointment, Anna, what do we got to do?

Anna Krueger:

Great question. First of all, it's all in how you open the call. Let's talk real quick about how you open the call with a lead because a lot of times people won't stay on the phone with you, or I find with internet leads they'll submit their info not knowing someone is going to call them. And so they'll say something like, "Oh, I'm really busy. Can you just call me later?" Or "Oh, could you just email me some of that information?" What they're really wanting to do is just get off the phone with you.

Anna Krueger:

What you want to do if someone says, "I'm busy, call me later" or "Can you email me?", there's a three-step process I'd ask everyone to write down. The first thing you want to do when they say, "I'm busy, just email me," and then we'll jump into how do you set the appointment in just a moment, but you got to keep them on the phone first. Right?

Anna Krueger:

The first thing you want to do is say, "I'm glad you told me," because they're not expecting you to express gratitude that they said, "I'm busy". It's a pattern interrupt. It makes you a little more interesting to talk to. The first thing you're going to do is say, "I'm really glad you told me." Then you're going to say, number two, "When is better?" Number one, glad you told me, number two, when is better? Then the third thing you want to do is say, "Hey, in 30 seconds or less, what has you thinking about moving?" The idea here, Frank, it's kind of like when you're at a party, at church, whatever, you're trying to walk out the door and someone's like, "Oh, hey Frank, just real quick, how's work going? How's the family?" You're on this mission to get going and suddenly, because they've asked about you, we take time and we take an extra two minutes and chat.

Anna Krueger:

What we're wanting to do is get the person that when we call off this home valuation request, and they're like, "Oh, I'm busy. Can you just call me later?" We're going to keep him on the phone by acknowledging it. "Hey, I'm glad you told me, when is better?" And then, "Hey, just in 30 seconds or less, what has you thinking about moving?" And what we find is they'll usually give you something, whether it be, "I was thinking of downsizing," or "I was thinking about pulling equity," whatever it might be. Then that gives you something to ask about. So Frank, what had you thinking about downsizing? The rule here is if they stay on the phone with you, just keep going. Don't interrupt the fact that they're talking to you now to say, "Oh, I remember you said you were busy." You know, they picked up the phone. They probably have time. They're just giving you a line.

Anna Krueger:

If they stay on the phone with you once you start asking questions, then you stay on the phone with them. If they say, "Well, I wanted to downsize, but like I said, I have to go," you at least have some information to start the next phone call. I might call Frank tomorrow. He blew me off today. I'll call him tomorrow. "Hey Frank, I know you said you were thinking of downsizing," and I'm immediately a more interesting person to talk to because of that.

Anna Krueger:

Step one is you just have to keep these people on the phone and a lot of them do try to brush you off because they weren't expecting that phone call. That's really step one.

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah, because remember they did not put their information to speak with an agent. They put their information to find out what their home is worth.

Anna Krueger:

Right.

Frank Klesitz:

Part of that, probably just out of, people fill out the phone number in the form just because you asked. Right?

Anna Krueger:

Right.

Frank Klesitz:

And now you're calling.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of them aren't expecting that call so you have to engage them to want to talk to you. Where a lot of people fail with this is they'll go right into all the logical stuff and they'll answer all their questions. And it's not that we don't want to do that, but we don't want to do that yet. The first thing you want to do is find out why does this person want to move? What was the reason they submitted their information, because that's the leverage to keep them moving forward. It builds rapport because you care about their story. Really the main thing is to keep them on the phone, ask them about their motivation, and if they keep talking, you keep talking.

Frank Klesitz:

Then if they were even interested in selling in the first place. Most may not be. They just want to know what their home is worth.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah, which in that case, so I firmly believe always assume they want to move because if they don't want to move, they'll tell you. Right? But if I start the call with a yes or no question, "Did you want to move?" Or "Were you just looking for the value?" It makes it really easy to shut down the conversation so I've just found if I assume they want to move, they'll say, "Oh actually I wasn't looking to move. I just wanted to know the value."

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah.

Anna Krueger:

Then I can, "Okay. What makes you want to know the value of your house?"

Frank Klesitz:

Let's even step back to that question because we made a huge assumption. They answered the phone.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah.

Frank Klesitz:

I mean let's be real, a very huge assumption.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah, it's a big assumption.

Frank Klesitz:

This leads come in, I would assume it goes into some type of CRM or some type of way of tracking for the follow-up, but with that, let's just assume you're reaching out. How do you maximize your chances that they actually answer the phone? What do you do to maximize that?

Anna Krueger:

That's a great question. Yeah. That's a really excellent question. Harvard actually studied this in 2012 and I, probably like many of you, thought that's really old data. We reached out and found they went to re-study this and it was the same data so they didn't complete the second study recently because it was the same. What they found is if you call a new lead six times in six days, once per day, for six days, you have a 90% chance of them picking up the phone or calling you back. And most agents, by the way, they found they only called maybe twice. You don't even have to be that great on the phone. If you're just tenacious and you keep calling the leads and do it the six times in six days, if it's a legit number, they'll likely either pick up or call you back by that sixth day, 90% of the time. Then part of that also is using a text message, using shooting them an email. The best email is a blank email and the subject line simply says, I just left you a voicemail.

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah.

Anna Krueger:

That's it. That can lead to a ton of callbacks.

Frank Klesitz:

Say that again. Say what you said just there again about the voicemail and what to say.

Anna Krueger:

Okay. There's a whole way they'll leave a voicemail, which I haven't talked about yet, but the email that you're going to send, it's going to be a blank email and your subject line is simply going to say, I just left you a voicemail. That's it. Just this week we had a coaching client say, "That is working. I'm getting a lot more callbacks or at least they're responding to the email because of that."

Frank Klesitz:

So it has the email signature and it just says, "I just left you a voicemail," and that's the email you send?

Anna Krueger:

That's it. Yep. Nothing else. Yeah, because then it makes them curious to listen to the voicemail.

Frank Klesitz:

Then the voicemail says what?

Anna Krueger:

Yeah, so there's a five voicemail strategy. I'll walk you through that real quick. The first call you make, you don't leave a voicemail because some people are going to call you simply because they're thinking who just called me? I'm not that person, but there are some people that will call back numbers that they don't know because they're curious. So that first call, no voicemail.

Anna Krueger:

The second call on out though you'll leave a voicemail, and the structure is, and all of you will customize this, but the structure is you give them some benefit about your team. Something you probably would say in a listing appointment. For example, I might say, "Our team earns three and a half percent more of list price for our clients than other agents in the area." I might put that on my voicemail. Then I'm going to give them a specific time to call me back by.

Anna Krueger:

I might say, "Hey Frank, it's Anna from the Haro Group. Thank you so much for reaching out to us on our website. You know, we earn three and a half percent more list price than other agents in the area. Call me today by 5:00 so, so I can help you know how we can earn you more money." There's a value and then a very specific time to call me back.

Anna Krueger:

Most voicemails are just, "Hey, it's me. Call me back." Then you do that every single voicemail and honestly, it's kind of obnoxious. You want a different value add every time you call this person with a specific time to call you back by. They might not call you by that time, but simply giving them a deadline increases the chance that they will call you back. When you do the six calls in six days, you start leaving voicemails on that second call on out, that's that magic formula to get a 90% pick up or callback ratio.

Frank Klesitz:

Anna, this is gold. Anna, how many thousands of follow-up calls have you done?

Anna Krueger:

Oh my gosh. I calculated this maybe six months ago and I don't have a number of calls, but I have 27,500 hours of lead gen experience since 2006. And I was doing it kind of like low estimate. Yeah.

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah, this is great.

Anna Krueger:

It works.

Frank Klesitz:

Okay.

Anna Krueger:

A lot of people say voicemails don't work. Then I'll say, "Well, raise your hand if you've had a training on voicemails," and very rarely will someone raise their hand. I think that's why people think it doesn't work. It totally works.

Frank Klesitz:

If you have questions, please leave it in the YouTube chat if you're watching live. I'm monitoring it. Good to see you guys. All right.

Frank Klesitz:

So lead comes in, goes into CRM, six attempts in six days, every attempt is a phone call. You don't leave a voicemail on the first one, and you gave us the principles for leaving the remainder of the voicemails at the remainder five. You also email them every time when you call and they don't answer, with that simple just subject line. Nothing else in the email.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah.

Frank Klesitz:

What about texting?

Anna Krueger:

Yeah, you can do the same thing. The first text could simply be, "Just left you a voicemail." I actually, when you leave that first voicemail, I would text and email you and both would say, "Just left you a voicemail," and that's it.

Frank Klesitz:

Okay.

Anna Krueger:

From that point forward, you can actually model your emails a lot off of the voicemail. Maybe your second email would say, "Hey, we've helped 102 families so far this year. We would love to help you with all of that experience behind us. Give me a call back today. I'd love to find out what has you thinking about moving." Something like that. You keep it motivation focused.

Frank Klesitz:

Got it. I noticed on the very first phone call, you pinned them down for 30 seconds, finding the motivation, which is the most important thing for any lead.

Anna Krueger:

Yes.

Frank Klesitz:

As fast as possible. Then you remind them of the motivation every time when you follow up.

Anna Krueger:

Yes. Yeah, because that's the whole thing. I know, if any of you have ever taken the class Bold, it's a real estate class offered by Keller Williams, anyone can take it though, they have these laws in there that they talk about and one of them is logic makes people think, but emotion makes people act. All of us can probably think back to Christmas. There was probably something, some gift we bought that was totally illogical, it cost too much money, but we knew that the person would love it. That emotion side of us made us, all right. I'm going to buy this overly expensive thing because they're going to love it. It's that idea that if we know someone's emotional reason why they're moving, that's going to make them act way more than just the logical stuff. And most realtors call and talk logic. When do you want to be there? How much do you want? Who are the decision makers? But not a lot of realtors take time to really dive deep into the person's motivation.

Anna Krueger:

It creates this tie to you of like wow, no one else cared to ask me why I wanted to move. They just seemed like they wanted my business. But Frank here, he knows me. He knows why I want to do this. Yeah.

Anna Krueger:

Then if you go to cancel, they call is, "Hey Frank, it's Anna. I know we were going to meet today and your personal goal is to downsize so you can buy an RV to travel. Call me back today, I want to help you do that." The whole conversation is around your motivation, not the team, not me. It's about you, the client, the whole time.

Frank Klesitz:

Video. Any video in this process? We talked about phone call. We talked about voicemail. We talked about email. We talked about text.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah.

Frank Klesitz:

What about video?

Anna Krueger:

Yeah, I think video's great. I know people that have systems where they'll send a video email, so it's an email, but it's got their face in there. Especially when it can be personal where it's, "Hey, Frank..."

Frank Klesitz:

Where you mention their name and it's a one-to-one type email.

Anna Krueger:

Right. So they know this isn't just some email that they mass sent to everyone, which by the way, those work too, but it makes it so much more personal when they can see your face, they hear their name, they know this isn't just an email that went to everyone.

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah.

Anna Krueger:

That works as well. Yeah.

Frank Klesitz:

I'll throw out something we use, we use a service called Loom. L-O-O-M.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah.

Frank Klesitz:

There's also BombBomb out in the space.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah,

Frank Klesitz:

There's also Dub, I think I've heard of.

Anna Krueger:

Cool.

Frank Klesitz:

These are little plugins you can put into your email that allow you basically to hold a button down, record a video for that specific person, load it up, it goes right into the email to send to that individual and it creates a little more of that connection.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah. I've had that. I've had coaching clients send that to me. They'll send me a thing after a call and they're like, "Hey, you know, whatever about the call today." I mean, it fills my bucket and they're not even reaching out me to be... I'm their coach. They're not reaching out to me to offer a service, and I love getting them. It's just really personal. So yeah, I'm familiar with BombBomb for that, and I'm sure those other ones are great as well.

Frank Klesitz:

I'll throw one more in there. I've heard teams, they'll buy iPhones because it's just easier to do it this way, an iPhone for their follow up, and they'll just record videos and send them iMessage with a video directly in the phone.

Anna Krueger:

That is a great idea.

Frank Klesitz:

In addition to that, if they opt in on the website you maybe have some retargeting setup so that person is going to Facebook or going to YouTube, your videos are popping up that way. When you add up, Anna-

Anna Krueger:

All of that, yeah.

Frank Klesitz:

Lead comes in, goes in the CRM. Calls, voicemails, texts, emails, throw in some video, maybe some retargeting.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah.

Frank Klesitz:

Let alone they're probably getting drips that come from the actual CRM of their home value.

Anna Krueger:

Right.

Frank Klesitz:

You're probably going to get them on the phone.

Anna Krueger:

Probably. Yeah, I mean that's what that study showed.

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah.

Anna Krueger:

Ninety percent of the time they'll get back to you.

Frank Klesitz:

What if they don't [crosstalk 00:16:32]. I'm sorry.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah, you go ahead.

Frank Klesitz:

I want to know. I really want to know. What do you do after the tens of thousands of follow up calls, if they don't answer in six days, what happens?

Anna Krueger:

Yeah, so then they move more to an every two week reach out, but I make sure they're on some sort of marketing, which I know, Frank, is where like I love viral marketing. That's where you-

Frank Klesitz:

It's a long term 36 touch program.

Anna Krueger:

Right.

Frank Klesitz:

Got it.

Anna Krueger:

And I still make sure they get calls, but I now more lean more on the marketing because this is my rationale. Unless they were on vacation or maybe out sick or some weird circumstance, if they didn't call me back after six times in six days, this isn't as hot as other leads that might be coming in. It's a cooler lead potentially. We're going to still market to them, we're still going to call them, but we're not going to call them as often. Because if I highlight this person and make it a priority, I might miss someone else who's-

Frank Klesitz:

Correct.

Anna Krueger:

Coming in. The thing is, they're still seeing it. That's what I love about email marketing and things like that. We'll get calls from people. I used to get calls from people that would say, "You might not remember me, like six months ago I reached out and you left me a bunch of voicemails. I didn't call you back, but I'm ready now and you're the person I want to work with."

Anna Krueger:

It's great when you get those calls, and so it's encouraging to remember they might not be calling you back, but they're seeing it. They're seeing the emails. They're seeing all that marketing.

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah.

Anna Krueger:

Anyway, if they don't call back after six days, I usually call every two weeks for a period of time and then eventually it'll shift to once a quarter, but never less than once a quarter because we all, if you've done inside sales or if you're an agent, you've done any sort of lead gen, really in any industry, you know that usually you get those leads and you're like, oh my gosh, I called this person 30 times. Today they picked up the phone and I just set an appointment. It happens to all of us that are doing this type of work. So it's still a lead.

Frank Klesitz:

You know, I'll add something here. If you think six is a lot, oh six times every day, you know, once a day for... This feels like this is overwhelming and inappropriate. No. The large mortgage companies, there's a very large mortgage company, huge, that buys leads from LendingTree, and these are people that have, I want a mortgage, and here's literally all my personal contact information, please have someone call me about a mortgage.

Anna Krueger:

Right.

Frank Klesitz:

They call 50 times in the first 10 days.

Anna Krueger:

Wow.

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah, there are algorithms that there are millions and millions and millions of calls. They call five times a day for 10 days.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah. That's a lot. That's a lot. Yeah, so this suddenly does not seem like so much.

Frank Klesitz:

No.

Anna Krueger:

Well, and I'll tell you-

Frank Klesitz:

The big companies are playing the game at a high level on lead follow up. Those are like, I want to talk to a lender leads.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah I mean, and if-

Frank Klesitz:

[crosstalk 00:19:12] You think it would require maybe a little less. Yeah.

Anna Krueger:

Well, and I'll tell you for those of you listening that might have that hesitation about six calls in six days, I'm the same. I was a high school teacher and I was like, I would never do sales. Now look at me. Right? But I totally had this talk in my head about, oh my gosh, that's so much, it's so salesy. It's not. You might have to do it to prove it to yourself, but in doing it, I would learn from feedback. People would pick up the phone and there would be people that would say, "Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. I haven't called you back. It's been really busy," and they're almost apologizing that they haven't called me back. People were like, "Thank you for keeping up with me. I've had a busy week. Thanks for staying in touch." Yeah, you have people that say, "Remove me from your list," and that's going to happen no matter how you call someone, that's just part of this job. That's part of what's going to happen.

Frank Klesitz:

Sure. Now I also want to talk about, let's say you generate a hundred leads. Let's say a hundred leads come in for a home value request, which I don't know what those run, maybe 10 bucks a lead, let's say.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah.

Frank Klesitz:

So you spend a thousand dollars on a hundred leads. One of those would probably turn into a sale, so spending a thousand dollars, commission check in most markets is a reasonable cost per sale. All right, but you said it takes six times to kind of get ahold of them, it averages out maybe five times, that's 500 follow up calls, emails, texts, conversations to get to that sale, right?

Anna Krueger:

Yeah.

Frank Klesitz:

How does one go about time blocking lead followup? I want to ask you this question because these leads are coming 24 hours a day for the most part. Right?

Anna Krueger:

Right. Yeah.

Frank Klesitz:

This time, that time, here, and we know that speed to lead is important. We didn't cover that, but real quickly I'm going to ask you that question.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah.

Frank Klesitz:

It's a catch 22. How fast should you call the lead when it comes in?

Anna Krueger:

Yeah. Well I wasn't perfect at it but what I knew, because sometimes you're on the phone or out to lunch, but what I'll tell you is in the same Harvard study they found a 400% difference if you call them five minutes to 10 minutes. That is a shocking percentage. If you call a lead within five minutes versus 10 minutes, just five minutes later, to me 10 minutes is still pretty fast.

Frank Klesitz:

Now it's down to five.

Anna Krueger:

You are four times less to have them pick up the phone. Speed to leads is important and this is why people, it all depends, some people are watching this and they're single agents. Some people are on a large team. Some people are inside sales agents. That is why people will build a team. They have more leads than they personally can call. I think each person just has to do a check of am I being honest with myself about how I'm managing my time?

Anna Krueger:

I find a lot of people want to have other people call their leads and it's like, well if you actually blocked this in the morning and usually that looks like 8:00 to 11:00 or maybe 9:00 to 12:00 if you're a single agent, so three hours. 8:00 to 11:00, 9:00 to 12:00, somewhere in there. If you're actually working during that time, you're talking to about 20 people, getting 20 pickups, I would actually say you're doing a pretty good job with that and if you still have more leads than you can handle, it might be time to find some help.

Frank Klesitz:

That's kind of the catch 22 of an individual agent, is you want to call these leads as quickly as possible. They're coming at all times in the day and it's very hard to run a good business doing that, let alone have a life. Now what you do is you block three hour hours a day but now it might take 24 hours to follow up.

Frank Klesitz:

A little tip for those of you generating online leads. If you are in that situation where it is just you, it may be possible to only run the ads during those times. If you're going to be available for calls from like 8:00 to 12:00, see if the Facebook ads, the pay-per-click ads, only run from 8:00 to 12:00 and that's where you push it really hard. I've heard some people do that.

Anna Krueger:

I said Mark. Hey Frank, you should maybe do some marketing or something. You seem like you know a lot about marketing.

Frank Klesitz:

I've been doing the Keeping It Real for about six years and picked up some kind of cool things to add into the recording. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well let's break down again. Let's go through what we've learned so far. Lead comes in, we're using the home value lead. Thee lead comes in, goes into like a professional CRM, so you can manage all the follow up actions, not just a post-it note or your email inbox. Right?

Anna Krueger:

Right.

Frank Klesitz:

Ideally you call it as fast as possible. You're going to call them every day for six days.

Anna Krueger:

Yep.

Frank Klesitz:

You're not going to leave a message the first time, but you'll leave messages the following times. And I'll ask you a follow up question here, because there was a good question in the interview from Vina here about more voicemail script information, which we'll ask later.

Anna Krueger:

Okay.

Frank Klesitz:

Leave a voicemail, we talked about the text, we talked about email and how to use the subject line. We also said feel free to add in some one-to-one video where you mention their specific name.

Anna Krueger:

Right.

Frank Klesitz:

If they don't answer in six days you call them every two weeks, then every quarter.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah.

Frank Klesitz:

If they also don't answer in six days, you also have a marketing plan of some type of 36 touch going out. You check out viral marketing for that. That's my company.

Anna Krueger:

Yes.

Frank Klesitz:

What else? Yeah, and then if you're an individual agent, time blocking time to follow up with these leads. Even though it may take you 24 hours to get back because you'll be better off if you just time block and do it versus just kind of running around randomly.

Anna Krueger:

Yes.

Frank Klesitz:

Or if you are going to time block, ask them maybe only run my ads during that time block time. Maybe, maybe not. Might be able to help kind of put those in. Yeah, because I do know some teams, they may have an ISA, but they'll only run the leads when the ISA is on staff.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah.

Frank Klesitz:

For eight hours a day.

Anna Krueger:

The thing is a lot of people, like if I'm working with the team, sometimes the reason they bring me in is they're like, "We have really bad leads, or maybe it's a bad conversion. We don't know. We kind of think we don't have great leads." Then it turns out after they get this down and they're following the system we just described, they're like, "Wow, these are great leads. We just weren't working them appropriately."

Frank Klesitz:

Weren't following them correctly. Now I want to ask you this, because I know we have limited time.

Anna Krueger:

Okay.

Frank Klesitz:

Closing for the appointment, because we're talking about converting leads to appointments, a lead comes in, we know how to follow up, we've made contact. We've identified motivation.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah.

Frank Klesitz:

But now you're a stranger. They didn't opt in to see you. You have a conversation with them now. How do you get the appointment? Take me to the appointment now.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah, so I'll walk through that pretty quickly. Everybody write this down. There are four parts of a conversation. The first part is get the motivation. What has you thinking about this? What's that going to do for you? What's the impact for you? Once you have that motivation there's a transition statement and it sounds something like, "Great, Frank. Let's see what we need to do to make that happen. I have some questions for you to see, put together a game plan for you."

Anna Krueger:

Now you're shifting into part two of the conversation, which is prequalification. When I say prequal, I just mean all the logical stuff. I don't mean lender prequal. I mean, who are the decision makers? How much do you owe in your house? Like all of the questions that pretty much every realtor knows to ask, we don't really need to train on that part.

Anna Krueger:

Part one's motivation, part two, you do all of the logistical stuff. Then if it makes sense, if this person actually is a good lead, it makes sense to move forward with them, they're wanting to do something soon, the third part of the conversation is actually the words, your next step is. You're going to give them a next step. And if they're ready, the next step is to meet with you.

Anna Krueger:

It's going to sound like, "Hey Frank, what makes you want to move? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, great. Let's see what we need to do to make that happen. I have some questions for you." I pre-qualify you. Then I say, "Okay, great. Honestly, Frank, the next step is to meet with me." That's an assumptive close. It's not, "Do you want to meet with me?" It's just, "Okay. Well the next step is to meet with me."

Anna Krueger:

Then the fourth part of that conversation is to pick the time. "Frank, your next step is to meet with me. Let me put you on hold, check the calendar and see what I have available here in the next 24 to 48 hours." Then I would offer you some times and we would get that in the calendar. The biggest thing that I hear is people will be like, "Ah, I was just on the website looking this up."

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah, whoa, what's going on?

Anna Krueger:

I like to tell them, "Here's the deal. You're just meeting with me to make a game plan. We're not listing your house tomorrow. We're meeting to decide if when you list your house, if I'm the person you want to help you do that and we're just putting together a game plan. I'm not expecting you to list your house tomorrow. It's just a meeting to see if we want to work together." Usually they're like, "Okay, okay. Okay. I feel better."

Anna Krueger:

That's the biggest thing I find is people have this, like, you know, I was just on the website looking and now I might meet you and you just want to emphasize, we're making a game plan. You don't want to set that with just anyone. Make sure you've qualified them and it makes sense to meet this person. But you do want to ease their mind. It's just a meeting. It's just a meeting. That's all it is.

Frank Klesitz:

Quick question, and for time we won't go too much more deeper on that. Do you have anyone setting those appointments on Zoom versus going out to the home for sellers?

Anna Krueger:

Yes. Yeah.

Frank Klesitz:

Do you see more of that trend happening?

Anna Krueger:

I do. In fact-

Frank Klesitz:

Especially when it's just a meeting, you know, you're driving all the way out there. They don't list. Tell me about that.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah. Yeah.

Frank Klesitz:

Tell me about people setting Zoom meetings as opposed to driving out of the house.

Anna Krueger:

Yeah, so I think that's one great thing that came out of 2020 was people quickly realized they can do a lot more with tech than they thought they could. You set it up the same way you would if you were going to their house, but you can do it through Zoom. I like to just add in there, if you're the lead, I might say, "Hey Frank, here's a great thing with technology is it can be like we're sitting across the table from each other, knee to knee, talking to each other, but you can do it from your house and I can do it from the office. We can go through everything we would go through if we were actually together, but save, drive time and make it just a lot easier for you." That's usually fine. You do want to make sure that they have Zoom. You can have a template email where you say like, log in 15 minutes early. Here's some instructions. You'll want to craft an email like that.

Anna Krueger:

Then one step I do that I don't do for in-person appointments is I'll say, "You know Frank, it would be super easy to forget about this appointment because you're at home and you don't have to get in the car and drive somewhere. So what can you do you to remind yourself of our 2:45 appointment?" Usually they say, "I could probably put a reminder on my phone," and that's because I had a lot more no-shows with Zoom appointments and come to find out, just saying,"How will you remember the appointment?" That fixed it. That would be one extra step I recommend.

Frank Klesitz:

Got it. This is great.

Anna Krueger:

Yay. I'm glad.

Frank Klesitz:

You have to go when?

Anna Krueger:

What's that?

Frank Klesitz:

How much more time do I have with you?

Anna Krueger:

I've got about four minutes.

Frank Klesitz:

Okay. Go through the voicemail scripts one more time. Give me a four-minute rundown of how to do an effective voicemail for the audience.

Anna Krueger:

Okay. This is a whole hour training so I will do my best to do it.

Frank Klesitz:

Is it? Wow.

Anna Krueger:

It's an hour training, yeah.

Frank Klesitz:

Wow.

Anna Krueger:

Here's-

Frank Klesitz:

Anna, hold on. It's okay to tell people where they can get that. Where can they get the training from you?

Anna Krueger:

The training? Okay. The training, we have one launching February 2nd. Thank you, Frank. If you go to MasteringInsideSales.com, we give you 19 language patterns. I've given you a few of them today. Trackers, all kinds of systems, and it's for anyone that does sales. The class is maybe 50% buyer listing agents and then maybe 50% inside sales agents. It's basically if you talk to humans on the phone and you want them to become a client, the class will help you. MasteringInsideSales.com is where you can find that. We do, we spend a whole hour just on voicemails, because the... It's called Mastering Inside Sales. We want you to be good at it.

Anna Krueger:

The quick rundown of it is, your first voicemail, you want to have a little mystery to it because again, that will appeal to some people. It might be, "Hey Frank, I saw you were on our website last night. Give me a call back today by 5:00. I'd love to help you. My number is blah blah blah blah blah." And say your name, where you're from. It's general enough that that will appeal to some personality types of like oh, I'm curious. What is this?

Anna Krueger:

That's your first voicemail. Then voicemail's two, three and four, you leave a value add. So again, that might sound something like, and all of you will have to customize this, but that might sound something like, "Hey Frank, it's Anna calling from the Haro Group at Keller Williams. Hey, I want to let you know that our team sells homes two times faster than other agents in the area. Call me back to today by 5:00 so I can explain how we can save you time on market. My number is." The idea is I've given you like a little tiny snippet about our team, enough to intrigue you, but we're not having a listing appointment on voicemail. Then I gave you a specific time to call me back.

Anna Krueger:

Third voicemail. I like to switch up where I put my name because some people don't listen to voicemails until like all in one day so if every voicemail starts, "Hey, it's Anna. Hey, it's Anna," they'll just start deleting. The third voicemail, I like to switch it up and put my name at the end. This one might sound something like, "Hey Frank, I want to let you know that we have a five star review on Google. Call me back today by 5:00 so we can put that awesome customer service to work for you and give you a great real estate experience. Call me by 5:00. Oh by the way, this is Anna from the Haro Group, Keller Williams. Here's my number." That would be voicemail three.

Anna Krueger:

Voicemail four is a similar thing. You just pick a different value add. This time I might say, "Hey Frank, it's Anna from the Haro Group, Keller Williams. Hey, I want to let you know we just helped one of our clients win a multiple offer against eight people yesterday. Call me back today by 4:00 so I can help you win in today's market. My number is blah blah blah."

Anna Krueger:

We're up to the fourth voicemail now. The first one was a little general. Two, three, and four had a value add. Voicemail five, and this one gets a lot of callbacks. I'm basically going to say, "Call me back no matter what dude," but I'm going to say it nicely. I'm going to say, "Hey Frank, it's Anna from the Haro Group. I've left you a lot of voicemails this week, so I don't know if you're super busy or just not interested. Would you let me know either way? I want to help you and I don't want to pester you. Call me back today by 5:00. Here's my number." That one gets a lot of call backs usually from interested people and that's when they're saying like, "I'm sorry. I've just been so busy." Sometimes you get the people that say, "Take me off your list," which is fine. You have a lot of leads. I want to clean this up. That's the five voicemail strategy.

Frank Klesitz:

Anna, thank you so much. That was gold.

Anna Krueger:

You're welcome. Thank you for having me on here.

Frank Klesitz:

Get out of here. I know you have a hard stop for your next training that you're doing. I appreciate you making some time for us at KeepingItReal. I'll wrap it up, you can hop on off. I want to thank all of you for watching. Thank you, Anna. I want to thank you all for watching. You'll have the replay here right here on the YouTube channel. We'll also get a nice writeup made and get posted on KeepingItReal.com. I want to thank you so much for attending. We'll have more of these here in the future in 2022 and feel free to leave a comment and ask a question and we'll get back to it.