Finding the right broker team is paramount to maximizing your business’s growth. At least that’s one takeaway from a recent online lead study published by Inman in December 2017. While the study largely focuses in on online lead reviews from an agent’s perspective, there’s nevertheless interesting insight around what agents perceive their brokers’ roles to be in online lead generation and handling. Surprisingly, many agents didn’t want their broker involved with their leads…
“I don’t think this is my brokerage’s job. It’s my job as a good agent to process these leads. If my brokerage does this for me, they also do it for the other 100 plus agents — then how are we different?”
While on the other side of the coin, new agents felt frustration working in environments where following online leads wasn’t encouraged. With one agent going as far as saying...
“My broker dismisses online leads pretty much. She says our agents should be referral-driven. That’s great for people who’ve been in the business a while, but I have to make a living until I can start getting enough referrals from previous clients and friends.”
Some agents felt that simply providing a warmer lead follow-up culture would suffice, leaving the broker’s encouragement or discouragement out of the equation. But one solution, really an obvious middle ground, is simply providing the background resources to the agent.
- Help with “scrubbing” — or qualifying — the leads and immediately assisting incoming leads to improve capture and conversion rates were other suggestions from respondents. “We have a (brokerage) call center that helps to qualify before meeting the agent,” a Kansas City agent reported.
- Brokerages could also be spending more money on online advertising and help with scripts, suggested others. “Our brokerage could benefit from updating their website to be more user-friendly, offer more data, and engage the people who are looking on it,” commented a Seattle broker.
The report highlights differing opinion when it comes to the value of online leads. Not surprising, the divide roughly parallels the 80/20 rule with a 67/23 split with those participants who claim greater results with online leads also claiming offline lead capture processes and tools… showing (at least in one light) that those that are scampering to work the leads coming in, appear to place more ROI value from this same lead source over time.
What role does online lead generation play in your business? And how does your broker support your lead generation methodologies? Have you used offrs before... is offrs right for your team? Find out at www.offrs.com and review the results for yourself.
*Special Report includes Survey conducted by Inman (in association with offrs.com) between 11/10/17 and 11/1/17. Of the 409 survey respondents, 255 (62.35 percent) identified themselves as agents, 100 (24.45 percent) identified themselves as brokers, 11 (2.69 percent) identified themselves as coaches, and 43 (11 percent) identified themselves as “Other.” offrs collects and provides topical insights, statistics, reviews, humor and best practices gathered from real estate professionals and consumer homeowner industry peers. If you're a broker or agent interested in learning more about seller lead generation or automated marketing services and solutions, visit www.offrs.com or continue to browse our growing collection of industry articles at www.offrs.net.
