On a fairly regular basis I’ll take an appointment with an agent who is thinking about getting started with coaching. As you can probably imagine we always end up discussing their organization’s lead generation model. One of the things that scares me to death is when an agent replies with “my lead generation is Zillow, REALTOR.com, OpCity, Agent Pronto, BOLD Leads, Dave Ramsey, insert company name here.” To be clear, there is nothing wrong with any of these services however, let’s not confuse lead receiving with lead generation. Alarms and bells start going off in my head when they say “I want to grow a team so I’ll just increase my spend with ___________.” It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, as a business owner if you want to be in complete control of your company you must be the one in control of bringing the business in. End of story. A business built on lead receiving from a third party is a business that is destined to fail. Take two seconds to reread that last sentence before continuing on.
When having this conversation I will typically share a ridiculous example about opening a restaurant just to drive the point home. Let’s say you and I decide we’re going to open a restaurant that serves chicken wings. We find a space in a local strip mall, we invest some money into building out a good looking dining room and of course we hire staff to help us serve our guests. During our initial business planning session we decide that since we can get chicken wings from somewhere else we are going to save ourselves the time, money, and frustration of building out our own recipes and kitchen by “outsourcing” the cooking. Here is how our restaurant will work: A guest will be greeted by the host at the front door and seated in the dining room. After making their selection of chicken wings, potato wedges, and a soda our server is going to immediately take their order out the back door and run across the street to the deli counter at the grocery store. The server is going to buy the appropriate chicken wings, wedges, and drink then bring it back to the restaurant to plate the food and serve to the guest. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?
- What challenges would that kind of setup create?
- Who is in control of the quality?
- Will the guests get a consistent consumer experience?
- Are our costs higher than that of a restaurant that produces our own food?
- How do the increased costs impact the bottom line?
- What happens if the grocery store changes their recipes?
- What happens if they run out of chicken wings?
- What happens if they stop selling chicken wings?
- What happens to our profits if the grocery store raises their prices?
Yes, I get that this is a ridiculous example and no one would ever consider doing this but there are many real estate teams running their business this way. They have spent the time to build an amazing administrative department, they’ve hired a bunch of sales people and fooled themselves into believing they’re in control of their business. So……… what’s the solution?
You must begin the process of building your own lead generation department immediately. You don’t have time to waste because at any moment the company sending you leads can put you out of business. It’s fine to receive leads as a second or third source but receiving leads as your primary source is a recipe for disaster. My recommendation would be to start with two things. The first is a plan to generate opportunities from the people you already have relationships with. The second is to create a plan to get into a relationship with people you’ve identified as your ideal client whom you do not already have a relationship with. A good question to ask yourself would be, If I wanted to start a company that sold seller leads to real estate agents what things would I do to generate those leads? The answer to that is likely a good plan. You want to become the company sending the leads, not the company receiving the leads. If you’re not sure why that is, see the title of today’s thoughts.