It is much easier to say that you are in the wrong business than it is to admit that you have just gone about it in the wrong away, the latter hurts your ego.
The business of brokering real estate transactions is not a dying market. At least I don’t think so.
You just need to be better. Improve your model.
There are many, many ways of improving your lead generation with creativity and leverage. There are a million things you are not doing because it hasn’t occurred to you. Very common. I am guilty too.
The fix is to test, learn, execute, reiterate and improve, rinse and repeat forever.
I’ll give an example.
I’m running my lawn care company. We only do recurring maintenance. Half of our calls we turn away because they want a one time job, a cleanup, a fence built, etc. and we tell them no and they hang up and go somewhere else.
Ads become less profitable. We need to generate leads.
Instead of saying it’s a bad industry, we call up every lawn care and home service company in our area.
“We have customers call in and ask for X service that we don’t offer, do you want us to send them to you?”
“Hell yeah”
“Okay we only do recurring services, can you send us people that need their lawn mowed regularly”
“Yeah that’s fair thank you”
Now, every person that calls in is a part of our marketing system getting drip fed value through emails, and works with our partners.
They do a project or one time service, and we give our partners coupons to hand out for a free month of lawn services if they signup with us. Then we give them a referral check for $100 if anyone signs up. The coupons help them close deals, we receive free leads from partners, and in the process of calling all of these businesses we plant the seed of offering to buy their recurring customers off of them someday if they DO offer the recurring services.
We are changing our lead gen to have more attractive offers, instant responses, live agents calling leads within 3 minutes of submitting online info, scheduling in person quotes to help raise closing rates at higher prices, better training for workers to reduce cancellations and increase LTV, allowing higher ad budgets because a $3000 LTV means we can spend more to acquire them than if they cancel after one year and we only bring in 1/3 to 1/2 of that LTV.
Unique strategies like sending ringless voicemails, or doing the basics like optimizing direct mail campaigns, or having every salesperson knock on 10 neighbor’s doors on every quote to increase # of signups “hey we just signed up your neighbor Debra so we can get you a discount since it’s less drive time”.
Using those partners to create a link circle to each other on our website and theirs creates authority and raises our SEO rankings, so now we create a little gang of high ranked listings that send each other the customers they can’t serve. Example: a really popular landscaper that’s well known in our area that never does recurring jobs but gets 20 calls a day for it. We called him and said we would send him our one time jobs and project customers for free. He said “that’s so kind of you, I will send people to you when they want recurring services”. That’s all for free.
Combine all of these things and that will lower our cost of acquisition, increase LTV, leaving us with much more profit and ability to dramatically increase our advertising and marketing efforts.
Things like charging a monthly price for 12 months amortized out helps us reduce commoditization and gets us more money per visit if you actually calculate it out. Other things like offering 6% off if they pay upfront for the year increases cash flow for advertising.
Other value adds like being a high tech company that has automations and systems and being communicative and convenient increases value and allows us to charge more.
So that begs the question, could you be better? I am almost entirely certain the answer is yes.
The business of brokering real estate transactions is not a dying market. At least I don’t think so.
You just need to be better. Improve your model.
There are many, many ways of improving your lead generation with creativity and leverage. There are a million things you are not doing because it hasn’t occurred to you. Very common. I am guilty too.
The fix is to test, learn, execute, reiterate and improve, rinse and repeat forever.
I’ll give an example.
I’m running my lawn care company. We only do recurring maintenance. Half of our calls we turn away because they want a one time job, a cleanup, a fence built, etc. and we tell them no and they hang up and go somewhere else.
Ads become less profitable. We need to generate leads.
Instead of saying it’s a bad industry, we call up every lawn care and home service company in our area.
“We have customers call in and ask for X service that we don’t offer, do you want us to send them to you?”
“Hell yeah”
“Okay we only do recurring services, can you send us people that need their lawn mowed regularly”
“Yeah that’s fair thank you”
Now, every person that calls in is a part of our marketing system getting drip fed value through emails, and works with our partners.
They do a project or one time service, and we give our partners coupons to hand out for a free month of lawn services if they signup with us. Then we give them a referral check for $100 if anyone signs up. The coupons help them close deals, we receive free leads from partners, and in the process of calling all of these businesses we plant the seed of offering to buy their recurring customers off of them someday if they DO offer the recurring services.
We are changing our lead gen to have more attractive offers, instant responses, live agents calling leads within 3 minutes of submitting online info, scheduling in person quotes to help raise closing rates at higher prices, better training for workers to reduce cancellations and increase LTV, allowing higher ad budgets because a $3000 LTV means we can spend more to acquire them than if they cancel after one year and we only bring in 1/3 to 1/2 of that LTV.
Unique strategies like sending ringless voicemails, or doing the basics like optimizing direct mail campaigns, or having every salesperson knock on 10 neighbor’s doors on every quote to increase # of signups “hey we just signed up your neighbor Debra so we can get you a discount since it’s less drive time”.
Using those partners to create a link circle to each other on our website and theirs creates authority and raises our SEO rankings, so now we create a little gang of high ranked listings that send each other the customers they can’t serve. Example: a really popular landscaper that’s well known in our area that never does recurring jobs but gets 20 calls a day for it. We called him and said we would send him our one time jobs and project customers for free. He said “that’s so kind of you, I will send people to you when they want recurring services”. That’s all for free.
Combine all of these things and that will lower our cost of acquisition, increase LTV, leaving us with much more profit and ability to dramatically increase our advertising and marketing efforts.
Things like charging a monthly price for 12 months amortized out helps us reduce commoditization and gets us more money per visit if you actually calculate it out. Other things like offering 6% off if they pay upfront for the year increases cash flow for advertising.
Other value adds like being a high tech company that has automations and systems and being communicative and convenient increases value and allows us to charge more.
So that begs the question, could you be better? I am almost entirely certain the answer is yes.