Follow Up Boss Tip: 5 ways to prioritize your follow up and get more clients without the guesswork

Do you ever open up your CRM and find your self doing more clicking around or just staring at the screen because you don’t know where to start?

Or have you hopped into your task list, or list of new leads, and been instantly paralyzed because there’s just absolutely no reasonable way to complete everything on the list?

Here’s the good news – I’m going to show you 5 simple things you can do right now to cut through the noise and find the top 10 or 20 people to follow up with that will help you improve your sales pipeline before the end of the week.

And even better, if you follow these steps, you’ll be able to set your team up to find the top 10 or 20 people to reach out to with one-click every time they login to your CRM.

That way they can start each day with a list of the most active, most valuable leads to contact now. So your agents can get more clients without the guesswork.

Before we dive into the specifics, here are a couple of pointers before we get started:

1. Complexity is the enemy of action

Some of these lists might sound basic, but that’s actually the point. Most teams I’ve worked with weren’t executing on even the fundamentals with consistency. Focus on having your team nail these basics and you’ll see a huge uptick in appointments, offers and closings.

2. Once is not done

Getting the most out of your follow up efforts is an ongoing process. Start with these basics and work them for 30-45 days. Once you can see your new baseline across key metrics like appointments set, response rate, etc., and can tell if these are reasonable expectations for your team, then start to adjust these filters to accommodate.

3. Call first, then text

Since we’re prioritizing the highest value contacts, you should be aiming to call the people showing on these lists. Then, if you hit their voicemail, hang up, and send a text instead. This will dramatically improve your response rate and efficiency for calling everyone on your lists.

In some cases, you’ll already know if your client prefers you to call, text or email, and in other cases, you’ll have action plans running to cover the email part of following up so be sure to quickly review your contact and use your best judgment.

4. Time block

Good follow up is more than just who to call, it’s doing it consistently. That’s why every agent on your team should be blocking 30-60 minutes every day to get these follow-ups done.

Ok, let’s dive in…

New Leads

There are a few factors to consider when following up with new leads:

• Source
• Team structure (eg. ISA or no ISA)

So as mentioned above, tweak these as-needed, but the standard, catch-all approach we’ve seen have the best response rate across the board has been to call new leads every other day for the first 2 weeks after they become a lead in your database.

So start by applying the following filters:

1. Stage is Lead
2. Created is ‘Less than 2 weeks ago’
3. Last Communication is ‘more than 2 days ago’

Ideally, this list will show an individual agent ~5 people each day. If you find it’s a lot more than that, here are a few things you can do to turn up your filters and further prioritize the list:

1. Change created from 2 weeks to 1
2. Narrow your sources – if you’re getting leads from multiple sources, prioritize the ones that are the closest to the transaction. Portal leads are usually people requesting info or a showing for a particular and expecting to hear from an agent so you’ll want to call those first. Website registrations are often just starting their home search so you can de-prioritize those.

If you find the numbers are still really high, you may be sending those agents too many leads for them to reasonably keep up with. This is when it’s time to consider an ISA or hiring more agents.

Once you make contact with any of these leads, you’ll be able to update their stage accordingly based on their timeframe to purchase, update their action plans accordingly, and as a result they’ll start showing up on a different smart list based on their timeframe.

Once you’ve set these filters, make sure you Save your list so you can bring it up in one click the next time you login.

Active Leads

If you’re using a well-integrated website, you’ll have additional information on what people are looking at when they visit your website. Often this is the very best place to discover leads that have either fallen through the cracks, or are just older leads that have become active again.

Ideally you’ll aim to add all your new leads to a saved search from your website so you can continue to nurture them with relevant content, and they’ll show on this list when they start checking out homes through your site.

Here are the filters you’ll use:

1. Last activity – less than 7 days ago
2. Last communication – more than 14 days ago
3. Sort by ‘Last Visit’

Again, you’re targeting somewhere in the range of 5-10 people on this list each day for each agent. If you have a lot more because of a large database, you can adjust these filters:

1. Properties Viewed is Greater than X
2. Properties saved is greater than X
3. Price is greater than X

With the recent improvements to the People screen, you can also now re-order and re-size your columns (and save those changes) so that you can see at a glance how active each lead is before you call.

Hot Prospects

These are the folks that you’ve determined are less than 90 days away from getting serious about listing or buying.

Your objective here is to set the appointment to get them confirmed as a client.

I’d highly recommend that you create a custom field called ‘Projected Timeframe’ or something to that extent. You’ll make this a date field. Then, with every lead you make contact with you’ll update this field with an estimated date that they’ll be ready to get started.

Then you can filter for those dates to follow up accordingly and it’s actually more reliable than using a stage filter because as longer-term nurture leads start to get closer to their projected timeframe, they’ll start to show on the right list automatically.

Pro Tip: Don’t forget that you can change the order of your custom fields, and whether they shown or hidden by default on each contact to streamline any data entry you’re doing.

Filter for:

1. Last communication more than 7 days ago
2. Projected timeframe in less than 90 days

Current Clients

Have you ever had a buyer fall through the cracks on you? Someone you maybe took to see some homes, and then forgot to follow up to suggest more showings and next thing you know it has been 30 days since you connected with them?

Here’s how to eliminate that from ever happening again.

Filter for:

1. Stage is Buyer or Seller
2. Last communication is more than 7 days ago

The best part about this list is that if you are staying in closer touch with a client, they’ll just be taken off this list automatically. This only captures the ones ‘at-risk’ of slipping through the cracks on you.

Past Clients/Sphere

Depending on the type of business you run, you may actually consider moving this to be the first group you reach out to.

There is rarely an effort to personally engage with this group that goes to waste.

That’s why every agent should be contacting their past clients between 2 and 4 times per year.

Here’s how to set those filters:

1. Stage is past client or sphere
2. Last communication is more than 3 months ago

If you’re wondering what to send them, we’ve already put together a post on a great keep in touch strategy that will consistently differentiate you, and add huge value to this group.

BONUS: Nurture

Still have some time to make calls after going through these first 5 lists?

The biggest difference in your conversion rates on leads, and on the stability of your sales pipeline comes from staying in touch with prospects over the long term.

While there are a number of other ways you can enhance in bulk this through good marketing, nothing will top a well-timed call or text to stay top of mind.

Here’s a basic breakdown of how often you should call each group based on how close they are to their projected timeframe:

3-6 months

1. Projected timeframe less than 6 months
2. Last communication is more than 3 weeks

6-12 months

1. Projected timeframe is less than 12 months
2. Last communication is more than 6 weeks

12+ months

1. Projected timeframe is more than 12 months
2. Last communication is more than 12 weeks

With the long term nurture leads, your main target is just to make sure that the listing updates you’re sending from your website are still relevant, and if not, make sure you update the criteria so that those notifications you’re sending are narrowing, and tailored to what they’ll want to go see when they’re ready.

Action Steps

As a starting point, pick even just one of these lists and set it up in your Follow Up Boss account and share it with the rest of your team. Then have everyone work that list for the next month or so to see how it impacts their results.

Remember, if you can help each team member have 5-10 more conversations with new people each week, they’ll easily be able to double their deals pipeline in 90 days or less without another penny spent on leads or marketing.

Prefer to get a video training on this? Our customer success team hosted a webinar called ‘How to convert more leads in less time using Smart Lists’ that will teach you everything we’ve learned from helping the top sales teams in the business set more appointments and close deals faster. Watch the full recording below: