Leads sometimes come from humans. That’s a light joke. The point it is that when technology companies test lead capture and routing systems, they typically test them with stock lead content. Unfortunately, many real human leads do not contain stock text. Real humans write real questions and sometimes use language that may not be whitelisted for your spam filter. **It happens!
One of the good ways to check your lead generation and a delivery engine is to compare reports. Look at the lead reports that you get from publishers like Trulia, Zillow, Realtor.com or Homes.com. Look at them carefully and pull a sample set of the leads and check your lead delivery tool to see if they made it through. Every broker I speak to tells me that the leads reported from publishers are always higher than the portals’ lead count in the broker’s back office system. Where did the leads go? They probably went into the spam filter.
In January of 2014, WAV Group released what is believed to be the largest study of lead responsiveness : If you did not get a chance to read it – please do. https://www.wavgroup.com/2014/01/13/agent-responsiveness-study-reveals-critical-flaws-in-real-estate-lead-response/. The observations are pretty bleak.
48% of buyer inquiries were NEVER responded to
Average response time was over 15 hours.
Could the spam problem really be that big? Probably not, but it may be significant in your business. Check your spam filter to find out. You may realize that your spam filter has a bunch of leads in it.
When you find false positives in your spam filter, it is important to train the filter to let those emails through. One broker we know took the drastic measure of blocking email from a company that was pounding their agents with sales and marketing information. When they did that, they did not realize that they would also be compromising or blocking all of the leads from that company. OOPS!
Brokers are becoming more and more like technology companies every day. Keeping pace in this ever changing world requires that brokers have a good understanding of how technology works – or employ staff or advisors that do. If you are lacking this in your business, you better consider a plan to fill that void sooner rather than later. Somehow I don’t think that technology is going away anytime soon.
p.s. be sure to test leads generated on company listings and leads generated on non-company listings – they are different 🙂
