The 4 Pillars of Lead Sources

Jason Posnick: Every single agent wants the best lead source. We all want the fastest leads, the most qualified leads. Look, I’m with you, I want those as well, but at the end of the day, every single real estate agent, every business owner, you need at least four pillars of lead gen.

Now, when I say four pillars, that’s four different sources of lead generation. Reason being is different sources of leads are going to come in the sales funnel, the lead funnel, at different phases. We’ll get into this a little bit more in a minute, but you’re never going to always be able to get bottom of the funnel, otherwise known as the quickest to closing leads. You’ve got to have leads at all different phases because your business is going to go through phases.

For example, open house leads. Buyers that you meet at open houses or neighbors that are potentially selling. These are very bottom of the funnel. Somebody visiting an open house, statistically, more than 60% of the time, already has their financial situation figured out. They’ve got their financial ability to purchase a home. Similarly, these people, they’re not just looking online, they’re not just asking questions, they’re beyond the idea phase, the research phase, the decision phase. They’re physically taking action to go see homes.

With these leads, typically what you’ll see is buyers who attend open houses, they will close on a home, not necessarily that one, within 30 days, or not close, but they’ll go under contract on a home, I should say, within 30 days from when you meet them. Open house leads, very bottom of funnel. You can’t just build a business on open house leads for the simple reason that what if we have a super low inventory market like we had in 2020, 2021, even still right now in Massachusetts? If you don’t have enough open houses, you may not get enough leads coming into them to build a sustainable business because you need not just people, but people without agents or people that you can earn the business from.

Moving up from open houses, you then have companies like Zillow, Realtor.com, that offer you live connections to buyer and seller leads. These are the next phase up in the funnel. These leads, they’re in the decision phase. They’ve gone past idea, they’ve gone past research, because they have clicked on contact agent and gone back and forth with the representative from Zillow or Realtor, or whatever company. They’ve made a commitment to actually giving you their physical time. They’ve made a decision that, “You know what? I am going to start this process and meet with somebody,” which is the step of taking action.

These leads in the decision phase, typically, you can expect them to go under contract within 90 days. With these leads, yes, they move very quickly, they’re very highly qualified leads, but it comes at a cost. For Zillow leads and Realtor.com leads, you’re going to be spending money, check equity, every single month to generate these leads. If you look at average conversion across the country, we’re saying 4%, maybe 5%.

In order to get four closings, that means you need about 100 leads if you’re an average converter. That’s going to get really expensive. Can you build your entire business on Zillow, Realtor.com? You could, but you also want to be cautious there. You want to diversify because if you’ve got all your business coming from one lead source, what if Zillow changes their model, or what if Realtor.com decides to stop selling leads? Your whole business would shut off just because that was it. You don’t put all your money in one stock, you don’t put everything into one investment.

You need to diversify your business. We’ve got open house leads at the bottom of the funnel, which are usually mostly sweat equity, which is great. Then we’ve got your Zillow, Realtor.com, your vendor live connection leads that will typically transact in 90 days. Moving up in the funnel, one more layer. Then we’ve got what’s called nurture leads. Now these are leads that come from, again, vendors like Realtor.com, Zillow, you’ve got UpNest, you’ve got a whole bunch of them. These are people that went to the website, typed in www.realtor.com.

They typed in a town, they clicked on a price range, they clicked on a property, they clicked contact agent. Then when the rep from Realtor.com reached out, they said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we’re going to take a pause for a second. We’re a little bit nervous. We jumped the gun,” and they don’t respond to the rep. When they don’t respond for a period of seven days, and every company’s a little bit different, but I know these used to be seven days, some move a little bit quicker, then the company Realtor.com, Zillow, will send the lead to an agent via email with the client’s contact info, with the phone number, the email, the property they inquired on seven days ago.

These leads are a little bit higher in the funnel because they didn’t actually take the time to connect with the rep. They said, “We want to buy a house. We think we’re in the research phase. Whoa, whoa, whoa, we’ve decided we’re not sure yet.” They haven’t gotten that decision phase, they didn’t execute the live connection. With that, they’re usually about 150 to 180 days from transacting on average. There’s always going to be those unicorns that go faster. Then moving up in the funnel, one more box, we got your pay-per-click leads, your Facebook leads, your landing page leads, and these are great leads, but you could expect them to be 250 days to a year out from actually transacting.

These leads are very high up in the funnel because they’re mostly in the research or even some are in the idea phase of decision making. We know that in order for them to then get from research to decision, they’ve got to get their questions answered, but so often they don’t know what questions to ask. When you look at your business and you look at your pipeline, your funnels of leads, how many different options do you have? Where are they coming from? Based on where they’re coming from, you can usually figure out about how long to closing.

Now, obviously, there’s way more lead sources. You can always partner with your lenders, and you can get lender referrals from a local partner. You can run landing pages. You can run mailers and flyers, and one of the greatest things of all time, go old school, just listed and just sold postcards. These are two of the most fundamental pieces of business that if you are not using these in your lead gen, in your business, you are behind, you are losing. Just listed, just sold, partnered with, or followed by postcards showing your reviews, showing the journey your consumers go on.

This is what’s going to bring business to you because there’s so many ways that you can get outbound reaching business. You also want to have the passive business that you’ve earned over time from things like a farm. Now, as far as farming goes, you can farm geographically. You can farm demographically. I actually work with a couple of agents down in Florida right now, and we’ve got some funkiness in the market in Florida regarding condos.

What we talked about was specifically, because we know there’s inventory of condos sitting, but single families are still flying, where can we find pockets of single family homes that we can start mailing to doing equity updates and ZMAs and CMA days, and all these different things, to start peaking interest of homeowners with their equity position to get them to start asking the questions and having the conversations.

What I’m getting to with all of this, the moral of the story is there’s a million-and-one different ways to generate leads. You’ve got to have four pillars of business, of lead generation, at all times. Now, every agent has a sphere, and I know somebody is watching this right now saying, “Jason, I just moved to a new area,” or “I don’t know anybody,” or “I’m too young and my friends aren’t buying houses yet.”

That’s your drunk monkey. You’re lying to yourself, and you’re making excuses. I guarantee you’ve got a barber, you’ve got a grocery store you go to, a gas station you’re always at. For me, it’s my doggy daycare or my childcare. Everywhere I go, I make sure to talk to as many people as I can, not necessarily about real estate, but because they’re becoming part of my sphere. Everyone’s got their sphere. Eventually, you’ll have past clients, which could become one of your pillars.

Then you’ve usually got to figure out what are your other two going to be? Will it be using check equity and paying for leads? Will it be building a farm? Will it be partnering with lenders, inspectors, and contractors locally to get referrals to potential buyers and sellers? There are so many ways to do it. The last thing that I’ll say, and the most important thing, is what works for one agent doesn’t work for all.

Just because you see one agent crushing it– I love to say crushing it because of this, crushing it on Zillow leads or Realtor leads, doesn’t mean you will. If you’re going to work those leads, you’ve got to be a master on the phone. You have got to be a master of follow-up, and you got to have a strong mindset because you’re going to kiss a bunch of frogs until you find your prince or princess.

You might have somebody else who is crushing it with video, and they are getting lead after lead after lead from the video content they’re putting out. If you’re not a “video person,” which again is another excuse, talk about that another day. If you’re not a video person, you’re never going to enjoy doing video. If you don’t enjoy it, you’re never going to really be great at it because we all know we’re going to put the most time and effort into things that we love.

If you love it, you’ll do it. If you don’t love it, you’re simply not going to do it, or you’re going to force yourself to do it. Once you’ve got your four pillars figured out, this is one of the biggest mistakes they see agents make. They start going down a path. They’ve got a business plan, they’ve got it all mapped out, and a month in, no business yet, it’s not working. It must not work, and they change.

You’ve got to stick with something for a period of time. I always use the analogy of if I go to the gym once for nine hours, do I get in shape? No. You get physically fit by going to the gym 5, 6, 7 days a week, 4, 20, 30, 40 minutes a day. It’s about consistency over intensity. Far too many agents get super intense with one thing, one focus, one lead generation source for a short period of time, don’t get the result they want, and they switch. The results still don’t come, not because the lead source doesn’t work, but because they haven’t given enough time to grow to prosper.

Another analogy I love for this is brushing your teeth. If you brush your teeth for four hours a day, once a year, will you get cavities? Yes. If you brush for two minutes a day, twice a day, every day, you won’t get cavities. Your lead generation is exactly the same. Figure out your strengths. Figure out what you love. If you don’t know what you love yet or you don’t know your strengths, start trying something. Build a plan. Dedicate 3 months, 12 weeks, 12 Week Year. Great book by the way. Dedicate 12 weeks to executing on the plan. Get an accountability buddy or a coach to hold you accountable. Make sure you get things done. Then execute.

Four lead pillars. You pick them based on your strengths, endless opportunity. The result isn’t though. The result is not equal, but the opportunity for business is. To recap that really long video. To recap for you really quick. Every single agent, every single one of you, you need four pillars of lead gen. Not five, not six, not eight, not one, not two, four. You need four pillars of lead gen.

Look at the sales funnel. Look at where they’re coming from to understand where the clients will be in the decision-making phase, to know how long it will be till they transact. For example, you’ve got idea phase, research phase, decision phase, and action phase. You want to have leads coming in in all different phases. Idea phase. These are people who you get from Facebook ads or PPC ads. They’re Googling for something online. They see a pretty ad for a house, “Oh, that looks pretty.” Click on it. Force registration. You get their info.

Something subconsciously makes them want a house, but they don’t really know it yet. Then you’ve got research phase. These are people who go to www.zillow.com, realtor.com, to your website. They type in a town. They type in a price range. They click on a property, but they don’t necessarily go through speaking with an agent or representative because they’re still researching.

Then you’ve got decision phase. Your decision phase, buyers and sellers. These ones go through with a live connection. They’re speaking to you, they’re excited, and they’ve got questions, but more importantly, they’ve got something they want. Maybe a home they want to see. Evaluation for their own home. They’ve got specific questions. Last but not least, the action phase, where we all want to find leads.

The most expensive and hard-to-find leads. Ones who are usually pre-approved, have a need, have a want, and they’ve actually taken the time to go after it. These are people you’ll meet at open houses or who come to you directly saying, “Hey, Jason, I want to buy or sell a home in X months. Can you help me?” I would love nothing more. Four pillars. Know where your clients are at. Meet them where they are. Go get to work.

Learn more about Jason Posnick here.