The Follow Up You Started and Did Not Finish

Ask an agent where their next deal will come from and many will start talking about generating more leads. Ask the same agent how many people are sitting in their database who once enquired and never heard from them again, and the room usually goes quiet.

The second group is almost always larger than the first, and you have already paid for it.

Where does a conversation actually stop?

Not where you intended it to stop. Where it does stop, in practice, when the week gets busy.

For most agents there is a recognisable point. The first call is made. A message is sent a few days later. Then a third attempt goes out or it does not, and if it does not, nobody notices, because nothing has gone visibly wrong.

Can you say with confidence where yours stops? If you looked at ten enquiries from three months ago, would you find the same number of contacts logged against each one, or would you find ten different stories?

Intention is not a system

A good intention performs beautifully in a quiet week. The test of a process is what happens in the week when a transaction is falling apart and a client is upset and you have three showings before lunch.

So ask it of yourself plainly. In your worst week this year, did the follow up still happen? If it did not, that is not a character finding. It is information about your process, which is a far more useful thing to have.

What would finished mean?

Here is a question worth answering in writing, because the vague version of it lets everyone off. For a new enquiry who does not respond, what exactly counts as having followed up properly?

How many attempts, across how many channels, over how long a period, before that person moves somewhere else in your database rather than quietly disappearing? Until that is defined, no follow up is ever finished, and no follow up is ever failed either. It just tails off.

The people who said no

There is a second group worth thinking about, larger still. The ones who told you the timing was wrong.

Someone who said not this year, eighteen months ago, was giving you a date rather than a rejection. What happened to those conversations in your business? Is there a place they go where you will see them again, or does a person who is not ready simply leave your attention?

It is worth being specific about what happens to that person. Are they tagged with the month they mentioned. Do they receive anything from you in the meantime, and if they do, is it something they would find useful or something that simply reminds them you exist. A person waiting eighteen months has plenty of time to meet another agent, and the one who stays in front of them without asking for anything is usually the one they call.

The uncomfortable audit

You can do this in an hour, and most agents resist it because of what it shows. Take twenty contacts from the past twelve months who never converted and look at the actual record of contact against each.

Three questions will answer themselves as you go. How many attempts did most of them receive. At which attempt did the contact stop. And how many of them ended up buying or selling with someone else during that period.

What would you expect to find? And are you confident enough in that expectation to not look?

A question to sit with this week

If every person who ever enquired with you had received one more contact than they did, what would be different about your year?

If you want to build the missing part

A follow up process that survives a bad week is designed rather than intended. If you would like help designing yours, you can book a discovery call.