Lead Generation Fundamentals

Let’s talk fundamentals. Lead generation is incredibly important to your success, regardless of your industry. You will always need people who need your products and services. So before you can begin to truly service your leads, you need to define exactly what qualifies as a lead in your profession. 

Define Your Leads

Your definition of a lead will vary depending on your specific industry. Most of you reading this are in real estate. The definition I would encourage you to use is…

• Someone who has the intent to buy or sell within the next six months.
• You qualified their motivation and timeline. I suggest using the six connecting questions from page 95 in the book Shift.
• You have permission to follow up/stay in touch.

Build a Bunker-Does your environment support you goals?

Anyone undertaking the task of lead generation will benefit from an environment in which they can bunker themselves and get down to business. Does your environment support your goal? Think about where you currently do the majority of your lead generation. Can you securely isolate yourself there for two to three hours at a time without distraction or interruption? If not, you need to create a bunker. A bunker has two layers; physical and digital. A physical bunker is a space you can work inside of that no one is able to enter. Close and lock your door. Draw the shades. Put up a sign letting the world know you are lead-generating and unavailable. Do whatever it takes. The second type of bunker is a digital bunker. This is keeping your environment free of the digital deluge of distractions we allow ourselves to live in today. Shut your texts, calls, emails, voicemails, and social media off. Allow yourself and that big brain of yours to focus on one thing and one thing only; building your empire. I get it that you need to answer your clients and tend to your deals. But guess what? That stuff can wait. It’s helpful to get yourself into this routine by noticing that you’re already good at it. You are an expert bunkerer when you go into a listing or buyer appointment. I don’t think you check your email or phone while you’re sitting in front of a prospective client do you? Treat your lead generation with the same respect. I promise you the results will be worth it. Page 172 of The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan is a great resource for further strategies on building a bunker.

Prep, Action, Maintain-The Anatomy of Lead Generation

When we look at the anatomy of lead generation, we find lead generation is made up of three fundamental steps.

Preparation

• Who are you going to call? Prepare a list of each of the people you are going to reach out to. 
• What are you going to say? Prepare and have practiced your scripts. Engineer messages for the people on your prep list.
• What is your expected rate of return? Everyone needs a metric to define what a successful lead generation session looks like. Think of yourself as an investor except now you are investing your time, what is the ROI you would expect from the time you are investing in lead generation? I recommend you set your baseline metric as adding one solid listing lead to your pipeline per day and scale from there.

Getting very clear about the above, especially your metrics will enact an important law about human behavior, which is that what we want will always govern what we do.

Action

Now that you’re prepared, it’s time for action. This is the simple part.

• Prospecting. This is looking for new business, whether it’s calling your database, networking, holding an open house, whatever it takes. 
• Followup. This simply calling back the people you said you would last week, last month, or last year. Take advantage of your CRM to make sure you’re setting these reminders to follow up on into the future.

Maintain

• Update your database. Add your new people, get reminder notes set up correctly, updatie notes, everything you need to keep your database organized.
• Fulfill promises. Follow through with all of the things you told your clients and prospects you would do, whether that’s setting them up on a buyer search, sending them a buyer’s or seller’s packet, whatever it is, just follow through.
• Thank-you notes. In this age of digital deluge and distraction, thank-you notes are a lost art form that really shows a human touch and become tangible reminders for your clients that have more presence and longevity than an email or a text. I encourage you to be writing these to a certain number of people each day, whether they are new leads or existing clients.

The Bunker Buffer

The final piece of lead generation fundamentals is one that I see overlooked time and again, but has the potential to negate a sizeable amount of the gains from your lead generation sessions. By simply scheduling a one-hour buffer block after each of your lead-gen sessions to attend to the things that piled up while you were in your bunker you can keep a massive amount of control over your day. Use this time block to respond to all of the emails, texts, and other communications that came in during your session, or simply to follow up on all of the things you remembered to do during that time.

These are what I consider to be the fundamentals of lead generation and I would encourage you to adopt them. Line these nails up and continue to hammer on them every day and you will win.