5 Ways To Be A More Successful Real Estate Agent

Today, I'm going over a traditional real estate sales funnel, and how you can use it to be a more successful real estate agent.

Most of what attracts people to the real estate industry are the allure of great commissions and making lots of money. There are quite a few factors that influence how successful a real estate agent is at what they do. To have great success, you need to understand the game and play it well. A big part of this is understanding how to attract leads and convert them into sales. Once you have this understanding, you can form your brand and marketing around what helps the best suit your target audience.

While knowing how to negotiate and find the perfect property for your clients is what makes you a great agent, you won’t be able to utilize those skills without the right leads. This is why marketing and the sales funnel are so incredibly important. Much of the success that comes with real estate is from experience and the wisdom it grants. In this article, we’ll go over 5 ways to be a more successful real estate agent based on what works.

Table of Contents

What Do All Successful Real Estate Agents Have In Common?

If you want to set yourself up for success as a real estate agent, it helps to look at common themes among agents who are thriving. So what exactly are they doing right? First things first; they know their business inside and out. They know what works and equally important they know what doesn’t work. It takes hard work, understanding, and passion to foster a successful career in real estate.

A successful real estate agent comes up with a plan for marketing and branding to set himself up to make big sales. Many real estate agents enter the field without any plan. This may be why so many, as much as 87% quit in the first 5 years. Knowing the keys to success will help you anticipate and plan for potential hurdles and obstacles. Being prepared and setting yourself up for growth will help to ensure a long and fruitful career as a real estate agent.

Understanding The Real Estate Sales Funnel

The most important factor towards success as a real estate agent is attracting and converting leads. To do this, you need to have a solid understanding of how the real estate sales funnel works. There are five steps toward the real estate funnel. Developing a good understanding of the funnel and each step will help you succeed and experience consistent growth.

Your sales funnel represents the flow of your business – From the first contact with a new lead to the moment they buy or sell their home and beyond. The “funnel” name comes from the idea that your sales process will start with a lot of leads and thin out towards the bottom as you move from prospect to lead to client. Let’s break down the four parts of the funnel in more detail, and help you figure out what each of these parts looks like in your business.

Awareness

The first step in the traditional sales funnel approach is awareness. This involves raising attention for your brand and getting traffic to your website. Many agents make the mistake of putting all their eggs in one basket meaning they put all their awareness and marketing efforts through one channel. In reality, it helps to use every potential avenue for gaining traction and awareness through your marketing efforts.

No matter which method you choose to use, remember to keep your efforts local. It’s much more efficient to be a big fish in a small pond. Sites like Google will have an easier time promoting you if you blog about local areas and events than if you choose to cover broad topics that could apply to anyone in the city, state, or country. You’ll be working on awareness often, so be sure to choose methods that appeal to you. Video creation might seem like a fun choice, but if you don’t have the energy or resources to create engaging video content on a reliable basis, you might find your channel never grows. Let’s look into the various avenues agents use to spread awareness.

Online Presence

Online presence is key to gaining awareness as a real estate agent these days. Without a website and social media presence, you miss out on a massive avenue of gaining awareness. Creating and sharing a relevant blog can be a great way to create a reliable source of organic traffic to your website. Many agents have blogs on their websites that utilize SEO to attract traffic to the website.

Social media is of paramount importance as well. It offers the opportunity to grow a consistent audience. Some agents love shooting footage of their area and posting it to YouTube or creating advice and lifestyle videos for platforms like TikTok. Whether you use TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube, social media offers an excellent avenue for gaining some name recognition and attracting potential leads. It is important to remain consistent and interact with your audience to help attract leads and build a name for yourself.

Community Involvement

While the internet has proven to be an extremely valuable tool, there is still undeniable merit to face-to-face interactions. Seeing, meeting with, and talking to people is incredibly important even in the age of the internet. For a more analog approach, try getting involved in community events.

From annual events to weekend get-togethers in the park, there’s always something going on that you can be a part of. Check sites like nextdoor.com or meetup.org to see what’s happening in your area. Facebook is also an excellent way to discover opportunities for engaging with your local community. This allows you to gain an in-person repertoire with locals and gain knowledge about the community you serve.

Mailers

Another excellent way to get your name out there and increase local awareness of your services is through mailers. While it’s not our favorite method for lead generation, some agents swear by mailers. This is usually a numbers game. This means for every 50,000 you send out you might get just a handful of replies, but the right agent can turn those leads into business.

It helps to have specific mailers for buyers and sellers to help target your marketing efforts through mailers. These specific mailers can cater to the interests of the recipient to help you gain that valuable interest that attracts strong leads.

Interest

This is where your real estate website shines. How do you get and hold your leads’ interest? To begin, you’ll want a clean and modern real estate website. Develop a site that will allow you to create landing pages for your promotions. Doing this well helps you capture leads easily and inform you when a lead gives you their contact information so you can quickly follow up.

If you need a high-performing real estate website, check out LeadSites. This platform offers designs by Easy Agent PRO and gives you the resources to build a site with the modern agent in mind. Once you have your website, you’ll want to create a way for leads to contact you. This can be as simple as a contact form. Many agents have success with making contact forms part of an ad campaign. It helps to provide a free promo after visitors provide their name and email. This contact info can be used to create email campaigns and newsletters, which you can use to ensure your leads remain interested and keep you top of mind.

When it comes to keeping your leads interested, frequent communication is the key. Try to reach out once a week with helpful advice, and updates on the market. Reach out with anything you think your leads will want to know. Being the one who provides them with this information is a great way to ensure you remain top of mind when they decide to take their search for an agent more seriously.

Desire

We like to consider this the part of the sales funnel where your leads begin to actively reply to your calls and messages. By this point, a lead is interested in finding their agent and moving ahead with the buying or selling process. There’s an adage in the real estate industry about contacting leads: If a lead reaches out to you, you have 5 minutes to respond before you lose them. Whether they text, email, or call, a prompt response can make or break the sale.

This is where having a good system in place can be a lifesaver. Chatbots on your website can help you communicate with site visitors without actually being present. Automated text messages and emails can respond to leads when you aren’t around. Check with your CRM provider to see what solutions are available to you. Having a few scripts written out, especially when you’re just starting, is a great way to ensure you’ll be prepared for any conversation topic a lead may have.

Action

This is the part where you get to take off your marketing hat and finally be a real estate agent. Taking action involves applying your skills and expertise as an agent. You’ll work directly with your clients to help them find their dream homes or sell their current ones. We have plenty of other articles that detail all of the processes agents will be working on during this phase of the sales process including open houses, home staging, negotiations, client communication, etc.

As you can see, the skill and expertise of being a real estate agent don’t actually come into play until the end of the sales funnel. While it helps to excel at negotiations and home staging, you won’t get to apply these skills without having an excellent marketing approach to secure leads.

Follow-Up

Our sales funnel ends at “Action”, but there’s a very important extra step many agents forget when thinking about their sales process. This is following up with past clients. Many of the techniques you’ll be using during the “Interest” phase of your sales funnel will be repeated here. This means reaching out to former clients through email. It helps to make your follow-up emails less frequent than your initial interest communications. An email every few months will suffice at this point.

Many agents find great success by building up a collection of past clients who are already happy with their service. As your business grows, be sure to keep these clients at the top of your mind. Not only does this keep your name in their head for themselves, but also for anyone they encounter who is looking for a real estate agent in the area that they can trust. Remember, most of us move more than once in our lifetime.