Blog / Prospecting
Charissa Cole Real Estate Academy, Mastering Your Service Area
An effective prospecting program can save a real estate agent valuable time and fast track the relationshipbuilding process within their business development area.
Real Estate Academy Systems Trainer and Technical Support Charissa Cole said a good prospecting program started with a software program that worked for agents. “A lot of people don’t have an effective prospecting program and they don’t know where to start. They’re doing the groundwork but they don’t follow up or have a system to remind them what they need to do next,” Ms Cole explained, and said mastering a prospecting area was mainly about tracking and building a process. “They don’t follow up after a month, 6 months or 12 months and don’t provide valuable information so they lose contact with those people. To master your service area you really need to have an effective prospecting program in place with clear, concise actions that need to be done on a regular basis,” Ms Cole said.
Getting Started
Agents needed to start by writing down how they will service their clients in a way that is manageable. This program should include providing clients with beneficial information, such as current market analyses or reports showing how many days properties are on the market in their area. It should also be constructed so it can be built on regularly on a weekly or monthly basis. “We recommend agents do an hour’s worth of prospecting a day. They can be more effective in that one hour using the system than they could be doing a letterbox drop for 2-3 hours that day and forgetting about the rest of the process.” “It really reduces prospecting time,” Ms Cole explained. “Instead of going out and doing letterbox drops for a whole street or a suburb campaign and then just forgetting about all that hard work, agents can follow up with the next batch of phone calls or valuable information in a report.” Once a system is in place agents can come into the office and spend their allotted prospecting time more effectively sending out bulk emails and mail outs or making phone calls as follow-up actions.
Building a service area
Starting with 1500-2500 homes, the information on owners can be uploaded to Complete Data. This data can then be broken down into street campaigns to target owners once a property in their street comes onto the market. “It helps them become an area specialist,” Ms Cole explained. “If another agent has listed a property in your patch you would want to get on top of it straight away and do a prospecting program for that street,” she said, and added agents could use their prospecting program to print out letters for owners or do a doorknock with a current market analysis for the past six months. “If another owner is thinking about selling the agent actually has more of a chance of getting in the door than if they didn’t have an effective prospecting program.” After an agent has started a prospecting program, the relationship with the client will progress to the next level and the agent can make one-on-one contact. “They can start to track them if they ask them out for a market appraisal. We would then move them over into the Contacts database and start to build a relationship,” she said.
The Complete Data system can generate reports outlining an agent’s current market share, the ratio of owneroccupiers to investors and how many days properties are on the market. “This helps to track their numbers so they can maximise their market share and prospect effectively to clients. They know how they’re tracking, how many properties they’ve got and the average sale price for them and also their competitors. Just to be able to chart and see your market share is a powerful thing. You can see how you’re growing as an agent from utilising the system and building your market share from 2-3 per cent to 40-50 per cent.”
Set up regular campaigns
When the prospecting system is running well, owners can be set up in a sixmonthly campaign where they receive a current market analysis from the agent. “They can do a bulk find and then push that out to 600 clients in a matter of 20 minutes, or do a whole suburb of 1000 people with a couple of clicks of a button. It’s really quite powerful.”
Sitting in front of a computer and inputting data is the last thing many agents want to do, but the work pays off in the long run. “Most of the top performers utilise this area. I’m passionate about it because I can see how it changes people’s businesses,” Ms Cole explained, saying some experienced agents spent one hour a month on bulk mail outs and one hour a week to update Complete Data and netted almost all of their business from their prospecting program. “People can’t afford not to be using this process because it’s proven and it takes all the stress and time out of it. People say they don’t have time to prospect; they don’t have time not to prospect,” she added, and said a good prospecting system allowed agents to work smarter, not harder.
Charissa Cole is now available for in-house training sessions and will be appearing live with Lee Woodward on the first Friday of every month for face-to-face Complete Data software training at the new state training centre in North Sydney. For more information contact her on 0431 588 170.
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