image credit: crimescene
Mostly because I’ve never found a contact management system that I liked (ACT came the closest but the memory bleed from Firefox has left it impossible to run), I wrote the names of all my prospective buyers and sellers on the white board next to my desk. These are the more or less serious buyers, not just those who make a one-time inquiry off an IDX feed and disappear back into the ether with nary another word.
Three columns followed each name – their timeframe to buy and when I last contacted them via phone or e-mail. Frankly this isn’t groundbreaking stuff but when I hear talk of returning to basics, this to my mind is the basics. And I’ve never been as strong with the follow-up as I ought to be. I have a hunch many of us have room to improve if we make an honest assessment.
Including today’s call from the mother of someone moving to town in the next few days, there are 24 buyers on the list. The sellers’ side is much smaller but that’s to be expected when you change brokerages and have to leave some folks behind.
Here’s what was notable about the exercise:
1) Walking into my office and seeing the number of clients I really have at any given time is empowering and sets a positive mood for the remainder of the day.
2) Seeing the last time I contacted each of these folks in such a visible manner sets the game plan for each day.
3) I need to find the key to getting these buyers off the fence and into the market.
Several are Canadians riding the exchange rate even more so than the current real estate market. It appears the U.S. dollar regained the upper hand today, at least according to the FOREX widget I installed last week.
Much has been discussed today regarding the methodology of prospecting. But at the end of the day, the prospecting itself is irrelevant if it doesn’t translate into closed sales.
Those I keep on a separate spreadsheet, one I continue to expect to fill even in a down market.
Chris Johnson
January 31, 2008 at 8:37 am
Act was great–try a license for act 6.0, and it’s wicked fast. It takes some work to get it right, and they are missing the “top producer eqsue” stuff (activity series stuff that correclty handles undone linear acttivities).
Anyway, I’m messing with a locally installed SugarCRM instance, and the learning curve is pretty steep, but managable, and it can be taught to do EXACLTY what we want at roughly the speed that we want. (THe .3 second delay in top producer made it useless when I was selling houses)