The goal of circle prospecting.
The goal of circle prospecting is similar to any other type of prospecting, we want to generate leads. Where it differs from expired and Fsbo prospecting is that we are not trying to set an appointment that day. We are open to setting an appointment that day however we have to understand that when we are calling someone out of the blue who does not have their hand up, they are not asking for real estate information, they may not even have plans of selling their home ever again, we are building relationships. One of the common things you will hear as you begin to circle prospect is the phrase I’m not moving until they carry me out of here. These are not the people we are looking for. We are looking for people who are interested in what’s going on in their market. Often these people are thinking about selling in the future. So what we want to do is get on their radar. We want to identify the people who could potential he sell their home in the next 3 to 6 months those are our hot leads and they will become our focus point. The people who are interested in selling their home in the next 1 to 5 years we want to begin to move those into our inner circle of our sphere. We need to understand that these people don’t know us they don’t know for sales people if or scam artist they don’t know the difference so we want to get an email address from them whenever possible because we can begin to market to them via our email system or drip campaigns and let them know who we are.
As we go through the neighborhood and add more and more people to our database who have some intention of selling their home at some point down the road we are going to continue to nurture these leads. While they may not be thinking of moving tomorrow we want to be the person they think of when they do think of moving or hear of someone they know that is thinking of moving.
Now these leads need to be nurtured somewhat differently than expired’s and Fsbo’s. We want them to know that the market is doing well or if it’s not doing well we want them to know that as well. We want them to know that we know the area that we are great agents and that they don’t have anyone better than us to contact when they decide to list their home. Typically I’m going to use a system similar to a 33 touch, which means reaching out and getting in front of them at least 33 times per year. Four of these will be phone calls, 12 of these will be newsletters, if you have it market snapshot is another great 12 touches, if you do not have market snapshot you can do your own market snapshot and send that 12 times per year. That leaves us with five more touches that we can make unique to us to reach out to them. Some great ideas are things like charities in the area, events in the area, other homes you may have listed or sold in the area etc. this is just a rough guideline feel free to do what feels best to you.
The numbers
With circle prospecting the numbers are going to be different than with expired and Fsbo’s. Expired and Fsbo’s are going to lead to an appointment in much fewer contacts. With circle prospecting you’re going to need to contact a lot more people in order to find the motivated. A great rule of thumb is to add five nurtures every day. This could be as simple as 15 contacts in a day, it could also take you 85 contacts in a day the nice thing is you can reach many more contacts per hour Villa Circle prospecting then you can with expired’s and Fsbo’s. I typically see about a 30% connect ratio to the number of people I call. Meaning if I call 100 people I should have 30 contacts. Several of those people will not be home several of those will be wrong numbers however I should reach at least 30 people out of 100. Keep this in mind when writing your goals and your daily plan.
What do I say to circle prospects?
With circle prospects you can call for number of reasons you can call to let them know about an open house you’re doing in the neighborhood, you can call to let them know about a just listed, you can call to let them know about I just sold and if you don’t have any of those to call and talk to them about you can call and let them know how the market is doing, I typically say something along the lines of:
“Hello this is ____ I’m calling to let you know that in our market in the past 60 days for houses have sold out of the six that have been put on the market. We know that when this many homes are selling in 60 days that many neighbors will decide to sell their home. Who do you know who’s thinking about moving?”
I don’t ask them up front if they’re interested in selling their home often that seems to turn people off however I will ask that in the script after 2 to 4 questions about others moving and why they pick this neighborhood.
Now that you know what you’re looking for and what your goal should be go out and kick some butt.