Jim Rohn once said, “You must change your approach in order to change your results.” We’re halfway through the year, and if you aren’t exactly where you want to be, it may be time to challenge your perspective and how you conduct your day-to-day business. The fact is that all it may take to experience a different outcome is to make a slight adjustment. So what’s one adjustment you can make to start seeing different results? The way you manage your lead pipeline!

The traditional approach to working a lead pipeline

In the traditional approach to lead management, we often think of leads flowing through a pipeline, top-to-bottom. When you first generate a lead, whether it be an online generated lead, a referral, or any other source, every contact you have has a specific through the pipeline.

1. New lead (top-of-funnel)
2. Engaged lead (meaningful conversation has occurred)
3. Active lead (physically showing properties to, or selling a home for)
4. Pending lead (have a pending sales agreement with)
5. Sold lead (have closed and have earned a front-end commission)

Many agents approach their day by starting at the top of their pipeline, spending a significant amount of resources on their top-of-funnel efforts to generate new leads. They spend their remaining time working through their pipeline top to bottom. This approach creates business, but does it create the best results? Let’s see.

Work your pipeline in reverse order to remain efficient and focused

What if you were to change your approach and work your pipeline in reverse order? You want to work ‘closest to where the money is’ by first prioritizing staying connected with your sold leads. This is where repeat and referral business comes from. It’s essential to invest resources into a multi-touch follow-up campaign and to engage with each sold lead on social media so you are top-of-mind. This not only helps you to retain these sold clients, but also to generate future opportunities and leads from these relationships.

Next, you want to focus on your pending leads and be hyper-attentive to get them to the closing table. Then focus on your active leads by continuing to show them homes or work on selling their home. Then you will spend your time working with your engaged leads and guiding them to start looking at homes, become qualified to buy, find contractors to sell, etc.

Don’t ignore your new leads by any means. You need to spend time on top-of-funnel and have a system in place that helps you with this. Still, ultimately, your primary focus every day should be to retain your past clients and to nurture those relationships so you can earn referral business and keep feeding your pipeline.

Working your lead pipeline in reverse order is a minor tweak, but it’s an impactful action to take because it keeps you focused and makes you more efficient. Whether it’s buyer leads or seller leads, heavily focus on nurturing your relationships and staying in communication with your closed clients, and the results will follow.

Want more ideas on how to work your lead pipeline (and specifically, generate and close those coveted listing leads we all want)? Download this FREE GUIDE.

This educational guide will give you tips and strategies on how to work your sales pipeline and implement a lead capture-to-conversion process that is seamless and will elevate your results!

To learn more about how you can effectively work your pipeline in reverse order, schedule a conversation with an Elevate Success Coach.

About Elm Street
Elm Street offers a growing portfolio of real estate technology and marketing services with the goal of providing one vendor and one point of contact, fully fused into one singular platform – Elevate – to capture and nurture more leads into closed business. Elm Street’s portfolio of products and services allows busy real estate professionals the ability to streamline and automate their marketing and day-to-day business objectives by offering high-end IDX websites, lead generation tools, a powerful CRM, email, social, text, and blog marketing automation, recruiting and retention tools, and more. To learn more, please visit ElmStreet.com.