Insights on Lead Conversion from Agentology’s Powerhouse of Data

In an interview with Dave Savage, David Tal of Agentology reveals some stats and facts regarding lead conversion and how you can improve your tactics. Watch or read below:

Dave Savage: Hi everybody, Dave Savage here and today I am interviewing David Tal. What’s up David?

Dave Tal: Hey how you doing? Pleasure to be here.

Dave Savage: It’s good to have you. So, community I was introduced to David by Craig Sewing – the founder, spokesperson leader of the American Dream TV. Big player in mortgage coach community now for a long time. And David’s doing something that I think you’re going to be interested in. The name of his company is called Agentology. I got that right David?

Dave Tal: Agentology, yeah.

Dave Savage: Agentology. I actually don’t think I’ve said it like that. I like it. It sticks in my head and I’ll let him describe what his company does. He’s got some insights that from my perspective are going to help you do a better job of converting leads. One of those leads came from – you know you bought leads online, he’s going to help you convert those better. You got Facebook leads coming in. You know, think of his team as a first response team to ensure that when the lead comes in to one of your Realtors or to you, they get a multi-channel immediate follow up. “Speed to lead” is critical. So, Dave I know you’ve got a report, why don’t you start by just telling us a little bit about you. and Agentology and then walk us through the insights that you have?

Dave Tal: Yeah, great. And great to be here. Thanks for having me. So, yes as you mentioned Agentology what we’re doing is we’re helping real estate agents respond to and follow up with all their internet leads. You know the idea being that nowadays Realtors and agents have to be advertising online to be growing their funnel and their pipeline. So, you’re advertising on sites like Zillow and realtor.com and Trulia and driving traffic to your own website. Leads are coming in 24/7 and you need to have the power of your own inside sales team, or ISA, to be able to respond to those leads quickly within minutes, 24/7. And to be able to do all the necessary follow-up to call, to text, to email multiple times to just make sure that you’re getting the most out of those. And so what Agentology does is: we take care of that for agents. So, they sync any of their lead sources or CRM’s with Agentology, and as leads come in, our human concierge – we’re all based here in San Diego. And we’re all here, a really large team, and all they’re doing is responding, following up with your leads to set up appointments for you, and to disqualify leads that are kind of junk, bogus, bad info, people who are just not interested. So, we take care of that for you. And there’s much more to that but I wanted to mention that because it’s that service that has provided us with a lot of data. We’re now processing over a hundred thousand leads per month. We’re doing a tremendous amount of volume and this has given us a real insight into the businesses, the lead sources and all the different CRM and buyer and seller ratios and a tremendous amount of data that we’re collecting every single day. And as our way of giving back to the community that we love to serve and partner with – we see you guys as partners – we want to share that data with everybody. So, what we’ve done is starting in Q4 of last year, we started our quarterly AIR report, we’ll include a link here for you to download it. It’s free. And the idea is AIR stands for “Agentology Insights Report”. This is where we showcase a lot of the data we’re gathering on leads, on lead engagement, on qualification – all sorts of stuff. And so, I thought I’d just take a couple minutes and really just kind of walk you through some of the things I find the most interesting. And then hopefully you guys download it for yourself. Check it out and share with anybody else you think may find value in it.

Dave Savage: So, so while you’re pulling up your report David. I want everybody think of it like this: I mean we believe that the best loan officers are the best educators, we believe that the best loan officers would get the most referrals or looked at this like conversion partners. Like “hey, if I refer a buyer to you, it’s going to get the best conversion. Could you deliver this total cost analysis”? So, when you start watching this while he’s going to walk you through his report, think of it as you are learning to be a teacher at a Realtor lunch-and-learn. I mean think of the takeaways that you would take from the briefing that we’re going to get right now: “how could I integrate that into a conversation with the team?”, “How could I use that to be a more effective partner?”. You know I’m just getting to know David. So, maybe you want to contract him, maybe your agent does. But regardless of whether you ever do business with these guys, he’s going to give us a lot of insights that will just help you have a better conversation with agents that have a lot of leads coming through. So, walk us through what you’ve learned from a hundred thousand leads a month?

Dave Tal: Sounds good. So, I’m just going to walk you guys through it here. And this is just packed with a lot of stuff. It goes into all the different time zones. Even it gets pretty specific but I’m going to walk you through some of the fun facts and highlights. And this is Hillary- she helped put this report together. She runs our concierge operations and just has a sincere desire to share as much wisdom and insight as we can with the industry. So, I have to just give her a nod.  I’ll jump in right here. You know one of the things we’re always tracking, and this is how we learn to adjust our how many people we have working per hour, is you know what times a day do the most leads come in. Right? The leads are coming in 24/7 and one of the things that really stood out to me is that 45 percent of leads come in between 5:00 pm and 8:00 am. So, back in the day. I don’t know about you but when I was an agent and a broker 100 percent of my prospects walked in the door between 9:00 and 5:00. And now 45 percent of them actually come in after hours. And if you include weekend days like the daytime hours of the weekends, basically the non-Monday through Friday 9:00 to 5:00, this number jumps up into the fifty six percent range.  So, most leads come in nights and weekends – that is a huge shift from the way things used to be. And so, it’s really important even if you have an in-house assistant, or a receptionist, or any kind of an ISA, even if you have someone fantastic during nine-to-five, you’re still missing out on half of your leads not getting responded to quickly and effectively if you don’t have a 24-hour service. And so with Agentology, one of the things we allow agents to do is to customize the hours that we’re on. So, agents can have Agentology on from 5:00 p.m. Until 8:00 am as an example, to make sure that we’re giving you that coverage. Also Mondays, Thursdays and Sundays are the busiest. Sundays being the busiest day. Again this is not something that was the case years ago. But nowadays, this is when people are free . This is when they’re off work. This is also why people are doing stuff at night. It’s kind of when they’re settling in. So Sunday’s are by far the busiest days. And the highest lead flow is between 3 & 6 p.m. Landlines, we forget about landlines but 14% of all leads are landlines and you can’t text those. So, if you have an autoresponder, like an auto texting system or even a concierge service, that’s only texting. If you’re not also calling you’re missing out on 14% flat out. You just cannot get ahold of 14% of your leads because they’re landlines. We forget that, although most of us probably don’t have landlines anymore. I certainly don’t. A large percentage of the population does and that population tends to be older. When they fill out a form online, they’d rather give their landline than their mobile. So, it’s extremely important to not forget to call. You can’t just text; you got to call, otherwise you’re missing out on all these guys.

Dave Savage: The cool thing is that it’s not a big number. You know it’s beautiful having people’s mobile numbers being able to text them. But that, no doubt, is something I hadn’t thought about, and how important that is to make sure you’re calling all those folks.

Dave Tal: Yeah absolutely. And I’ll go into calling a little further in  a minute here because even mobile numbers calling makes an insane difference. Here’s some interesting stats on response rates. You know we at Agentology, make 10 attempts with every single lead. We call, we text, we email. We make a total of 10 attempts over 5 days to reach every single lead. And what we have found is 37 percent of leads answer one of our first two phone calls. We start off if it’s during working hours and day hours. We will initiate calls first. Before we even text we place a couple of phone calls. If it’s a lead that comes in later at night or in the middle of the night, we will initiate by text to start. We always respond within five minutes.  And what we found is that most people engage with us in those first five minutes – whether it’s via the first few calls or the texts – and a whopping 72% of leads engage with us during the first 24 hours. That’s pretty powerful stuff. And So, this just goes to show that speed to lead. So, this here breaks down: we reach 22% of people just in our first call attempt. The next call we reach another 15% then we text another 17%. The second text you get more, you get more. Do you know that the average agent first of all responds in over three hours? It takes them over three hours to respond to the average lead and they only make an average of 1.3 attempts. They don’t even make two full attempts on average. But even if you’re making two attempts and you’re calling look how much you’re leaving off the table. Look how much you’re missing out on. And so, it’s extremely important that that you’re making multiple attempts and, as you mentioned with multiple channels of communication, you can’t just text. You can’t just call. You have to be doing at all.

Dave Savage: So here I want to add if you feel free to go the next slide.

Dave Tal: Yeah.

Dave Savage: But I want to add a couple notes for the mortgage code community. So, I’ve interviewed a couple of top producers recently where they’re talking about the interview that they’re having with the agent: where they’re looking for problems when they can have value. And so, whether or not you partner today with Agentology; whether or not you’re like a Wally Elibiary, where part of your model is helping Realtors convert leads (listen to my interview with Wally). But regardless of whether you are, if you’re talking to an agent team and they have a lot of leads coming in, just asking the question:  “on average, how many contact points are you making?”, you could reference a study by Agentology. You know, 10 touch points is recommended best practice. Asking questions like “what percentage of your leaves come in after five?” You know just asking that question positioned you as someone like ‘hey, I’m smart I understand leads.’ And so, I’ve already pulled like three four or five questions out of this. I hope you guys are taking notes. And I hope you’re getting a more for your next Realtor meeting. Regardless of whether or not this is part of your strategy or not.  This is great.

Dave Tal: Yeah, I know and speaking about your next time you talk to Realtor this is the one that really stands out to me: 60 percent of agents don’t answer. We try to make live transfers. So, when we have a live lead on the phone that’s interested, we try to transfer that in a live transfer that we can create a really warm handoff to the agent. But most agents don’t answer even when we have someone live on the phone. They just don’t answer. So, pick up the darn phone and you will double your engagement in your conversion rates. That’s as simple as I can put it. Secondly, and here are some other really interesting stats: about a third of all the leads we qualify requested an appointment the next day. So, they’re interested – they want to get moving on things. 61% of them wanted to speak to the agent the very same day. And so, when most leads want to talk to you the same day and most agents don’t answer, that creates a real problem and an inefficiency that is unfortunate but we hope to close the gap on.

Dave Savage: Especially in today’s market and I’m not going to mention specific brands because homes are in such demand. A lot of the value is speed. I can get you to see the how the fastest. And so, I think this also fits into the whole market that we’re at: speed, close your loan fast, get people on the phone fast, when they want to go look at a home fast. I mean it makes lots of sense to me.

Dave Tal: Absolutely and a statistic on that is that you are 21 times more likely to convert a lead into a client if you engage them within five minutes versus just thirty minutes. So, if you’re calling a lead back thirty minutes later you have such a diminished chance of actually converting them into a client as if you had responded within minutes. And that’s what we do. Make sure that you are responding.

Dave Savage: By the way, that that made me think of an interview I did with Chris Smith, the author of the conversion code. And I’ve interviewed Chris a number of times – everything from Facebook marketing to conversion. But I did a call with Chris less than a year ago on how to get anybody on the phone. And everything they’re saying aligns with that. By the way I’m going to put a link below not only to download this, but a link to that interview with Chris. Because I think this is great leadership. It’s going to help you as a mortgage professional, get more people on the phone, help you be a conversion partner and then of course, [Agentology] is like a company that you may want to partner with to help you convert more, folks. Keep it rolling.

Dave Tal: Yeah and we’re really looking to give you guys more leverage.  It’s not even about replacing anything it. If you just add us to what you’re already doing then you’ll ensure that nothing ever slips through the cracks. And hey, if you get a hold of a lead before we do, great! With a click of a button you can tell us to end our attempts and we will stop trying to engage that lead. So, this is about giving you leverage so that you don’t have to do any calling, any texting yourself. But hey, if you’re around and you want to answer your lead immediately. Go for it.  We encourage that. We’re here to give you that leverage in that back up. One thing here, if you don’t use any other services, first calls and the answer rates double in the afternoon and evenings. Or early evenings I should say. So, that that’s when people are kind of settling down. So, that’s just something to note. Some of the really fun facts: we qualify almost a third of all the leads via a phone call. So again, this is one of those places where if you’re not calling as part of your strategy and you think just texting and putting them into some email campaign is going to do the trick you’re missing out on a huge amount. If you’re only collecting the blue here and you added this you’ll actually increase things by 50%. You’ll increase that engagement. So, it’s imperative to call, I can’t say that enough. 67% of leads want to purchase in the next six months. So, out of all the leads that we managed, two and three wants to purchase in the next six months. But only a quarter of them or so have financing or cash already. So, that’s where you really want to have a mortgage partner that you can immediately funnel interested clients to get them pre-qualified right away – to help them move this along. Because this doesn’t match to me. You know, they want to buy, they’re not even qualified, right? This is the opportunity to bring in and bridge a mortgage partner to make sure you get them qualified quickly effectively, and can make their you know their goals happen for them.

Dave Savage: So I want to mention something here. Mortgage coach community – this is something that we do a lot of training on. I did an interview with John Downs, one hundred-million-dollar producer talking about his scripting for how he’s managing these bigger pre-approval funnel. So, you know two things jump out at me here. One: if you’re partnering with an agent and you’re helping them with conversion. You know that, ‘hey a lot of these folks are just great mortgage leads’. And then two: just a reminder that when you go into every single buyer lead, understand that the odds are that it’s a long sales cycle. You know you may be pre-approving them now, but it’s not 30 days. You got to be ready to play the long game.  That’s why you need to deliver the total cost analysis and train the customer that ‘hey, as your story is starting right now, as that story involves all of big things I’ll add a new video, you need to deliver with a more complete sales process with every single buyer’. At least that’s my takeaway from this.

Dave Tal: I couldn’t agree more.  And that’s that really sums up some of the key elements. You know we have little glossaries here that’s more relevant to our customers. We do share some scripts here that work. You know Lab Coat Agents, they’re there, they’re the pros at this. You know, you got Tristan and Nick Baldwin and Barry Jenkins and Kevin Markarian and just a lot of amazing talent over there. And they helped us with our scripts. And so here’s this, that we recommend that really get people to engage. So worth exploring , worth looking into and utilizing some of these in your strategy. And then I won’t go into these because these are specific to time zones. You got Eastern, Central, there’s some stats related to each mountain and Pacific. And then you know here’s just some facts about ISAs. You know ISA is a inside sales agent, right?  It’s the term for basically an in-house assistant who helps you engage and qualify your leads for you. However, there’s some drawbacks to this and this is why more and more top teams are moving to a service like Agentology as opposed to hiring this in-house, because it just doesn’t make sense to do it in-house for a few reasons.  You know first and foremost, when 54 percent of your leads come in after hours, it doesn’t make sense to hire someone 9 to 5, right? You’re still missing out on half the leads. Also, these people – they call in sick, they have vacation days… leads don’t leave. We qualify a ton of leads on Christmas and on New Year’s and then all the holidays. It’s when people are filling out forms. It’s when they’re free. It’s that it’s on their time, on their terms. And also, you don’t have the hire, train, give desk equipment, hope that they’re doing their job right. And then hiring an in-house is a is going to cost you about $35,000 to $48,00 a year between phone systems, training, salary. Not to mention commissions, which isn’t even really baked in here. Most in-house ISAs will want a piece of the action. With us, we’re about one tenth of the cost of an ISA. So, it literally saved ninety percent of that. Put it to us and we will produce far better results because for 24/7, this is all we do, all day long. And we have a tremendous amount of resources and technology to power what we do. And we know what works. This is what we’re pros to do. It’s the same reason probably don’t need an in-house full-time lawyer, right? You just need a lawyer for when you need them. It would be way more expensive to pay a lawyer $200,000 a year to just sit there for the few times you need them. It’s the same thing with an ISA. Leads are not coming in every three minutes for you. You don’t need someone in there full-time waiting for your four or five leads a day to come in. That’s something you should be outsourcing. We charge a few bucks per lead to make 10 attempts per lead. And so, it’s just a real no-brainer and this is why we’re working with some of the top teams around the country and almost every single market. And I recommend you go to Agentology.com/PRICING. So you can get a little cost analysis for yourself and see how that would compare. And then we even have top teams that already have ISAs. It’s just because they’re generating five hundred or a thousand leads a month. They hire us on top of their ISA anyway because their ISA can now focus on nurturing those leads long term, putting them on MLS drips, inviting them to social events, following up, setting up showings. But they let us handle the top of the funnel to help engage and qualify those leads and hand them off to their ISAs – when you’re adding just 10% more cost to your ISA to do all of that. And we’re seeing that agents are seeing up to a 300% increase in conversion rates by using Agentology. And here’s just some stuff you could look at in your own time about how that works. But we help agents boost conversion rates up to 300% just by the nature that we engage every single lead within minutes. 24/7 we make ten attempts call, text, email, we’re all US-based and we frankly love what we do. So, that’s all.

Dave Savage: I love it.  You crushed it. We got some education and we got a bit of a demo, an overview of your services.  Again, this is a new relationship referred by Craig Sewing. The seem like is super legit and a great company. If you in the mortgage coach community do business with them or you know someone, feel free to give us comments below. You’re watching this in Facebook. I will push this into our private Facebook group “mortgage coach productivity mastermind” So, all you mortgage coach members, if you have a great experience, let us know about it and hopefully you got some takeaways  to make your next realtor meeting more compelling, more valuable. And you guys did a great job. I mean whether someone engages with you or not, I think you know the twenty minutes we spent talking is going to make them more effective and more successful. So I really appreciate the insights that you shared for everyone. If you’ve got a takeaway: like this, give us a like, share it with your mortgage friends. Let us know what you think about it. And again, if you engage with Dave and Agentology, please let the mortgage coach community know about it. Dave anything, last thoughts?

Dave Tal: Thank you for time. I’m always available to answer any questions. Anyone can reach me at David@Agentology.com. Or Facebook me: David Tal. Reach out to me anytime. I’m happy to help or guide you in the right direction. And give you guys advice: whether it’s service we can help with, or recommend you to something else that might be a better fit. But just always looking to support and add a value wherever I can. So, I appreciate the time.

Dave Savage: Well, I love it. Thank you very much. Appreciate you.