Perhaps this emphasis arises from trainers, marketing gurus or well-meaning consultants.  You’ve most likely heard the cliches shared around boardrooms and classrooms such as, “The minute we’re out of the lead generation business — we’re out of business!”  That is true.  I won’t argue the point, but stay with me as I want to shift the emphasis to another, more important, part of the equation. 

Lead generation budgets within company’s marketing plans allocate billions, if not trillions of dollars annually.   Just in the real estate industry alone, billions of dollars are spent by real estate organizations, and their agents to promote, advertise, and market their services with the hope that a lead will be generated.  All of those dollars invested are doing exactly what they were meant to do — drive and generate leads.   I couldn’t even begin to estimate how many leads are generated on an annual basis within any sales organization.   I would have to guess that within the real estate vertical, hundreds of millions of leads are generated annually.  Yet when compared to actual transactions closed, the industry is doing a poor job of creating transactions, and returning an acceptable bottom line on the dollars invested.

This is not a new problem.  So why do we continue to perpetuate it?  Is it tradition?  Does it just come with the territory?  I can recall some twenty years ago that a real estate organization became aggravated by the ratio of transactions created to the amount of dollars spent on generating leads through print advertising.   They knew that the phone was ringing, but deals were not being written.  The management of the organization decided to conduct an experiment to find out where  the leaks were in their process.   For a period of 90 days they surveyed all  incoming calls  for their name and address, prior to transferring the call to a sales associate.   At the end of six months they researched all names and addresses and compared them to the recorded deed transfers that had taken place during the same time period.  

I don’t have to tell you the end of the story because you can probably imagine the outcome.  Bottom line, over 90% of the incoming calls generated were not converted to closed business.   The company had spent the money, invested their marketing dollars wisely, but failed to realize that their sales staff had major skill gaps that ended up costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost opportunities.   This case study is still relevant today.   As long as we concentrate on lead generation, we will have miserable bottom line results.   Sure, go ahead and generate leads, but you need to also make sure you’re converting the ones you are generating. 

The best companies have already figured this out.  They’ve reduced their advertising dollars, and they have shifted their budget to invest in developing their sales staff’s conversion skills, and the implementation of technology to ensure higher levels of conversion.   What if you cut your lead generation budget by 40, 50, or even 80%?   Are you having heart palpitations just thinking about it??  It truly is a paradigm shift.   Shift your focus on increasing the rate of conversion.  This is the key to greater profitability.

It is no secret that most industries fail in this regard.  Within the real estate industry, for every 100 leads generated, only 10 are being followed up on.  That means that the money you spent to generate the leads was for only 10% of the leads generated.  Those are very expensive leads.  You could buy leads and come out better in most cases.  What is even worse is the level of conversion.  Out of every 100 leads generated, less than 2% are being converted to closed business.  What is wrong with this picture??  It is no wonder that we have sales associates grumbling about bad leads.  Obviously they’ve not been taught how to convert them.   In fact most agents don’t know the difference between an online lead, or an offline lead, nor the different approaches on how to properly convert the two. 

We spend millions of dollars in online lead generation technology for very dismal results.   Lead generation is important, and lead conversion is great — but the true measure of success is found within the middle of the two: lead management.   What does your lead management strategy look like?  How are holding your organization accountable to proper conversion standards?  Do you offer certification or training in this regard.  What systems have you invested in to make sure that you organization can convert 10, 15, or even 20% of it’s incoming leads to closed business?

There is a strategy that is working for companies all across North America.  It only takes a shift in focus and your mindset to make it all work.  Then add great lead management technology and training support into the mix, and you’ll come out miles ahead of your competition.  Want to know more?  That’s another article — or a phone call.

The Problem with Lead Generation

The blog-post featured below is from the RSS Feed at:



Recent studies indicate that continued exposure to RSS Feeds diminish the number of neurons floating around in your brain. Therefore, to experience higher levels of joy, pleasure and intelligence -- we recommend clicking on the link to read the post in its native environment. Click below to go to the home page.

©2010 . All Rights Reserved.

The commercial entitled “Parisian Love” is not only ingenius in its simplicity, but heart-warming and emotional as well. It is easy for the viewer to get caught up in the emotion of the video. Thus the success of the video; it draws you in and makes you feel as if you are a part of it. You might even find yourself wondering if perhaps it couldn’t be you searching on Google?

Knowing how accessible video is, I’m still amazed at how many are not utilizing video in their marketing efforts. The overwhelming hidden message in this Google video is the simplicity, ease and in-expense with which it was produced. There really is no excuse for not utilizing video in your marketing. Video is easily produced, it is cheap and the technology is readily accessible to the masses.

In fact, the Google video probably didn’t even require a camera, as the majority of the commercial utilizes screen recording technology. You could recreate the video in a matter of minutes by utilizing Tech Smith’s Camtasia Studio, Screen Toaster, or Screenr.

What’s holding you back from utilizing video? Take a look at the Google commercial and see how you could apply the same type of video to convey messages to your audience. Could you utilize screen shots of slides, pdf, or online images? How about capturing client testimonials, or descriptions of products and services? It is all easily produced. Put your creativity to work, and let me know your ideas.

Here’s the video below.

Video Marketing: Take A Cue From Google

The blog-post featured below is from the RSS Feed at:



Recent studies indicate that continued exposure to RSS Feeds diminish the number of neurons floating around in your brain. Therefore, to experience higher levels of joy, pleasure and intelligence -- we recommend clicking on the link to read the post in its native environment. Click below to go to the home page.

©2010 . All Rights Reserved.

Just as there are agents and companies who gain business in spite of themselves, there will also be agents and companies that enjoy sporadic success by spontaneously and half-heartily jumping into the social media mix.   If for no other reason, they’ll experience an increase in business because they are touching, engaging and communicating with their sphere of influence within social networks such as Facebook.   It is no secret that, in general, the real estate community does a poor job of staying in front of their past clients and customers.   Add a little Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter into their marketing mix and voila — a transaction or two!

The antithesis of this approach is having a system and process that can consistently render desired results.   The social media process is  a simple five step process that will deliver upon the expectation of  more leads, more clients, and more raving fans.  The process isn’t easy, and it certainly isn’t a magic formula or a silver bullet.  It requires thought, dedication, energy and time.

Here are the five steps of the social media process:

1.  Develop Content

2.  Drive Traffic

3.  Engage Consumers

4.  Create Clients

5.  Cultivate Raving Fans

Each of these five steps contain several sub-steps of social media activities.  For instance, for the purposes of this article, let’s take step number one:  develop content.   In order to develop content you first need to create a central destination for all the content — a container for your words of wisdom, customer advice, REALTOR insights and special reports.   There is no better content management system than Wordpress. 

A Wordpress blog will become the center of your social media universe.  All your actions, feeds, posts, tweets, white papers, articles, etc., will orbit and gravitate to and from your Wordpress blog.   However good content will be required to engage consumers.   You don’t want to market  and drive traffic to a destination that has no value or content.  

Consider all the great advice, knowledge, expertise, and  insider secrets that reside between your two ears.  You probably have years of information that needs to come out in the form of 200 to 300 word articles, how-to’s, advices, etc.   You might even have some nightmare transactional experiences that could serve as great “case-studies” to educate potential clients on what not to do.  Likewise, there’s no doubt that you’ve also solved problems, navigated the deal-killing antics of others, and negotiated brilliantly.  All these can serve to communicate your value and worth as a great agent or company.

Grab a notepad and pen.  Spend a good forty minutes to an hour thinking through Buyer, Seller and Transactional problems.  Write down topics, titles and or bullet points that solve those problems.  Each of these can provide the foundation for a great resource.   To make it easier, why not segment the audience a little further:  investor, first time home-buyer, vacation home buyer, For Sale By Owner, urban, high-rise, high-end, etc.   Each of these segments have their own challenges.  Cover these in your list. 

Once you’re done with your list, begin outlining three to five points for each topic.  Before long you’ll have an exhaustive list of content.   Schedule writing and development time into your time-blocked schedule, or hire the help of a freelance writer or virtual assistant, if needed to bring your resources to life.  The completed articles can then be cut and pasted into your Wordpress article platform.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking on the social media process to a wonderful company in Upstate New York, RealtyUSA.   Merle Whitehead, along with Mark Re, Al Picchi and others from the RealtyUSA leadership team are making sure that their organization is on the leading edge of social media by providing the tools, education and resources necessary to equip their associates to serve the needs of their clients and customers.   The slides from the presentation are below. 

Feel free to provide feedback, and/or your experiences and challenges with the exciting marketing opportunity called social media.

Social Media: Driving Dollars to Your Bottom Line!

The blog-post featured below is from the RSS Feed at:



Recent studies indicate that continued exposure to RSS Feeds diminish the number of neurons floating around in your brain. Therefore, to experience higher levels of joy, pleasure and intelligence -- we recommend clicking on the link to read the post in its native environment. Click below to go to the home page.

©2010 . All Rights Reserved.

It seems that everyone has the wrong focus: lead generation.   Every conference you go to, every tech guru that you hear is espousing the secrets of lead generation through a myriad of online vehicles.  Social media, social networking, Adwords, fan pages, targeted traffic, new P.R., and host of others.  

Here’s a couple of rules that apply to this industry problem:

1.  Before you embark on a SEO or website traffic strategy — get your content in order.  Content is king and if you don’t have great content — why waste the money on a marketing strategy!

2.  Even more important:  why buy more leads with a marketing strategy?   Why don’t you wait until you’ve mastered the lead conversion process.  If you master this process, you don’t need as many leads.

So how many leads are actually good leads?   If you listen to your agents, they will tell you that all the leads you give them are crap!  Rightly so since the overwhelming majority of agents do not know how to interact with an online lead.  We’ve never taught them the difference between an offline lead and an online lead — and why they need to be treated entirely different.   So no wonder they throw the leads back at you and complain.  After all they called the lead and asked them when they wanted to look at real estate — to which the lead replied – ”I’m just looking!  Leave me alone!”    Have you ever considered requiring training and certification for your agents BEFORE they can receive their first lead?

If you want to take you lead management strategy to the next level, don’t even distribute raw internet leads to your associates.  Savvy firms have realized that this is the equivilent to flushing $100 bills down the toilet.    Out of 100 raw internet leads, most companies are lucky to convert one or two leads to paid business.   Sadly, the odds are stacked against the company since only 50 of the 100 leads are even responded to by their agents.   Right off the top, 50% of the leads that you’ve paid dearly for with marketing dollars and expertise is wasted!   Most companies are only working with 10% of the entire lead pool.  Why?  Because most agents abandon 80% of the remaining 50 percent they responded to.  

The firms that experience the highest conversion rates scrub and incubate leads prior to distributing to their associates.  Then after distributing the leads, hold the associate to a high standard of accountability.   Perhaps it is time to re-think your lead distribution and management strategy? 

At a recent conference hosted by Century 21 Real Estate, LLC., I had the pleasure of presenting many of these facts to their top leadership from across North America.   I’ve included the slides from my presentation for your review below.   After viewing the slides, let me know how your company is winning the lead conversion battle.

Lead Management: Cash Cow or Mad Cow?

The blog-post featured below is from the RSS Feed at:



Recent studies indicate that continued exposure to RSS Feeds diminish the number of neurons floating around in your brain. Therefore, to experience higher levels of joy, pleasure and intelligence -- we recommend clicking on the link to read the post in its native environment. Click below to go to the home page.

©2010 . All Rights Reserved.

Not only email, but social media, texting, blogging and everything else that technology has brought our way.   How do you keep up with it all?  When do you raise the little white flag in surrender?  Can you honestly read the first paragraph and nod your head yes?  Is technology adding to, or taking away from your income? 

Recently I spent the day with a colleague who utilizes technology and tends to stay on the forward edge of innovation.   This person was having some difficulty with their mail server and Outlook email client.  I sat down to access the problem and was greeted with the following:  4,763 emails in their inbox, 772 emails in their unread mail and about 99 folders set up to theoretically keep everything organized.    Now I realize that this is an extreme case of email overload, but I wonder how many of you might be fighting your own email battles. 

My personal goal is to keep my inbox to no more than 30 emails in it at any given time.  If I’m travelling, it might expand up to 100 or 120 emails over a 24 or 36 hour period.  However as soon as I’m able, I weed through the emails and organize my inbox back down to the manageable 20 to 30.  How do I do it?  I’m glad you asked.

When it comes to email management, here are some rules that I live by:

1.  OHIO – Only handle it once.    Don’t let an email linger in your inbox.  Either act upon it, delete it or archive it.   You can act upon it by replying, forwarding or creating an action item.   After you dealt with the email, you can delete it or file it away in organizational email folders.  These folders can be labeled by business, client, vendor, associate, legal, personal, newsletters, etc.

2.  Set up rules and email folders to automatically file away frequent emails such as newsletters, jokes, friends, family and business emails.  Once the new email arrives, the rules will filter through your inbox and automatically move the email to the folder that you’ve assigned it to.   Set up folders with names such as:  new ideas, follow-up, planning, phone calls, to-do, delegate, etc.

3.  Use the UNREAD email inbox instead of your email inbox.   Once you begin filing away emails through filters and rules; you won’t have as many emails in your inbox, but you also won’t be aware of emails unless you change your email checking habits.  Instead of consulting your inbox folder every few moments, you’ll have to get used to clicking on the unread mail folder.  

4.  Invest in a good junk mail filter, not an off the shelve version, but a server based solution such as Barracuda or Postini.   You’ll notice the difference right away.  There’s not a system that I’m aware of that will get rid of every junk email, with the exception of the verfication systems that send an email back to the sender to verify their contact information such as SpamArrest.   Last month I was doing some server maintenance and found over 6,000 spam emails in my Barracuda filter system.   I’m convinced that the extra investment pays off.

5.  Stop being a slobbering dog.   Of course I’m talking about Pavlov’s dog.  We are so trained to listen for the chime of an incoming email.  Every few moments, we inadvertently stop what we are doing to see who just emailed us.  After all, we wouldn’t want to miss out on that lottery notice, or a new offer for some hair growth supplement.   Turn this notification off in your Outlook by clicking on Tools > Options > Preferences > Email Options > Advanced Options and unclick “play a sound when new mail arrives.”    Increase your productivity by silencing the notification.

During a four hour visit with my colleague we  were able to  clean up Outlook and their inbox.   Only 42 emails remained in the inbox.  Success at last.  What’s your story?  How are you taming the inbox tiger? 

Email Management: 5 Rules to Taming Your Inbox

The blog-post featured below is from the RSS Feed at:



Recent studies indicate that continued exposure to RSS Feeds diminish the number of neurons floating around in your brain. Therefore, to experience higher levels of joy, pleasure and intelligence -- we recommend clicking on the link to read the post in its native environment. Click below to go to the home page.

©2010 . All Rights Reserved.

Nationally recognized real estate consultant shares knowledge with Realtors

By Times Record News Staff , Originally Published on Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Social Networking Can Add Profits

The blog-post featured below is from the RSS Feed at:



Recent studies indicate that continued exposure to RSS Feeds diminish the number of neurons floating around in your brain. Therefore, to experience higher levels of joy, pleasure and intelligence -- we recommend clicking on the link to read the post in its native environment. Click below to go to the home page.

©2010 . All Rights Reserved.

Here are the event details:

Technology Management: Develop & Deploy an Effective Strategy for Your Office

Aug 3–4 | 2 days | 3 CRB Credits

Join Me in the Windy City!

The blog-post featured below is from the RSS Feed at:



Recent studies indicate that continued exposure to RSS Feeds diminish the number of neurons floating around in your brain. Therefore, to experience higher levels of joy, pleasure and intelligence -- we recommend clicking on the link to read the post in its native environment. Click below to go to the home page.

©2010 . All Rights Reserved.

The second of two new shows in which top e-commerce experts examine some of the more common mistakes that are made online, and what you can do right now to resolve them.

This second show features expert advice from Sascha Lueken, Search Engine Expert, second-elements marketing, Stefan Tornquist, Research Director at Marketing Sherpa, Rick Wilson, Executive Vice-President at MivaMerchant, Bryan Eisenberg, Cofounder of Future Now, and Christian Anthony, General Sales Manager at ShopFactory.

Start getting the sales that your site deserves – watch this show by clicking on the play button on the video player directly above this paragraph.
If you didn’t see the first episode in the series, you can see it here. 

Stop Being A Moron! Webmaster Mistakes – Part II

The blog-post featured below is from the RSS Feed at:



Recent studies indicate that continued exposure to RSS Feeds diminish the number of neurons floating around in your brain. Therefore, to experience higher levels of joy, pleasure and intelligence -- we recommend clicking on the link to read the post in its native environment. Click below to go to the home page.

©2010 . All Rights Reserved.

What is TDS? The facts and causes are still being speculated by Silicon Valley consultants. The factors and variables involved with each reported case are countless and unique to the culture or mindset of those afflicted. Previous speculation of its root causes such as inherited DNA traits or restroom hygiene have been eliminated recently in the light of new findings.

Recent reports suggest that this is a lifestyle or behaviorial syndrome. It appears that the more dependent one is on technology – the greater the risk of contracting the syndrome. The reports further suggest that once contracted, the amount of complications mirror the length of time that an organization or individual has been dependent on technology to carry out common functions.

Symptoms of the syndrome include exaggerated gesticulation, manic swings in emotions, increased stress levels, violent outburst or strikes to networked peripherals. The final stages of the syndrome are signaled by extreme dips in productivity and an incoherent mumbling combined with a lifeless stare.

In an effort to educate our readers, we’ve developed this video to provide an example of TDS’s alarming impact

A special thanks to www.becel.ca for providing the video. 

How can you be prepared? Experts suggest having a back-up plan as the first line of defense. Every organization and individual should create a list of well defined procedures that can be implemented should TDS strike. Depending upon the situation, the procedures could outline the steps needed to return to the use of a previous technology, and could include the steps for being cross-trained on multiple methods and technologies for all work-flow. Additionally, having a technology hotline or emergency response mechanism in place can help to speed recovery.

New findings are suggesting that there might be a mutant strand of DNS already at work. Preliminary evidence is pointing to a complete incompacitation that takes place not as a result of dependency, but as a result of being overwhelmend by the thought of implementing technology into one’s daily behaviors or lifestyle.

Please stay tuned to this blog as new findings will be shared as they make their way to our press-room. In the meantime we have lauched a grass-roots effort to collect eyewitness reports of TDS and its effects. If you or someone you know suffers from this debilitating syndrome, please forward your comments and reports on to us.

TDS: Technology Dependency Syndrome

The blog-post featured below is from the RSS Feed at:



Recent studies indicate that continued exposure to RSS Feeds diminish the number of neurons floating around in your brain. Therefore, to experience higher levels of joy, pleasure and intelligence -- we recommend clicking on the link to read the post in its native environment. Click below to go to the home page.

©2010 . All Rights Reserved.

This is the first of two new CEO TV shows in which top e-commerce experts examine some of the more common mistakes that are made online, how to avoid making them and, if you already have, what you can do right now to resolve them.

This first show features expert advice from Bryan Eisenberg, Cofounder of Future Now, and David Meerman Scott, best-selling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR, as they explain how to build and run a highly effective e-commerce site that makes every conversion it can.

Start getting the sales that your site deserves – watch this show now by clicking on the play button located on the video player directly above this article!  You can access additional CEO TV shows by navigating to CEO TV at the top of this page or by clicking here.

Stop Being a Moron! Webmasters Keep Making the Same Old Mistakes

The blog-post featured below is from the RSS Feed at:



Recent studies indicate that continued exposure to RSS Feeds diminish the number of neurons floating around in your brain. Therefore, to experience higher levels of joy, pleasure and intelligence -- we recommend clicking on the link to read the post in its native environment. Click below to go to the home page.

©2010 . All Rights Reserved.