Winning Real Estate Lead Management and Follow-Up Plan

In this video guide, John Gluch, the founder of the real estate team Gluch Group, shows how to manage real estate leads.

In the video, the expert demonstrates the whole real estate lead management process flow in his CRM and explains the importance of each step.

Watch the video to learn how to easily manage real estate leads now!

What I’m going to do today is dive in and show you exactly how we implement all of the lead follow-up systems we have, how we track and manage it.

It’s really not that complicated. It looks a little complicated here, while just getting started, but I’ll make it really, really simple so that you could start doing this in your business, whether you are just starting out or you’ve done lots and lots of deals.

My name is John Gluch. I’m the team leader of the Gluch Group, and we have real estate teams in a couple different places. Our big teams are in San Diego and Phoenix.

As I mentioned, we have sold thousands of homes. We sell hundreds of homes a year, and this is the platform we do it on.

I’m creating this video exclusively for the Real Estate Bees so that we can share this information and make sure that everybody knows how to do this, and hopefully will help you get successful a lot quicker than I did.

So, let me dive in here.

Here is Follow Up Boss, a real estate CRM for lead management. Anyone can get it. It’s relatively affordable and really, really simple to get going. I’m just going to walk you step-by-step through the system and how we get started.

The first thing we do when a new lead comes in, we add it to the system. Everybody goes in the system. Every single person. And the thing that makes that easy is that Follow Up Boss is also your phone.

This is what really sets it apart from lots of other systems. I am not getting any money for recommending this. I’m not affiliated with them in any way. It just really is what I use.

What’s great is it’s a dialer. Meaning you call people with Follow Up Boss, and you text people with Follow Up Boss. This is the system you’re going to use to make all those calls and text messages.

We have a different phone number for everything Follow Up Boss lets us do. We can track when someone called from Google, from Yelp, etc.

You may choose just to have one phone number — that’s probably what most people do.

But you can see I’ve got all these phone numbers on the left, and what’s great is when a phone call comes in, the phone number shows up, and I can just save that person as a contact in Follow Up Boss.

It makes it easy and automatic. We bring on lots of real estate agents on the team all the time, and they get used to this very quickly. It just becomes their business phone number.

The first thing our agents do when they come over is they reach out to all their past clients, their friends and their family, their sphere.

They text them on their new Follow Up Boss business phone number that they get, which is just included as part of the package.

They say, “Hey Uncle Frank, this is Joey, and this is my new business number. I just joined a real estate team, and I’m excited about it. Moving forward, this is the number I’ll be using to communicate in terms of business. And so if you would save this for me, that would be great.”

It’s such a great intro and a great way to let people know that you are a professional, you have a professional phone number, just like any professional might.

That will help you to really make it a habit to put everybody you communicate with into the system.

Getting them in is kind of the easy part. Then once you get them all in and saved, now what you want to do is categorize them.

You could make this really complicated if you wanted to, but we have a really simple way we do this. So, let me walk you through the People tab here.

As a real estate sales lead management system, Follow Up Boss does all kinds of cool stuff. I’m just going to go through the simple stuff, the ways that we track and create people.

Here’s a contact, and when you get a new person that you enter, you could just do it really easily here. You would put their phone number in there and save them.

So, this is your person, and here are the rules we live by on my team. Every new person needs to be put in a stage. Stages are how we determine where people are at.

It’s sort of a big picture category of what kind of human being this is. And there are really not that many things we have to deal with.

It can be an engaged lead. We are having a conversation with them, they want to buy or sell a home potentially, and they are engaged or they are signed active.

The next stage — we’ve got them signed up, and they’re ready to go. They want to go buy or sell a home. Then a pending, of course, then after the pending they become a sphere or past client…

There may be somebody who we want to communicate with on an ongoing basis — sphere. Let’s say it’s a friend from the gym you got to know or whatever, and they are not looking to buy or sell a home, but they are in your sphere now, they are in your world.

So, you could just kind of skip all these and go straight to Sphere. If they are not actually a lead when you meet them or when you add them, like your Christmas card list, you would put all those people in a Sphere.

Then we’ve got Nurture Engaged. These are people who are a little longer in the process.

We’ve got Cold Leads — these are people who are ghosting us, who don’t want to talk to us anymore.

And then we have the Brokerage that allows us to recruit other agents, and when we do that, we get paid for it. That’s a category of people — agents we’re recruiting and trying to bring over to the brokerage.

Then we get people who are already at our real estate brokerage, eXp Realty, and my little group is called the Abundant Agents. These are people who are effectively in the group already.

Then we’ve got Agents I’m NOT recruiting. You know, you’re going to run across lots of people, and some of them you don’t really care for, right? If that’s the case, you put them here.

And then, Non-Agent No Follow-Up. These are vendors like lenders, mortgage brokers, and stuff like that — they are not in your sphere. They are not a lead, they are just people you’ve got to do business with.

Then these three — Lead, Trash, and Closed — are just garbage, you don’t use these.

We just can’t get rid of these, because Follow Up Boss makes us keep all three of those and so they are in there.

Let’s figure out where this person goes. Let’s say this person is an engaged lead. We’re going to save that, and we built some little fancy automation that tags people automatically over here.

I’m going to skip over that for now.

Now, how to follow up on real estate leads? What we do want to do, always, is add a tag to each lead in your real estate lead follow up system.

This is the second non-negotiable on our real estate agent team. You’ve got to put them in a stage, and then you’ve got to tag them. And the tags that you have to put are a cadence.

How often do you want to call this person to follow up with them? New hot leads would be daily, right? Like let’s get up those people every single day.

Then we’ve got weekly and then we’ve got monthly and quarterly? So, pretty simple.

Let’s put this person in here as Daily. Now, we’re done. That’s it. Pretty simple, right? What this allows us to do now is have some kind of organized system that tells us where these people are at in the pipeline and how often we should follow up with them.

So, that’s how we enter somebody new. In terms of who they get assigned to on my team, our philosophy has always been that the best seller agents get the best leads.

I don’t care how long you’ve been here — if you have the best realtor skills and you’re converting at a high level, you get the best leads. It’s really that simple.

The second piece, of course, is capacity. If people are busy, they are busy. And so my inside sales guys, the people who are generating these contacts and answering the phone, basically the guys who are on the phone, they have an order of who to assign leads to.

Let me walk you through how we actually follow up with people every day.

The people tab up here on the left is kind of the magic of Follow Up Boss as a real estate broker tool. If you’re a team leader, you can pick whoever you want in here.

I’m just going to pick my people. What this is going to do is, because I’m the team leader, I see all the people in the database here, these numbers. But if you are just an individual, you’re just going to see your numbers.

And what these are is our call lists, like who we should call today. It makes it really, really obvious and easy to know who to call. My real estate agent goal, or the one of the people on my team, is to get these inboxes.

And these are custom lists that I created to get these to zero. These are people who remember how I just said you have to have a stage and you have to have a tag for how often you’re calling the people.

That’s how the realtor lead follow-up system lives and breathes.

Oh, I did forget to mention, one of the cadences is for how often you should call people it’s never — a no follow-up tag.

So, that would be somebody who is just the vendor you don’t need to call, but you need them saved in your phone.

You’re not going to call them very often, right? So, that would be a no follow-up person. As long as they have one of those tags, they’re not going to show up in these inboxes.

And these are called Smart Lists in Follow Up Boss language — they are custom filters that you create.

Here you can add all kinds of filters. You can sort them by name and whatever price point, anything you can think of, you can sort by.

All this is doing is telling me “here are all the people in our system who don’t have a stage.” Meaning all those stages I showed, like Lead, Sphere, Engaged Lead Sphere, etc., it doesn’t have any of those, and so these are people who need to get categorized.

You want to get this list down to zero. We just added a ton of people to the database recently so that’s why this list is so high, but these are 630 people who don’t have a stage yet.

That’s a problem, so everyone on the team should be working that down to zero.

Let me show you one of my agents. This is Garrett’s list, and you can see he is at zero. It’s exactly where it should be. He’s on top of his list, everything’s working great, right?

Next thing is the Tag Inbox. These would be people who don’t have a follow-up tag, meaning it doesn’t say daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or no follow up.

This is kind of where you start to be sure you didn’t miss anyone. This is the catchall and making sure everyone is actually in the system where they should be. As long as these two things are at zero, you’re good.

Every day when you log into Follow Up Boss, your job is to work left to right and get these lists down to zero.

The way you create these lists is really simple. You go to all people and you create whatever filter you want.

I’ve only wanted people who are a certain source, right? So, I only wanted it to include people who were Google local service people.

It’s only going to show those people, and then you can save this list. You can go in here and create a name and save it with everybody on your team or it could be just for you.

I’m not going to go into all that in detail. The main thing is I’ve created these lists and shared them with my team to help them stay organized.

As I mentioned, there are the two inboxes, but now it’s kind of what you would expect it to be. It’s the people who you are supposed to be called every day, that’s who you would call next.

In theory, those are going to be your most important people. You are going to work your way through that list, and then you are going to get to your weekly people, and then monthly.

What’s cool is that this realtor CRM automatically pulls people off that list when you talk to them.

If you create the filters this way, what Follow Up Boss can do is it can only show you people who are tagged daily that you haven’t talked to today, because you sync your email and it is in your phone.

It knows if you’ve called, texted, or emailed that person, because it’s watching, it’s connected. All you have to do is pop in this person’s contact info and send them an email, send them a text message, call them — any one of these activities.

You can also manually just log that you talked to that person today, and it will pull them off the list.

So, here’s his quarterly list where an agent has 55 people to catch up with. And what’s great is as you go through these people, you can call them, email them, text them, etc.

Then you just click the next button, and it’s going to go to the next person. And the same thing — you call, text, email.

You can also create templates. There can be automatic templates with various languages that we use as a team to check in with people, to follow up, to invite them to an event — that kind of thing.

Its real estate email marketing software allows you to send mass blasts, etc. It’s really got a cool powerful tool.

But the magic is, and really what I’m trying to communicate in this video is, to get everybody in your database.

That’s step one. Create a system where everybody is in there, and I don’t know a better way to do that than in your phone. That kind of forces you to put everyone in there.

The second thing is to create some kind of system. I like the system where you really only have to track two things:

1. What stage is this person in? Like where do they live in my ecosphere?
2. How often should I be calling them?

And that’s just a gut call. You can always change it. So, somebody, when you’re calling them every day, eventually, signs up, and you are checking in with them weekly — that’s really easy to do.

You just change the tags in Follow Up Boss, and they’ll start showing up.

And then I like the automation of it, automatically telling me, “Hey look, you don’t need to call this person because you called them yesterday.”

I won’t even know that’s happening. It’s just happening on the back end to be sure that I don’t screw things up.

Another cool feature of Follow Up Boss is tracking. It’s got some really cool tracking tools.

If you go to admin over here, there’s a bunch of different ways to do this, but it will keep an eye on how many calls people have had.

You can see the calls that have been made, who on the team is making the most calls, and how often they are talking to people.

You can even do leaderboards, which is cool, like who’s making the most emails, text messages, phone calls, all that stuff — a really, really great way to track people.

It also will track deals — once you get deals in escrow and that kind of thing, it will show you.

We are not using that feature right now: we have a different system that does that, but it’s really easy to do in Follow Up Boss and kind of keep an eye on things.

But you do, of course, want to track how people are moving through the pipeline and that kind of thing. So, lots of reporting.

Our main focus really is, at the end of the day, closings, right? Are you getting enough deals done?

If you’re not getting enough deals done, then how I always go to figure out how we are doing is starting back at the People tab.

Are all of your lists at zero? If you’re doing a good job following up with everyone, and that’s not working, then you probably don’t have enough people in there.

You know, some people have twenty, or thirty people — that’s not enough to get the number of deals most agents want. So let’s get that number up. Let’s increase the amount of people you have in the database.

If you have a lot of people and you’re staying in touch with them, then you’re saying something wrong. So, let’s figure out what it is.

I can look through the text messages, Follow Up Boss will let you record the calls as well so I can listen to calls and figure out what’s going on because there’s something going on in the scripting and that kind of stuff.

That’s our preferred way of tracking, and Follow Up Boss makes that all really easy.

Follow Up Boss does also have a lot of automation in here. Though not anything you could possibly dream up, it does have quite a bit of automation you can create here by using their action plans.

A little simple example we have with our system: if you add a tag that says “weekly”, and it was already at “daily”, anytime I add one of the new cadence tags, it’s going to automatically remove the old one that used to be on there. Little things like that can help.

You can also send automatic emails when clients get to certain stages. I don’t do any automated follow up. I’m a big fan of manual follow up, but you could create automated emails and that kind of thing to go out to your drip campaigns.

But I have found those to be more work than they’re worth. I like good, old-fashioned phone calls, so that’s what we focus on. It is phone, text, and actual human-to-human email.

So, great system! Again, this is not a Follow Up Boss commercial — it just is what I use, and hopefully, you can implement this in whatever system you are using as well.

If not, you can check out the system for yourself and see if you like it.

So, I hope this was a super helpful video on the lead management best practices. Feel free to reach out in the comments or I’m easy to find — John Gluch.

And I’m happy to help answer any questions you have or steer you in the right direction. All right, good luck and happy CRM lead management to you.

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About the author

John Gluch is a real estate agent with over eighteen years of experience. He is the founder of Gluch Group, a real estate team doing bisiness in Arizona, Nevada, and California. John’s team sells over 700 homes in a year and is a part of eXp Realty, one of the largest brokerages nationwide.

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