Knowing Your Worth and Auditing Your Lead Funnel

A few weeks ago, Gabe Cordova, GM at MaverickRE, and Will Gray from Follow-Up Boss hosted a webinar called "Plugging the Leaks in Your Lead Funnel." Between Gabe's over 20 years managing a database of 1.9 million contacts and Will's CRM expertise, they provided a wealth of information on common lead conversion problems.

Most teams are simply unaware of these types of problems, or they see them but fail to recognize that they're looking at an actual problem.

"Everything we're discussing today is not theory," Gabe began. "It's really what we're doing. Best practices to give you guys some tools to really help get better conversion and more specifically plug the leaks."

The value of your time

Before moving into any of the tactical aspects, Gabe introduced a practice I believe many more teams should implement: determining what their time is truly worth. Not what they hope it will be, or what they may be telling themselves at 2 am when they are questioning their career choice, but what the actual numbers say.

The worksheet he shared outlines a very straightforward calculation.

Buy side:

1. Setting a solid appointment takes approximately 5 hours on average.

2. Showing homes takes an additional 10 hours.

3. Contract negotiations take approximately 3 hours.

4. Escrow takes an additional 3 hours.

5. Miscellaneous work takes an additional 2 hours.

Total time spent: 23 hours.

With an average sale price of $425,000 and a 2.5% commission at a 50/50 split, agents end up earning $212 per hour on company-generated leads and $318 per hour on sphere leads.

"I would ask them where else they have worked that they earned $200 an hour," Gabe stated. Many agents forget this when they are plowing through their daily task lists.

Conducting a lead funnel audit

Now that we know what our time is worth, the next question is where our time is actually going. Gabe and Will went through a few audits that typically expose the issues that most teams prefer to ignore.

1. 30 day new lead audit

You create a simple filter in Follow-Up Boss.

“Created less than 30 days ago.”

And then you search for the gaping holes.

"One of the biggest things I like to look for is empty," Gabe said. By empty, he meant leads with no last communication. "What happened to this person? Is something filtering in a particular way that it isn't reaching him?"

In their case study, they discovered 235 leads that had empty last communication fields. That is not a minor problem.

That is a routing or assignment issue that needs to be addressed immediately.

Metrics you want to track:

1. Speed to lead (the amount of time it takes to contact a lead)

2. Number of touches within the first 10 days of contact

3. Stage accuracy

4. Last communication date

Speed to lead is obviously important. However, are the agents following the initial cadence or just not?

Are the leads properly categorized or is everything being thrown into whatever bucket? Last communication date helps identify the leads that fall through the cracks.

"A lot of times you guys need to just pull up and see whether you are an agent doing this or you are a team lead, just do a quick audit," Gabe encouraged. "What has come in in the last 30 days? What has literally come in?"

That last part is more critical than people realize.

You could have a system that you believe is functioning correctly, but if you are not actively reviewing what is happening with new leads, you are only basing decisions on past experiences.

2. Stage definition problem

Another area that assumptions run rampant is the area of stage definitions. During the webinar, Gabe asked:

"If I audited your team members right now and I asked them to define the stages in the CRM, would they all have the same definition for those stages and what it means?"

Many team leaders admitted that they would not. Even though definitions for stages may exist in some form, they are rarely documented in a manner that is easily accessed, or they are documented and then forgotten.

The workbook contains a template for defining each stage in the CRM. Each stage's meaning, the anticipated follow-up cadence, what occurs when the anticipated follow-up does not occur, and when leads transition from one stage to the next.

Gabe repeatedly emphasized that:

"Simplify. Make sure your stages are complete. Use timeframes. If you are unfamiliar with this, we will cover it later in this document. Nurtures are a big garbage dump where everything dies. Use timeframes."

A dumping ground, yes, that aligns with what I've seen. You put something into nurture and it goes into witness protection.

You know it exists, in theory, but good luck finding it again when the timing is right.

3. Follow-Up Boss timeframes

The black hole that is nurture is exactly what timeframes are intended to prevent. Timeframes is a feature in Follow-Up Boss that many teams either do not utilize or do not utilize effectively.

Example: Short term nurture = 0 to 3 months or 3 to 6 months timeframe. No outbound text or call in the last 14 days.

These are your hottest nurture leads, the ones that may be closer than the labels suggest.

Example: Long term nurture = 6 to 12 months or 12+ months. No contact in the last 28 to 30 days.

They require less frequent contact, however, it still needs to be consistent.

"We work funnel backwards," Gabe said. "We work bottom of funnel down."

"I do not want to reach out to new people if I have people raising their hand. I want to talk to my hot prospects that are talking. But when I go through all of my priority alerts in the different stages, I can get to my nurturers."

This approach (bottom up) makes sense when you think about it. I'm guessing it takes a bit more discipline than most teams have available on a typical Tuesday afternoon when five new leads come in and there is that rush of "new opportunity" associated with it.

4. Speed to lead reporting

That rush of "new opportunity" is why speed to lead is tracked so relentlessly. Will took the group through how to utilize Follow-Up Boss's speed to lead reporting.

You go to the Agent Activity Reporting tab, choose "How Quickly Do We Contact Leads", filter by lead source (e.g., web leads) and sort to see actual values at the top.

"We want to get this down below five minutes," Will said. Although he added a disclaimer that it won't be perfect.

Someone calling in at 1:00 AM doesn't necessarily require a call at 1:02 AM. Good old-fashioned logic still applies.

The true benefit is identifying patterns and large disparities in speed to lead among agents. If the majority of agents average 1 to 2 days to contact leads but one agent averages 9 to 19 days to contact leads, that is where coaching needs to begin.

At the very least, a discussion about what is occurring in their workflow.

Going further: Call quality metrics

Those coaching discussions become much more defined when you examine call quality rather than just speed. Gabe revealed that his team utilizes MaverickRE to further evaluate call quality.

The focus shifts from generating more leads to evaluating what is occurring through these metrics and providing coaching based upon it to improve conversion.

MaverickRE's AI call scoring evaluates overall call scores, whether agents requested appointments, rapport-building percentages, location/timeline capture rates and objection-handling effectiveness.

One example that really stood out to me (and stuck with me), Gabe's team discovered they were only requesting appointments 10% of the time. After focusing solely on this metric, they increased the request for appointments to nearly 20%.

"When you start generating more appointments and more deals because you are altering what you are asking for, guys, that is a game-changer in your business," Gabe said.

Ten percent. One in ten calls.

That is the type of number that causes you to ponder other areas of your process that seem perfectly obvious once someone highlights it.

This simple thing changes the game

For Gabe's team, the thing they were missing was almost comically simple.

"We started scheduling a whole lot more appointments because we simply started learning how to ask for the appointment. It may sound elementary. Sometimes the simplest items we alter in our business, the items we highlight and bring attention to, will result in a significant change in our results."

An appointment does not necessarily have to involve showing homes. It could be a phone consultation regarding preparation to purchase, a buyer guide walk-through or a market update call for potential buyers.

Any scheduled conversation qualifies. The purpose is to schedule a meeting where you both commit to a specific time to converse.

Gabe mentioned that it may seem elementary, and I think that is precisely why it is easy to overlook. You assume you are already asking for appointments because of course you are, right?

Except the data indicates otherwise. Or at least, not as frequently as you might assume.

Takeaways from Part 1:

The theme throughout (assumptions vs. what the data shows) is evident in everything Gabe and Will discussed.

1. You need to determine your worth. Understanding your hourly value will allow you to determine where to focus your time.

2. Regular audits matter. Monthly reviews of leads in the pipeline will help you identify routing issues before they become larger issues.

3. Defining stages for your CRM needs to be aligned. Create and document the definitions for all stages of your CRM and communicate them to the entire team. In reality, most teams cannot even agree on what "nurture" is.

4. Timeframes prevent nurture from turning into a black hole.

5. Speed to lead is monitored continuously. Don't stop there.

6. Call quality is more important than how fast you contact the lead. The content of those communications determines the results.

7. Request appointments. The most fundamental habit that affects conversion more than people realize.

What's next?

Conversion doesn't cease once you obtain that appointment on the calendar. Part 2 explores what Gabe called the most overlooked metric in the industry: appointment management.

His top-producing team (ranked #4 nationally) had a 97.8% rate of appointments with no results prior to beginning to address this leak. Almost every single appointment fell into some form of void where nothing was documented in regard to what occurred.

"Like the rest of the industry, we spend an enormous amount of time focusing on speed to lead and 10 days of anguish and all that," Gabe said. "And what I am observing, and this was us as well, we don't do a very good job managing appointments, inspecting appointments."

That 97.8% number is probably lingering at the back of many people's minds right now wondering what their own number would be.

Part 2 addresses that.

👉 Stop Chasing. Start Converting.