Years back, I was analyzing the sales pipeline of the top performer on my sales team. I was shocked when I discovered that this agent only had 48 leads in his pipeline whereas every other agent on my team had more than 200 leads in their respective pipelines. When I called him into my office and asked him what was going on he replied “I can’t work more than 50 leads at a time…actually, I do not know if I can even work more than 30 leads at a time. I have 10 Hot leads right now and I can’t even keep up with them. Who can really work more than 10 hot buyers? I mean, if they are ‘hot’ it means they are looking to do something right now…I’m with them multiple days a week until we find them the right home?!”
This was a “light bulb” moment for me. My top performer was right. In our industry most believe that the more leads they have in their pipeline the better. But what I’ve discovered, it’s the opposite that is true. The fewer leads you maintain, the more success you’ll have as you can dedicate more time – the appropriate amount of time – to each lead. Follow up and lead incubation improves and, as a result, you focus more effort on converting your best leads to appointments and closings instead of chasing an abundance of leads.
From that day forward, we began limiting all agents to a maximum of 100 leads in their sales pipelines. This became known as the “Law of 100”. Lead conversion immediately increased, stronger appointments were held, and we began closing more transactions.
I’ve taught this concept to hundreds of high performing teams over the years and nearly all have reported increased success. Most team owners are actually pretty hesitant at first to put this law into practice. What’s the primary reason I’ve found for this reluctance? I believe it is the “abundance of leads placebo effect” – this belief that more leads (on your dashboard) means more deals to be had, and less leads equals fewer opportunities. But we’ve found that’s just not accurate. If you have quality leads, and you can focus more time per lead, opportunities increase.
If you are hesitant to take my word for this then I challenge you to put a toe in the water and test this law. Ask an agent on your team to focus exclusively on their top 50 leads and neglect the other X number of leads that are presently in their pipeline (and likely already sitting stale). My bet is that your agent will report higher contact rates and appointment totals in just a matter of weeks if not days.
Now, once you narrow the focus to a select group of warmer leads on your dashboard, what do you do with all of the other leads that did not make the cut? That’s when you start to leverage the hopper (or pond) approach…and that will be covered in a future blog!