Quick Tip: The OVO Follow Up System

Quick notes on professional persistence. For many agents when we are going to do follow up, we feel uncomfortable with it. We feel like we're going to be annoying with clients and or potential clients. So we don't make the calls, we don't send the email, we don't send a text. And what happens is we lose those opportunities to our competitors. Here's the reality - 80% of all sales are made after the fifth contact or follow up, yet, most salespeople will give up after the first or second. In fact, 50% of all real estate leads are never followed up on!

We don't want to fall into that gap trap, right? We want to be someone that is following up consistently, but we need to think about it in a different way. Professional persistence is different than just being annoying. One personal example for me personally is Matt. Matt had been working on me for months and months and months to sell me his product. I would get a weekly call, a text or an email from him and about 80% of the time, I didn't respond to him. Sometimes I would engage. But this week I finally pulled the trigger and set up a meeting where he went through his entire sales presentation and I pulled the trigger and bought what he was selling. That would not have happened without religious followup. By the way I don't look at it as him being annoying. You wouldn't either. Why? We don't look at salespeople and think of them as bad people or terrible people. We just look at them as doing their job when they're following up. And it actually can be very impressive.

But there is a right way and a wrong way. When you are doing follow up you want to offer value. I call this your OVO, you are offering value of some kind and then you're offering to help the client. For instance, if I'm talking to a buyer, I might say:

Hey a new listing came on the market this morning I thought you might finding interesting. If you want me to I can send you all the comps around the listing before you take any time to go look at it to see what other things are selling for. If you like what you see I would love to go out and show you the house.

(Offer, Value, Offer)

If you are talking to a seller the conversation might be:

Hey, I'm just thinking about you because I'm doing an open house nearby. Also there's been a couple of sales in the neighborhood that I can shoot over to you that may affect appraisals in the area. Also we have a couple of new marketing pieces that we just rolled our that I would love to share with you that are really helping sellers get top dollar.

(Offer, Value, Offer)

Be sure to mix up your styles of communication. Not just calls, not just texts, not just emails, but a whole mix of styles. Every time you meet somebody new plug them into your follow up system and start working on your OVO!