Five tips to build leads

Gaining new prospects requires creativity, persistence, and confidence. Think you need a boost in a few of these areas? Here are five tips you can use today to get the results you want tomorrow.

Create a system. Having a system in place to manage leads can boost sales up to 50 percent in a year. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Audit how you handle leads to find and document problems and how they impact your bottom line.
2. Develop and document the best solutions for each problem.
3. Implement the solutions you expect will give the best potential impact first, and then measure the effectiveness of all changes.
4. Where possible, automate the process.

Nurture your leads. It isn’t enough to simply find them and call them once or twice. As with any relationship, you’ve got to work if you want to see results. This means using multiple communication channels, not just e-mail, and personalizing content of messages whenever possible.

Be patient. According to some estimates, most sales are made from the fourth to the twelfth month of contact. For agents, this means not getting discouraged or, worse, trying to rush the client into a decision. Pushing too hard can backfire in the long term.