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this is Michael feling with t360 I'm the senior vice president of technology and brokerage marketing and today we are going to be talking about one of everybody in the industry's favorite topics lead generation and conversion right there's always that thing where everybody always wants to talk about more leads more leads but we all know the real where the rubber hits the road is with conversion so we have got one of the industry's experts with us today Aaron Glass from Prime Street um who's going to be talking us through and kind of pulling back the curtain a little bit on some of the things that they have learned since they've been in the space helping brokerages and agents handle hundreds of or thousands of leads um each month and some of the things that they've done so they're going to share some of that magic sauce with us today and we're also going to be talking about a paper a research study that T3 and Prime Street have undertaken together to explore this topic in a little bit more so with that said I want to introduce Aaron Glass from Prime Street Aaron tell us a little bit about yourself and your background hey thank you um yeah so I've been in the prop tech industry now for I guess uh 10 years um I was early on at Op City saw the transition to realor.com uh enjoyed the space so much I came back um so I'm now with Prim Street AI we just adopted the AI model uh in early January so we're super excited about it and we'll talk a little bit about here um and so I you know how we got started just to kind of set the scene here I guess um so Prim Street was born out of necessity um so a few years ago homes.com was owned by or was a subsidiary of the same company that we are um and they did a study and showed some data about things like contact rates um customer experience things like that as a result uh or from homes.com leads and what they saw is that that contact rates were really really low and so uh Prime Street was created not long after that and so we've stepped in to handle things like customer service U we've since separated uh with homes.com but we stepped in to handle things like customer service um and helping convert those leads down funnel as well uh now we use AI for lead engagement um to show us data about what's going on with leads uh and we're super excited to talk about it well yeah and this is of my favorite topics to talk about because um t360 obviously is kind of one of the leading consulting firms in the real estate brokerage space did a research study of couple years ago now where they interviewed 10 or surveyed 10,000 agents of what they Most Wanted from their brokerages um and it's probably no surprise to anybody that'll watch this video today or any other time that the thing they wanted most was leads um and AT3 we always have this saying that it's not when you actually cook it down um agents don't actually want leads right and we can kind of discern that by the fact that they have a hard time responding sometimes to some of these things but what they really want is business opportunities or readymade business opportunities we talk about it so and that's really where you guys have kind of filled that void um you guys help with both the generation side but really the conversion piece of getting those things kind of warmed up and ready um for an agent so um talk to me about this concept that you know broker just don't really have lead you know that's one of the things that we kind of stud studied in this most recent study that we're going to be releasing in about a few weeks time um they're actually pretty good at generating leads they do an okay job with that but what they really struggle is on the conversion piece so tell us a little bit about some of the like what's the thing that you guys have learned um as you've kind of moved into that space what um the biggest lesson you've learned that brokerages aren't doing as they kind of that prevents them from being as successful as possible well I think a big thing is just data surrounding the leads and the lead sources in general and you know I don't want to give too much of the paper away but that was something that was really telling for me you know a lot of people don't have Necessary Technology in place to handle like the the entire customer life cycle so they're buying leads because they know they need to uh but they don't necessarily know what's happening with them whether they're being contacted whether they're even converting so so I would say a big opportunity is just implementing tracking whether that be through a thirdparty source or developing uh the tracking uh technology on your own I would say that's a really big one uh another piece we see is just ongoing education um you know cultures vary so differently from brokerage to brokerage company to company um and you'd be surprised how often we hear that agents just want and need training coaching ongoing education so that's another big one as well um and technology in general not to go in a big tangent here yeah know that I mean well the let's just go back to that you got a lot there um you know when we were um working on this survey study together and we were getting the initial data back you know one of the things I always like looking for is correlations right what how can we learn how one thing impacts another thing and so we started with some real Basics when we were working on this paper and one of the questions that we asked when we got the data back was you know we asked brokerages to Define how confident they were in their ability to convert and and when they responded they kind of gave us an idea and probably no one will be surprised by the fact that um by and large most brokerages are not super confident in their ability to convert but the one thing or I guess I shouldn't say the one thing one of the things that would determine or increase their level of confidence was tracking right and it almost didn't matter what track what metrics they used they just had to use more and our study found at least three U metrics right we we found a kind of a kind of they started to group up if they were tracking three or more metrics then their confidence with their ability to convert went way way up and that's something you guys spent a lot of time studying you know ever since we had our first conversations so what are some of the most important metrics that you guys pay attention to when you're kind of thinking about conversion I think that's a great question um so and and leads are kind of hard to tell they they have such a long life cycle in most instances I think the average transaction time from a from a customer lead to a home sold is about six months I would say on average um so I you know close rate is the obvious one uh from lead created to home sold how many of those can you get and and again that's an easier one so what we look at to help us track whether or not a source is really working out for us the first one is whether or how many times we can uh refer a client to an agent so in our world we're buying Le leads interviewing them introducing them to an agent so to a brokerage perspective they would see that as how many leads can they get in contact with and start the process with uh so that's an easy one to tell kind of early on how many times can you actually get in contact with them um the second one being a little bit further down the life cycle are the actual meetings that take place so not only can you get in contact with them can you actually meet with them in person and those typically help us understand I yeah I love those and one of the things that I've uh loved since we've been working with you guys is really kind of breaking that funnel into a couple different pieces you know I think in the industry we're just beginning to explore this concept right and really breaking this all down other Industries have done this for a long time but that c that response rate right not not forget like conversion rate forget you know all those appointment rate just starting with can you get these people on the phone right after they've indicated that they're interested in in talking to somebody can you actually get a conversation so I I love that one you know we've started to refer to that one as kind of a health metric you know a funnel Health metric that Define how healthy is your pipeline and then that one that you mentioned in terms of like do they actually end end up meeting with the agent right because I think most of the time when we talk to brokerages if they can get an agent in front of a good lead the agents are usually pretty good if it's in that window of you know 60 to 90 days the agents are generally pretty good that's why they're in this profession but if you ask them to go beyond that um it gets pretty challenging for them so that kind of um kind of conversion or that lead to appointment is a good one um what what else any any other metrics that you guys pay particularly or close attention to that you would kind of suggest the brokerages well those are the big ones um especially in a business like ours where we are introducing live transferred referrals I would say those are the the key indicators uh aside from close yeah the other one that we like to kind of Coach broker just to think about is cost per acquisition right how much do they need to spend to actually get a closed transaction right and then of course what's the compan retained company dollar so you know I think if you again we met we asked people of during that this paper about 10 different metrics um I think it was about 10 right it was eight or 10 that we asked folks about you know and you got those ones at the fly you know cost per lead those kind of things response rate appointment rate and then finally cost per acquisition that's a pretty good mix of metrics to be tracking um and like you said you can do that with software or you can do it by hand I've seen brokerages do it by hand it can be take some time but it's well done um so when you guys are talking to talking to brokerages um Can how they can help themselves where do you see them generating the most Ro Roi from you know is it tell me a little bit about where you how are they're able to do that where can they where can they get the biggest bang for their Buck if they're going to start to try to improve their abilities where do you see that happen not to beat a dead horse but the tracking piece but another end of that you know technology is a is a broad scale you know um and it's it's crazy because sometimes we talk to brokers who have you know up to eight nine 10 different technology platforms that they're moving in and out of so having you know integration with technology getting it all into one place um I would say is a good one but also engagement technology you know agents are so busy Brokers are so busy you know real estate Professionals in general are really busy they make their money by being in front of people showing homes working through deals um and sometimes people fall through the cracks I you know Prime Street has a rule we update every seven days it just means we're getting in contact with somebody at least once a week and staying top of mind and I know I referenced you know about how long a lead takes to close about six months so if you think about it if you're only contacting somebody you know once a month once every other week however how long if it's not on a weekly basis they might feel fall through the cracks so having good Tech that can do that you know automatically for you is a really big one yeah so that's interesting so you know that's one of the air ways you guys really add value to your relationship with the brokerages that nurturing technology and kind of uh doing what are some of the other ways that Prime Street kind of really enhances or improves a brokers's success well customer experience you know before I speak to any broker I go to their website and I fill out a lead form and I'll do it about a day or two in in in advance before I show up to that meeting and I'm just trying to see how long does it take them to contact me what's that conversation like are they texting emailing calling or just one um and so um customer experience is a big one especially if they know your brand already so if somebody goes on your website fills out their information and they're excited to talk with you uh and they never hear from you you know uh likelihood of that introduction just goes down and you'd be surprised you know I'll fill out these forms I'll never get in contact with them and so sorry goad how often does that happen I gotta ask how often do you fill out the form and you and you don't get anything back more times than not unfortunately yeah it's amazing to me in that in our industry where we have talked about this for a while now that we still haven't been able to solve that problem right is that if if you have agents responding to your lead um more often than not those leads will still go unanswered so how how do you guys help solve that problem for brokerages well uh I mean if you think about it agents they're really good at selling uh but if you start sifting through leads and start getting beaten up uh by people unhappy that you called or you got the wrong number or whatever it is Agents start to make judgments everybody does we say we're a salesperson's best friend because we're saving people from having to make those initial judgments and find all that information out um and so to the agents the reason why we're their best friend is we're not making any judgments on those leads every single one of those is getting contacted and contacted really quickly and then yeah let me let me let me stop you there because this is something that I think is a fascinating point you know we all know the fastest way to improve lead conversion is speed the lead so tell us how fast you how fast are you guys able to respond to a lead well even on our worst day it's under 10 seconds but also the AI is fractions of yeah I mean and to me that's such an interesting stat when you guys first shared that with us you know when we go to a brokerage and if we do any type of lead conversion or lead generation kind of study your strategy on a particular brokerage we're talking minutes right we're like we're happy if we can get most leads responded to in an hour right and yet we all know that three minutes is kind of that famous sweet spot where it kind of goes up and you guys are doing it in 10 seconds so tell me a little bit about without giv away too much tell me about how you guys do it so fast well we have a big team and that's where you know that's what a lot of Brokers need help with especially even if they have an agent on duty model so if they have three four agents calling leads are coming in consistently sometimes they'll get hung up on the phone leads that come in after uh lack in response time so to us we're so big that lead comes in it's very easy for one of our isas csrs uh to be on the phone with them we also have technology that gets us there quickly but a lot of it is just Manpower we have a really big team going at it yeah and and uh so let me take us in a little bit different direction you know when we were all getting to know each other one of the things that really kind of kind of opened my eyes about what you do for brokerages is that you know most of the brokerages that we talk to or certainly most of them they have a couple of lead sources right maybe two three if they're kind of really and we saw this in our study right when people were indicating how many lead sources most of them and and I should mention in our study that we had um large LGE large brokerages 10,000 plus agents all the way down to team um teams of like 50 agents and so so we had a purposely a broad spectrum and you know you had a few lead sources in there the company website was the most popular place and some other things um but one of the things that you guys had that you know was really unique in the industry was you have insight to dozens of lead sources that are out there that different brokerages are experimenting with and kind of the conversion rates and stuff so tell me how you do of like for lack of a better word let's like lead coaching when you're working with a brokerage and they're trying to figure out where to spend their money to generate the most amount of leads how do how do you guys work with them in that um data insightful data um so you know we're not only tracking how well lead sources are performing of those three metrics that we spoke about earlier and it's a little bit more extensive than that but we organize it really well so we're not only showing you how well your lead sources are performing we're showing you how how well your agents are performing with those lead sources as well so maybe your agents perform better with uh you know leads that come from your website than they do from Facebook for example so we're breaking it down and showing you from lead creation to lead close step by step what's going on how many times we're calling it we and that's also a really insightful piece of data that we show is you know this lead Source it may take us 30 or 40 calls to get in contact with somebody that we can refer and then lead Source may only take two or three calls to get us in contact with somebody who can refer so if they're trying to really refine their spend and you know improve conversion um and what I love about conversion for bro my for broker friends that are listening this is like instant profit right youve you've already paid the generate the lead and the more conversion that you can squeeze out of those leads you're generating that's almost all pure profit right so if you can get better at that if you're trying to drive revenue or drive profitability and you're generating leads this is a great way to do it so I I think that's great they can take their spend they can use their spend more efficiently we can speed up sales Cycles um and things like that if they're working with you so let's kind of start to kind of land the plane you know we got about another five minutes or so but I want to do two things before we finish one is I want to talk about what's a lead I purposely left this to the end right because I that we we we instantly launched into kind of like talking about lead conversion and Lead things like that but there's a lot of discrepancy in the industry um especially among people selling leads um you know what is a lead so tell me how Prim Street defines a lead um and then I'm gonna offer a couple thoughts on that I I think the easiest example is somebody who actually shows intent there are lots of situations out there lots of lead aggregators out there that if you just go onto that website it's taking all your IP data and giving that to somebody as a lead but I had no idea that my information is being shared with you I have no idea what's going on so you contact me it's it's unfruitful I'm you know we shut that down very quickly and so um a lead is more than just a name number email you can get that through anybody searching through your website a lead to Prime Street AI specifically is somebody who's actually expressed intent so was it Force registration sometimes that creates leads but most of the time they're upset um things like uh backend data if if somebody did not onto a listing decide they were interested filled out their information if if those sequence of events did not happen on their own then we don't we wouldn't consider that a lead yeah and so and this is again there's other industries that have figured this out right and I think these conversations are just starting to happen in real estate what you're describing to me as a sales qualified lead right and this is something that's kind of near and dear to my heart because it's somebody who's legitimately interested they've shown intent they're like hey I want to talk to somebody um you know and then there's this whole other group of leads called marketing qualified leads um if you're if some people are familiar with HubSpot they've kind of been the ones that kind of authored some of these terms and these are people who are kind of casually interested it's probably most of the people on most brokerages websites right are like they're looking at the interior photos of houses they want to Snoop on their neighbor um maybe they're thinking about doing something way down the road um but they're really like top top funnel and I think one of the reasons that the indry struggles with conversion is they just send all of that to an agent as fast as possible right they don't differentiate between those leads and you guys have taken the approach of really kind of focusing on that batch that's that has that intent that really is interested in doing something um so I think that's a really important piece this concept of demand generation marketing qualified leads sales qualified leads and making sure that we're developing business practices that are appropriate for each those those buckets um is one of the ways to be efficient and not and not throw top of funnel leads away because they're not ready right um so you know as we kind of talk about this let's just talk a little bit about the paper um and kind of what we did and what we're getting ready to do so people can know what to expect there um one of the cool things that T3 is able to do is partner with industry thought leaders like Prime street that are really trying to understand our space and understand what it means um to be in the lead generation and conversion business um so we surveyed uh 50 brokerages out of the t360 mega 1000 um of different sizes different um regions of the US different business models and ask them to answer a 20 question survey for us um with some pretty pretty deep information that then we could begin to explore kind of what's happening in in in um in the industry right now as in this space and so Prim street is then sitting down with us and kind of putting their eyes on that data helping us to analyze it so in a few weeks time we're going to going to be releasing a report um from the two of us kind of that uh T3 is in the process of uh writing right now and and sharing some of that Insight so where can they get that eron when that paper's finished where can where are they going to be able to get that uh oh I hope on Prim street. a so yeah absolutely we're going to make that available in a couple of different places you'll be able to get that from t36 but for sure um Prim street. so if you're interested in getting that information reach out to one of us and we'll make sure that you can get access to that watch for more information coming out on this soon we're going to be probably doing another call with the team is prime Street and talking about some of the insights that we're beginning to see in that data um so Erin I want to thank you for jumping on here with us today we've really enjoyed kind of working with prime Street and getting to know you guys and um having you guys really help us to approach the industry from a thoughtful perspective you know t3's objective is to enable intelligent change at I see you guys are like you know right at the tip of the spear on that not just kind of using kind of things that we think might be your anecdotal evidence but really digging in so thanks Erin thank everybody at Prim Street for t360 we're glad to be partners with you guys and we look forward to doing some more great work soon wouldn't be here without you guys so we we appreciate you guys as well T3 thanks thanks