How to Use the Focus 40 Tracker for Your Realtor Referral Partners
Would you like a list of 40 rockstar realtors who are going to send you consistent referrals all year long? All it takes is 3 Excel spreadsheets and 12 weeks of hard (but fun) work.
How does that sound? Pretty cool, right?
In my last post, I shared how my friend Kristen Simpson and I were chatting about warming up our realtor call list. Kristen talks to loan officers all day, doing strategy calls, finding out where they are in their business and what scripts and strategies they need to get them to the next step. One of the strategies she uses is something we call the Focus 40 Tracker.
If you haven’t read the previous post, go ahead and do that now. It explains the list of 30 qualified real estate agents, where you can find those agents, and how to call them using the Thor’s Hammer script to set up coffee appointments.
You’re going to call each of those realtors for 12 weeks in a row—or until you get that coffee/Zoom meeting.
Keeping Track is Everything
It really isn’t difficult to keep track of all of this, but you have to be structured and consistent. We use three Excel spreadsheets.
- Pre-coffee
- Post-coffee follow-up
- Focus 40
When we first start out, we have 30 realtors on our pre-coffee spreadsheet. We’re going to call them once a week for 12 weeks, asking for a coffee or Zoom meeting. Sometimes you’ll get a yes the first week, and sometimes it takes a while. If they don’t say yes after 12 weeks, take them off the list.
As soon as we meet one of those realtors for coffee, we move them to the second spreadsheet—post-coffee follow-up. We call this our realtor campaign tracker. You’re going to call them once a week for 12 weeks, asking for business. We have scripts you can use for this to make it simple and easy.
On this 12-week post-coffee spreadsheet, we take notes and keep track of what we did to encourage/motivate these referral partners. Did we send an agent mastermind link? A gift? Write a Facebook review? There are a whole bunch of different things you can do to move things along. The money is in the follow-up. Kristen says 80% of sales come between the 5th and 12th interaction.
Our end game is spreadsheet #3—a list of 40 realtor partners who are consistently giving us business at least once a quarter. We call this our Focus 40. Once a realtor from the post-coffee list sends me a deal that closes, they go on the Focus 40 list. But this isn’t permanent. We track this too, because to stay on the list, they need to be sending me one every quarter. Otherwise, they’re going back on list #2.
So there are a lot of moving pieces here. The key is just having a central point to keep track of it all. You’re going to have people coming off and on different lists at different points. Once you move someone to the post-coffee list, you need to add someone to your pre-coffee list. You always want a full list of 30.
The idea is to have 13 conversations and book 5-10 coffee appointments a week.
What Do I Talk About at These Coffee Meetings?
Starting a conversation with someone you don’t know can be awkward. We use the acronym FROG which stands for family, recreation, occupation, and goals. These are some easy things to ask about, because people love talking about them. Kristen actually starts with occupation, because she says there’s always a story behind it, a life event that got them into real estate, and now they’re very successful at it.
Just ask a question and listen for an answer. How did you get into the real estate business? I’d love to hear your story. If it segues into recreation, cool. Go there. If it segues into family and kids, awesome. Go there.
Kristen says there’s nothing like a face-to-face meeting, but ever since Covid hit, we’re all getting used to Zoom calls, so those are just as effective. And it takes the commute out of it, which is nice when gas prices are really high. Just do what’s best for the realtor. Feel it out with each person. You want to feel like you’re really connecting. You want to be able to see their face and body language.
The Loan Officer Breakfast Club™ and the Loan Officer Deal Desk on Facebook are huge resources for pure brainstorming, if you want to check those out. People really want to help each other. It’s invaluable.
You Really Don’t Need Everyone to Say Yes
I’m going to share something that might surprise you. My personal conversion rate is 16%. Out of all the realtors I meet for coffee, only 16% of them become a long-term source of referrals for me. My average referral partner lasts about 2.5 years. So, 84% say no thank you. That sounds pretty bad, right?
Yet, somehow, with just that 16%, I’ve got an 8-figure net worth. A 16% conversion rate has provided me with a very good income. You don’t need a ton of realtor referral partners to make a whole lot of money. Every time I get a yes from an agent, that agent is, on average, worth about $25k/year. If I want an extra 100 grand a year, I just need four agents to start referring me once a month. And I have a whole year to work on that.
Some Final Reminders
So, the Focus 40 is the end game. You’ve met or Zoomed with them, and you’ve started working together. They’re giving you consistent business, and you’re just going to nurture those relationships. When you’ve got a solid Focus 40 list, you don’t have to do those Thor’s Hammer calls any more.
If you’re not keeping track of this, measuring it, you’re not going to improve it. You have to take notes and keep track of everything that happens. You can’t just wing it. The only way to know where you need to spend more effort and energy and attention in your business is to know where your business is coming from. If we don’t have an organized, structured way to follow up with people, we’re doing a lot of busywork and ineffective activity.
This isn’t a 15-step thing. It’s simple. And it works. We just structure our days, make phone calls, and track them so we can improve on them. Consistency is key. When you have the plan, and you know what it is, and you wake up Monday morning and have the tracker, every day you make a choice.
You either choose to do the thing that’s going to drive our business forward or choose not to, but that’s on us.
If you’d like some help getting all of this in place, click here to schedule your FREE strategy call TODAY.