The True Cost of Missed Leads: Why Every Second Counts

Sep 8, 2024

In this fast-paced and competitive industry, making the most of every lead is imperative to the success of your business. Not only that, but you subscribe often to more than two portals plus spend on your own marketing all to generate leads, missing just one, costs you money. 

Every agency has a lead management system of some kind – but depending how effective it is can often determine how many leads fall through the net.

In this article, we explore some of the main reasons why estate agents miss leads, what it’s costing your business and how this challenge can be resolved.

Calculating the cost of missed opportunities

This article explains some of the hypothetical costs of missed opportunities, but how do you determine the actual financial cost?

Follow this formula:

Here’s a breakdown of how to calculate this:

1. Find the typical conversion rate from lead to successful property sale/rental (for example, 5% of all leads convert to sales for a typical estate agent).

2. Calculate the average commission per sale by identifying the average property value in the area and multiplying it by the typical commission rate.

For example, if the average property value is £250,000 and commission is 1.5%, the average commission would be £3,750.

  1. Calculate long-term customer value by estimating the number of referrals or repeat transactions over five years. For example, if each customer refers one other sale in five years, the true cost of a missed lead doubles.

To avoid missing leads, it’s important to get to the root of this challenge.

Why do leads get missed in the first place?

1. Out-of-hours leads

According to a report from a leading Portal, 50% of leads are generated outside office hours.

This adds an extra obstacle for negotiators when prioritising and following up with leads. Each business has its own way of getting back in touch with these leads, but Callwell has four options for its users:

    • Sending an autoresponder by email or text, ensuring that these leads are acknowledged, and the customers know they will be prioritised as soon as your branch next opens. Callwell can also offer, via Morning Caller, an automatic telephone call for these enquiries as soon as your branch opens.
    • For lettings, including a tenant qualifier in the autoresponder to give negotiators more insight into an enquiry.
    • A morning caller meaning that, once your office reopens, these phone calls will come through as if they are new leads
    • All of the above

2. Responding too slowly

Did you know that the average response rate to emails in the UK is less than 25% – meaning three-quarters of leads are being missed?

Wherever you are in the UK, you have a very short time to ensure you’re one of the agents invited to the valuation. How do you ensure you get to these high-value leads quickly?

While speed isn’t everything, responding to leads promptly is important. If you leave it for too long, you could see leads switch their interest to a different property with a different agency.

 

3. Not engaging with every lead

It’s natural to prioritise people who call or visit your branch over email leads.

However, leads may not have the time for a phone call or a visit to the branch, perhaps due to their working hours, transport or personal situation. Therefore, it’s unfair and unwise to dismiss these leads.

 

4. Using an inadequate lead management system

A strong lead management system that prioritises speed, efficiency and follow-up is crucial to capturing, nurturing and converting potential customers in this competitive market.

However, with around 36% of professionals across industries struggling to build an effective lead management strategy, it’s important to put things in place to ensure your processes work.

Prompt follow-up, efficient reporting, logical lead prioritisation and performance tracking are just some of the factors that determine the efficacy of your lead management processes.

 

Our philosophy

There’s no second chance to make a first impression

Selling a house is one of the biggest financial decisions someone can make, so they want to feel like they are in safe and capable hands.

Every lead should get a response

Helping people buy, sell or let a property is a significant responsibility – and each lead should be treated with respect.

When a potential customer shows interest, it’s likely that they are exploring a number of options. Therefore, it’s important to think:

‘How can we set ourselves apart from the rest?’

A report from InsideSales revealed that conversion rates jump more than 8x if attempted in the first five minutes, rather than waiting between five minutes and 24 hours.

Actionable steps to prevent missing a lead

Prioritise reporting

Having a good grasp of reporting allows you to respond to your successes and adapt your lead generation or follow-up techniques accordingly. Understanding what contributes to success and sharing that with your team allows them to treat each lead effectively.

Callwell’s built-in ROI tracker allows you to determine the ROI of your marketing spends across multiple channels, from Google, to social media, and other online sources.

Read more about the benefits of reporting in this article.

Keep all your leads in one place

Using Callwell’s technology, you can capture your leads the second they appear, no matter the source. Callwell automatically keeps track of every lead’s data and every interaction they have with your business, meaning you can measure the speed and success of your team’s responses and identify the best times to reply.

This also decreases the likelihood of leads being accidentally lost or deleted.

 

Leverage Callwell’s features

Callwell’s Pro and Essentials plans come with multiple features that can prevent you from missing out on leads.

Click here to find out more.

Our Auto Response feature alerts negotiators and calls back enquirers when an email comes through, reinforcing that you put your customers first.

The Instant Call feature allows you to appear attentive, professional and ready to meet the lead’s requirements. It gives your sales team the chance to make the most of every opportunity and can help you shape the way your agency is perceived by leads.

Missing out on one lead may not seem like a big deal, but when this becomes a repeated occurrence, it could mean you fall short of your competitors.

By offering you complete control over your leads and innovative lead management tools, Callwell can help you prevent missed leads and give you the competitive edge you need.

Interested in discovering how your lead management fares against your competitors? Take our Lead Management Health Check scorecard. It takes just minutes to complete and provides you with the next steps you need to improve your lead management and make your processes more efficient.

Enquiry alerts

Callwell Alerts allows you to notify key personnel, by email, if a lead has not been called by the local branch. The alerts are easy to setup by your company administrator.

Examples of alerts commonly used:

  • Any enquiry not called back within 1 hour - Branch manager receives email.
  • Branch managers receiving an alert if the Callwell Score below a set threshold.
  • Business owners receive an alert if the Callwell Score falls below a very low threshold.

Callwell Alerts are included as part of your Callwell Pro package.

Scheduled calls with Morning Caller

Approximately 50% of leads are received between 6pm and 9am the next morning and generally, we are at our most productive during the first 90 minutes of our working day. Which makes it even harder to call all your over-night leads before your competitor.

Callwell's Morning Caller schedules your over-night enquiries to start calling your branch at 10 minutes after your Callwell opening time and then one lead will call every 10 minutes from that point onwards.

Ensuring you and your team deal with those hard to come by leads quickly and efficiently, while maximising your ability to carry out business.

Take your Lead Management Health Check

How do you measure up to the best agents in the UK?

Discover just how effective your current lead management methods are with our new scorecard.

It takes just 2 minutes

It's completely free

Receive a personalised report

Inbound calls and ad tracker

Callwell does a brilliant job in helping agent with lead management of their portal and web email enquiries, but what about the Phone Calls?  

Callwell can also help with these.  We give you a dedicated number you can use for the portals and your own website leads.  This can be the same number or a dedicated number for each if you want to see the volumes and quality from each.  This number connects to your branch number or a mobile number if you wish. 

The call shows in your Callwell Enquiry Screen in the same way as an email.  If the caller has also emailed then we can show you caller details.  Then simply answer the phone in the usual way.  

From this system you can also send SMS text auto responders, follows ups and ask additional questions.  

Just another helpful tool from Callwell - allowing you to make that first great impression, first time every time.  

"

Email integrations

Send automated messages through our integration with Mailchimp.

ROI indicator

Our ROI indicator is clever! Used on a regular basis, this feature will help you understand exactly what you are getting from the portals you use.

For example, if you upload the details of the completions last month, the amount each ‘deal’ is worth and the amount paid for the source or portal, our report will show you your ‘Return on Investment’.

Your report will be stored on Callwell and can be retrieved at any time. The report is designed to be printed as a PDF for management or board meetings (or perhaps meetings with your portal provider!).

Team insights

Callwell team insights provides you with the ability to review the individual KPIs of each staff member in real time. For each individual the Performance screen shows:

  • Callwell score: The Average Callwell Score achieved
  • Enquiries: Number of enquiries the individual has clicked to ‘claim’
  • Calls (attempted) and (successful): The total number of each type of call
  • Total call time and average call time: Total time spent on calls and the average time for each call
  • Average review score: Where reviews is switched on the average star rating for reviews received

Performance included as part of your Callwell Pro package.

Live management reporting

Live Management Reports provide you with headline statistics and ensure you never lose touch of branch activity. We will provide you with a URL link that instantly presents  the number of leads received, broken down into enquiry types.

Within seconds you can filter out your valuation numbers and check whether contact has been made. This not only highlights leads received during working hours, but will give you detail on contacts made to those out-of-hours enquiries.

Scoring and leaderboards

Real-time customer service leaderboards

Callwell Score – each lead is given 1,000 point, a point is lost during working hours for every minute a lead is not both claimed or called, only a successful call will count. 

Callwell Scoring is optional and can be turned on or off. Your team can view a Callwell Score league table in real-time, at branch level and area level, leveraging their competitive nature to drive improved customer experience.

Your senior management can benchmark the overall Callwell Score against that of competitors, see Company Report. The performance of individual colleagues can be viewed, in the team insights report.

Statistics dashboard & reports

We provide real-time data analysis through Callwell's dashboard to help you manage your performance.

Missed enquiry alerts

Callwell Alerts allows you to notify key personnel, by email, if a lead has not been called by the local branch. The alerts are easy to setup by your company administrator.

Examples of alerts commonly used:

  1. Any enquiry not called back within 1 hour - Branch manager receives email.
  2. Branch managers receiving an alert if the Callwell Score below a set threshold.
  3. Business owners receive an alert if the Callwell Score falls below a very low threshold.

Email and SMS auto responders

Callwell auto responders help you stay in contact with you customers 24/7.

As soon as the customer makes an enquiry, they receive an email or text message with a message of your choice. The messages can be configured to be sent during the hours that you specify, for example, you may want a slightly different wording on the message that you send over the weekend to those during the week.

All auto responders can be branded with your logo.

Lead qualification

Callwell auto responders help you stay in contact with you customers 24/7. As soon as the customer makes an enquiry, they receive an email or text message asking them to click on a link and complete a simple form. When they click submit Callwell will update the system with the information, immediately. This feature enables you to gather the essential information you require in order to prioritise the customers you speak to.

Callwell automatically replies to a new enquiry, by SMS or email, asking predetermined questions regarding rental budget and household income, then we qualify the tenant allowing you to prioritise who to call first.

This feature is completely flexible and can sent at the times of day you choose, asking the questions that are important to your business. You can also brand the message with your logo.

Lead assign

Callwell Assign ensures to never forget which lead to give to which negotiator to follow up on and you’ll never have to print an enquiry again.

Enquiry type identified

Enquiry type & source of the lead displayed in the enquiry dashboard.

Depending upon which dropdown selections the customer has made, there are 22 definitions of enquiry type. These include Vendor, Landlord, Tenant, Viewing, First time buyers etc. All types are displayed in our easy-to -read format.

We also include the source of the lead, your own website, portals, or other advertising sources, our aim to give you full visibility on where an enquiry comes from and the type of enquiry.

Internal messenger

Callwell Messenger provides the user the ability to pass a lead, message, reminder or referral to a colleague in their office or another branch.

  • Enter the Name and Telephone number and choose the Type of the lead.

 

  • Choose the branch or users you would like the message to go to. Then add your text.

 

  • Once you click Create, the message will appear on the Callwell Enquiry screen of the branch or user you choose.

Full contact history

Recording all your call outcomes through Callwell means all your history is in one place.

Manual call back

Manual Calling enables a user to call customers using the Callwell system.

The feature is simple to use; open an enquiry and click Call Now and you’ll receive a call back from Callwell, press 1 and you’ll be in touch with your customer.

Record the outcome of your call and this will put the enquiry in your name, Call history will also update. Manual calls will come out of your allocated call minutes, and these will differ depending if you have Callwell Pro or Callwell Essentials.

All your leads in one place

Incoming customer emails, from all of the sources that you invest in, are displayed in a consistent easy-to-read format. The leads are all in one place and displayed in date and time order.

You can see at a glance the leads actioned, how they have been actioned, who’s actioned them.  If the action was via a call you can also see in Call History the call duration, and the number of times the call was attempted.

You can also see clearly the details from the original lead about the vendor or applicant, the property they were interested in and any notes that they added to the enquiry.

Instant calls

Instant Calls – if an email enquiry is sent during working hours, the Callwell system will ring your branch number, once a member of staff picks up the phone they will hear an automated message telling them the source of the lead, and the enquirers name, they are then asked to press 1 to be connected.

They then have approx. 20 seconds before the phone will ring at the applicant/vendors end, this gives you time to look at your Callwell dashboard to see all details about the enquiry.

This delivers several advantages, the phone will ring your branch seconds after the enquiry has been sent giving you a much greater chance of getting through to the person.

The speed of call will also get you in front of many other agents that don’t have this type of system, the sweet spot especially for valuation enquiries is to call back within 30 minutes or run the risk of missing out.