The Offer Follow Up – Why is it so Important?

Do you ever make an offer follow up?

On average, we tend to make around 160 offers per month, 40 offers per week, and about 8 offers per day. In our world, this equates to roughly 4 deals each month. Now, there’s more to it than just making a ridiculous amount of offers – you also have to be RELENTLESS in following up on all those offers – systematically.

Here’s the cut and dry reason why offer follow up is so important… the seller will forget about you. Simple as that. If you aren’t checking in on your offer at least once per week or so, they will completely forget about you and you’ll never get the deal. I mean, if you’ve put the time, energy, and effort into finding this lead in the first place, why not take steps to keep in touch until you can monetize that lead?

Have you ever heard the saying “The squeaky wheel gets the grease”? It’s true. Be that squeaky wheel. Let the seller know that you are dead serious about your offer for their house. You’ll be amazed at how much this one little tip alone will improve your ratios of getting deals under contract.

When are you supposed to STOP following up on your offers? You can stop when you get the deal, or it sells to someone else. That’s about it. Until one of those things happen, you should be following up with the seller at least once every couple weeks just to be sure they remember you want their house – and that you are ready to buy when they decide they are ready to sell.

We have 2 systems that we use for our offer follow up… one is automatic, the other in manual.

The Offer Follow Up Manual Method: This method is used for HOT LEADS. These are the leads that take top-priority because the seller NEEDS to sell. This is a simple spreadsheet that we sync to a Google Calendar. All you do here is set a date and time for your next offer follow up call when you conclude your most recent call with the seller. How frequent you follow-up will depend on several factors – how good the deal is, how motivated the seller is, what factors the seller is motivated by, and pending events that the seller is up against, etc. These calls are usually scheduled anywhere from 3 days to a week apart, and all you really want to do is touch base with the seller in a friendly manner, check in with them, and remind them that you are ready when they are.

The Offer Follow Up Automatic Method: This method is used for WARM LEADS. These are the leads that take second-priority because the seller WANTS to sell. What we do here is set the seller up in an Automatic Email Auto-Responder (like this one here at Mad Mimi). This is a series of emails that the seller with receive over a period of time. We usually set them up to receive a reminder email from us once every 2 weeks for a year. All we are doing here is giving the seller a soft reminder so that they don’t gradually forget about us. The main thing is that we want them to think about us when the reach the point of decision – when they make the choice that they are ready to sell their house and accept an offer from us. The great thing about this method is that it allows us to focus our time on the HOT leads, but we still aren’t losing contact with the WARM leads as a result.

So, that’s how we stay in touch with our Sellers in our business. I’d say that 90% of our deals come from sellers who have been followed-up-with in one way or another.