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How quickly should you get sales in geographic farming?

Lead Generation or Nurture Marketing?

Agent Dominator is not a lead generation company; rather, we are a nurture marketing company.  Here’s the difference…

Lead generation is when you use direct response marketing to generate prospect leads.  An example is pay-per-click advertising with a lead capture page to generate leads.

Nurture marketing is when you use education-based marketing repeatedly to the same list, to shift brand loyalty from competitors to you.  An example is postcard marketing to a geographic farm, using videos to build trust and expertise in owners’ minds about you.

Lead generation doesn’t always work, but when it does the results are immediate and drop off quickly over time.  Nurture marketing always works, but it takes time, and the longer you use it the more results you consistently achieve.

Nurture marketing always out-performs direct response marketing over time… you just have to give it enough time to do its job.

Expectations

Assuming a farm with at least 700 or more addresses, an average 5% sales each year, and no dominant agent, here are the expectations you should generally have (note:  if your farm is smaller or your turnover rate is lower, adjust the following expectations proportionately):

If you are targeting a high trusting community:  expect your farm to cash flow in the first 6 months and start harvesting a profit in the second 6 months.

If you are targeting a low trusting community:  expect your farm to cash flow in the second 6 months and start harvesting a profit in the third 6 months.

Once you start harvesting a profit, expect the harvest to increase every 6 months until you reach about 30% market share of all sales in your farm.

How do you determine the trust level of your farm?

The trust level of your farm is the degree to which they trust you enough to respond to you.  We’ve found a fairly accurate way to measure it is by looking at the click-through rate (CTR) — the number of QR codes being scanned — when we mail direct response cards to identify sellers.

If the CTR is around 0.5% (3 to 4 prospects when mailing 700 postcards) or higher, it typically means your farm is a high trusting community.  If the CTR is less than 0.5%, it typically means your farm is a low trusting community.

If you have a high trusting community (and you let us know) we typically will increase the frequency of the direct response cards in your first year to help you harvest more sales early on.  However, if you have a low trusting community (and you let us know), since sellers typically don’t respond to the direct response cards as much, we will usually increase the frequency of the other postcards that show off your expertise to build up their trust in you.  Then, as your farm gradually shifts into a high trusting community we can increase the frequency of direct response cards to harvest a few more sales.

First year vs subsequent years

For high trusting communities, many of the early-on sales will likely come through the direct response cards.  However, starting around the second year and once your farming community perceives you as an expert, we typically see agents getting the majority of sales from sellers calling them directly rather than from scanning the QR codes.