Do you want more real estate clients—not just for today, but for the long haul? Getting clients isn’t just about landing a quick deal. It’s about building a system that attracts, nurtures, and converts people into loyal customers. The more consistently you bring in new clients, the more stable and scalable your business becomes.
In The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, Gary Keller explains how to shift your focus from chasing individual sales to creating a steady stream of clients. Keep reading to learn more about what type of prospects you should market for and how to meet your real estate goals.
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How to Find Your Real Estate Prospects
Keller argues that the traditional approach of attracting real estate clients—where agents view themselves primarily as commission-based salespeople focused on individual transactions—limits agents’ growth potential. He advocates that agents shift their thinking so they’re no longer focused only on making one sale after another, but instead developing systematic approaches to every aspect of their practice—just as a CEO would.
By adopting this entrepreneurial perspective, writes Keller, you can break through income ceilings and create sustainable growth. You’ll also generate wealth more easily by building a business instead of just working a job, which will allow you to produce revenue long after you’ve stepped back from handling every sale and transaction personally.
(Shortform note: The shift in thinking Keller recommends may require you to adopt a “growth mindset.” In Mindset, psychologist Carol Dweck defines a growth mindset as an optimistic and persevering mindset in the face of challenging tasks (like growing a real estate business). With this mindset, you choose to believe that you can develop new abilities through dedication and hard work. In contrast, with a fixed mindset, you believe that your abilities are innate and unchangeable. Dweck argues that adopting a growth mindset leads to greater resilience, motivation, and achievement, as you’re more willing to take on challenges and see failures as opportunities for growth.)
Generate Your Prospects: Quantity Over Quality
As an entrepreneur, writes Keller, you’ll need to identify prospects—people who’ve shown interest in buying or selling property and might become clients. Prospects are the building block of your business, representing not just potential one-off transactions but catalysts for exponential growth. When you cultivate a substantial prospect pool rather than focusing narrowly on immediate sales, each prospect becomes more valuable than just their individual purchase or listing. They become potential ambassadors who can generate referrals, contribute to your market reputation, and help establish self-sustaining momentum. This ultimately helps build a business that can thrive beyond your personal capacity to handle individual deals.
Keller notes that sourcing prospects is largely a numbers game. It’s great to get high-quality prospects—those with immediate needs, financial readiness, and serious intent to take action—since they’re more likely to convert into property listings (which we’ll cover in the next section). However, Keller explains that what you’re really shooting for is quantity. The math is simple: More prospects lead to more property listings, even if your conversion rate—the percentage of prospects who become clients—is relatively low. What truly drives business growth is the total volume of people in your pipeline, not how efficient you are at converting each individual lead.
To illustrate this idea, let’s consider two real estate agents, Agent A and Agent B. Agent A focuses on high-quality leads and manages to secure 10 leads per month, with a conversion rate of 50%. This means they list properties with five clients each month. On the other hand, Agent B doesn’t filter for quality as much and generates 100 leads per month. However, due to the lower quality of these leads, their conversion rate is only 10%. But this still results in generating 10 property listings each month. Even though Agent B has a lower conversion rate than Agent A (10% vs. 50%), they actually end up listing more properties because they’re working from a larger pool of potential clients.
To maximize your prospect numbers, Keller recommends both traditional methods (like networking events and cold calls) and newer approaches (such as social media and online advertising).
(Shortform note: Keller encourages a bold marketing approach that blends old-school and new tactics. However, some evidence suggests that in-your-face marketing tactics commonly used by agents, like placing their faces on billboards, in newspaper advertisements, and even on television, may yield minimal returns on investment. Industry surveys reveal that traditional advertising channels rank remarkably low among factors influencing homeowners’ selection of real estate professionals. Instead, consumers consistently prioritize demonstrated competence, access to comprehensive listing services, and personal recommendations from trusted sources when choosing someone to handle their significant property transactions.)
| Avoid Perfectionism in Prospect Generation In Fanatical Prospecting, sales specialist Jeb Blount further explores the idea of quantity over quality. He writes that many sales professionals fail to generate a critical mass of prospects because they make the mistake of over-analyzing each prospect for quality. According to Blount, many salespeople believe that their prospecting strategies must be foolproof before they pick up the phone. In turn, they assess their prospects constantly to come up with a game plan—they review prospects’ LinkedIn accounts, their age, their geographic location, and so on. Further, they waste time anticipating every “What if?” that a prospect might ask. Unfortunately, this perfectionism leads salespeople to either perpetually delay their prospecting efforts or do outreach at an inefficient rate. After all, it takes a significant time investment to analyze each prospect—time that could instead be spent calling additional prospects. The upshot, Blount maintains, is that these salespeople fail to fill their pipelines of potential customers, harming their bottom line. |
Market to Your Prospects
Keller writes that as you’re collecting prospects, you need to systematically market to them. Prospects don’t automatically convert into clients; this transformation requires deliberate action. Through consistent follow-up communications, personalized outreach, and value-driven content that addresses their specific real estate needs, you gradually build trust and credibility. This systematic marketing process moves prospects through your sales funnel until they’re ready to list or purchase property with you.
(Shortform note: Marketing is most effective at turning prospects into clients when it’s tailored for your target market—those clients who have the right demographics factors, financial qualifications, and specific property needs for the listings you have. To determine your target market, you can use SEO tools and social listening tools to understand the needs of potential buyers and sellers in your area and gather relevant data regarding market demand for your real estate services. For example, SEO tools can tell you how many people are searching for properties similar to those you’re selling, and what real estate agencies they typically engage with. Meanwhile, social listening tools can tell you the specific needs of clients in your area.)
Keller recommends a multi-touch marketing approach: Reach out to potential clients multiple times and through various channels. In this context, a “touch” refers to any meaningful contact with a prospect—whether it’s a phone call, personalized email, social media interaction, e-newsletter, mailed brochure, or in-person meeting. It’s important to remember that this isn’t about bombarding them with messages. Instead, it’s about creating an ongoing conversation that keeps your brand at the forefront of your prospects’ minds.
| Attribution Models in Marketing: Single-Touch vs. Multi-Touch Keller emphasizes multi-touch marketing, but you have to evaluate whether a multi-touch approach truly suits your business best. In particular, you need to know how to properly attribute credit to each touchpoint. Credit, in this case, refers to the value or influence each marketing interaction has on moving a customer toward a final conversion (i.e., becoming your client). How much credit you attribute to a given touchpoint depends on which attribution model you use. Single-touch attribution models assign 100% credit to just one touchpoint in the customer journey—for example, the first or final contact made before a conversion. While simple to implement, single-touch models may oversimplify the customer journey by ignoring the cumulative impact of multiple interactions, potentially leading to biased marketing decisions. Multi-touch attribution models distribute credit across multiple touchpoints. Within the multi-touch model, there are a few sub-variants, including the linear model (which assigns equal credit to all touchpoints), the time-decay model (which assigns more credit to interactions closer to conversion), and the U-shaped model (which places extra weight on the first and last touchpoints). Multi-touch models provide a more holistic view of marketing performance, enabling better resource allocation. However, they require more data and a deeper understanding of customer journeys. You must weigh these factors when deciding which approach will best optimize your marketing strategy and drive better results. |
Hit Your Marketing Metrics
According to Keller, tracking and evaluating your marketing activities is essential for optimizing your strategy. By keeping tabs on how many people you’re reaching out to, how often, through what channels, and what responses you’re getting, you can start identifying meaningful patterns in customer behavior. For example, you might notice that after sending out three newsletters with helpful tips for sellers, you typically see an uptick in inquiries about listing properties. Eventually, you’ll reach a point when you’ll have enough data to know how many marketing “touches” you need to execute to reach your targeted number of conversions—and, ultimately, your target revenue.
Once these patterns become clear, Keller suggests you use them to guide future campaigns. If your data shows that a prospect typically converts into a client after receiving 10 marketing interactions—regardless of whether those interactions are through emails, social media posts, or phone calls—you can plan your outreach strategy accordingly. This targeted approach allows you to use your resources more efficiently by focusing on proven strategies rather than spreading yourself too thin across multiple platforms or tactics.
For example, let’s say you specialize in selling condos in a particular neighborhood. Over the past year, you’ve kept track of your marketing activities and found that for every 100 newsletters you send out, you typically receive 10 inquiries from potential sellers. Of these inquiries, about two turn into actual property listings. Now, suppose each of these listings yields an average commission of $10,000. This means for every 100 newsletters sent out, you generate on average $20,000 in revenue.
Now, let’s say your target revenue for the next quarter is $200,000. Let’s use the data we have to figure out how to meet this goal:
- You need to secure 20 listings to meet this goal ($200,000 divided by $10,000 per listing).
- Given that two out of every 10 inquiries become listings (a conversion rate of 20%), you’ll need to generate 100 inquiries to end up with 20 listings.
- You know that one out of every 10 newsletters results in an inquiry (a response rate of 10%). Achieving 100 inquiries would mean sending about 1,000 newsletters over the quarter.
| Beware of Excess Data Gathering Keller emphasizes that data-driven marketing can help you identify meaningful patterns in customer behavior. However, experts urge you to be aware of the potential pitfalls of excessive data accumulation. You may feel tempted to collect as much information as possible on prospects, but an overload can lead to confusion and a lack of actionable insights. You must learn to discern which pieces of information are truly valuable for your business goals. Identifying key performance indicators (KPIs), such as successful conversions from prospect to client or average property viewing-to-sale ratios, can help you focus your analysis and make strategic decisions based on relevant data. Moreover, understanding customer behavior—like what motivates a buyer’s choice or what deters a potential seller—is more useful than merely collecting demographic information. This behavioral insight allows you to tailor your marketing strategies effectively according to the needs and preferences of your target market. |
Learn More About Finding Real Estate Clients
To dive deeper into marketing to real estate prospects and turning them into clients and its broader context, check out Shortform’s comprehensive guide to The Millionaire Real Estate Agent.
