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Terry Peterson is the broker owner of Teamwork Realty, a Charleston, SC based brokerage focused on building agents’ "recognized, respected, professional brands in the real estate business.”
He founded Teamwork Realty with his wife Aimee almost two years ago after operating as a team for several years.
Before starting a team and later a brokerage, Aimee and Terry each had separate starts in real estate in the mid-2000s. She started with new construction, and he started as a commercial appraiser.
Then, after pursuing other careers for a while, Aimee and Terry sold a company they had built and discussed what to do next. At that point, they had been through seven homes in the five years they had been married. They both had backgrounds in the real estate industry and enjoyed it. And, after adding up how much real estate commission they missed by not getting licensed, they decided on their next venture.
They dove into residential real estate together without any grand plan, but they quickly identified their strengths. Terry became the support for Aimee to function as an agent. Then, almost inadvertently, they grew into a team, which launched for the first time about six years ago.
At that same time, they started using lead generation tools to have something to offer other agents.
In the years that followed, they grew the team and continued learning. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, they launched their own Brokerage, Teamwork Realty, in March of 2021. When Teamwork Realty was launched, it was just the seven agents from their team. Now, less than two years later, they have 70+ agents.
How has your real estate lead generation and CRM technology made a difference for you as a real estate team and a broker owner?
Answer from Terry Peterson: Our approach has changed as our business has changed. When selecting our tools, what we provide as a team is different from how we provide it as a brokerage.
As a team:
In a team setting, you can be more hands-on with each agent. We pushed more heavily on asking about lead generation and how things were converting.
We worked with our people on a 1:1 level, asking what we could do to help them be more productive and successful with each lead.
When we decided to launch a brokerage, it wasn’t going to be feasible to take that kind of direct, hands-on approach with 50 to 100 people.
As a brokerage:
We changed our focus on lead generation once we launched as a brokerage. Now, we distribute classes on real estate generation similar to CINC U, breaking down the webinars into CINC 101, CINC 102, and CINC 103.
Instead of me sitting down with every single agent on a daily basis, we use classes to cover what a lead system looks like. The 101 and 102 classes explain the tools, their functionality, and the teamwork involved. The CINC 103 class is more conversion-based, focusing on calling people and getting out of your comfort zone with strangers.
As a team, we did a lot of intense coaching, tracking daily calls and notes and contacts. As a brokerage, we have small groups of just three or four agents in a small meeting to talk about needs, discomfort, and help that is needed.
Because it's a small group, it's not intimidating to project an account up on the screen, point out ten new leads you haven't called, and discuss what is holding an agent back.
How did your real estate lead generation strategies develop as you transitioned to leading a larger team?
Answer from Terry Peterson: When my wife and I started as a team, we knew we needed to find lead generation tactics. As a tech geek, I first played with all the different options. I generated my own Google and Facebook leads, and imported them into spreadsheets. I even got fancy and added them to Google sheets so they could be shared.
I learned early on that no lead is better than another lead. I hear agents all the time say that system leads are better, but most leads are the same unless you have a system that is letting exclusively spam in.
There's a person behind each and every one. I don't believe one lead is better than another, whether you paid $1,000 for a referral or a $10 Facebook ad.
I spent weeks building and refining my ads and collecting all these leads, but when they were all collected and sitting there stagnant, they were already getting cold. I would spend the next week building individual campaigns. I built out whole campaigns ranging from first-time homebuyers to VA campaigns.
I kept going through a cycle of building leads, finding ways to work on them, and then having to redo it all over again because things went stagnant. I knew this cycle was ultimately not working in real estate. My breakthrough was at a CINC mastermind event in Charleston that a closing attorney invited us to.
I suddenly realized that if I keep this up, I'm working on marketing tech, not in real estate. What if I had a
system that already has an idea of who a lead is because it knows they came from a first-time homebuyer ad or knew they came looking for pools?
What if it knew how to send campaigns based on that kind of information? What if it could text them right off the bat to reach them right away? None of the systems I was playing with touched all of those points. Right then and there, I knew I needed to have that platform.
Because I was spending hours and hours doing marketing tech, I wasn't talking to my agents or helping them with contracts. Every time I consider lead generation costs, I look at how much time I will save on spreadsheets and managing my own generations.
The best feature of CINC is CINC itself, the fact that it does all those things.
What sort of a difference have you seen in your real estate lead follow-up efficiency since moving away from DIY to an all-in-one platform like CINC?
Answer from Terry Peterson:
As a Team:
At first, I was manually finding leads and distributing them to agents, but there was no clean way to do that. If I had a lead come from Facebook, I'd forward it to one agent and forward the next lead coming from Google to another. I was operating with a manual round-robin technique.
It was a waiting game for an agent to return and let me know if they got in touch. There was no time for follow-up, there was no time to say what kind of conversions were being had, and I was just focused on getting enough closings to make money.
We were then trying to reverse engineer where the lead came from, and how to reacquire that lead. We had no ability to monitor effectiveness as a team until we pulled everything into one system.
As a Brokerage:
It’s not easy to make sure everybody agrees that CINC is our central system for working with clients and leads and turning those clients into brokerage customers when we also get leads from other sources. Whenever we get a third-party lead, we keep everybody on the same page and ensure agents import the lead into CINC.
It doesn’t matter if the lead is from realtor.com or Zillow; we keep everything in one system. That is where the system becomes effective.
CINC impacts our brokerage’s effectiveness from a recruiting standpoint. We ask all prospective agents
if they've heard of CINC or not. If they haven’t, we tell them that we provide a system where leads come in automatically, and you don't have to go hunting for them. You don't have to build a website; you will get your own personal link.
If you want to go do your own ads, if you are big on social media, use your link; it’s yours to work with. We don’t actively recruit, but providing CINC makes it easier to sell our brokerage to agents. Our agents go through our CINC courses that already cover all the technology bases and will prepare them for the universal platform.
How has your real estate brokerage had so much recruiting success in the past year and a half?
Answer from Terry Peterson: Since we launched, we have averaged almost one new agent each week. But, we never focused on recruiting. We set a standard from day one that our relationship with agents had to be a reciprocated partnership. We focused on how to be of service to those who are willing to work for us.
We recognized that if we want to have good people, we should have something to offer them. Generally, agents join teams because they're apprehensive that they won't be able to do something in this industry independently without some guidance.
You can fail on your own for a long time without that somebody or something to help show you the way. Word of mouth and providing value have allowed us to grow from 7 to 70 agents in 18 months.
What has been the key to your real estate team lead generation and conversion strategy success?
Answer from Terry Peterson: When we started as a team, there was a lot of learning. We had good people, and we were productive. We were very profitable. But nonetheless, there was a lot of learning involved.
We have three teams that are now each running in CINC. I'm trying to get those teams up to speed faster. Our brokerage coaching and training is what I call enterprise-level.
Teams are different: when it's just you and two other people, there need to be tight processes. There needs to be daily meetings to discuss who's hitting the leads in the morning vs. in the afternoon. Otherwise, why are you on a team? What benefit do you have working together versus navigating the market separately?
As a brokerage, we are much more hands-off with CINC, other than our coaching, where we show people how to use it, and in our small groups making sure everybody's up to speed on how they can improve. We don't use a lot of the tactics and techniques teams use.
We’re not watching agent by agent or checking who makes x amount of phone calls. If an agent approaches us wanting to do more business, we look at the database and tell them how many leads they have access to and ask how many they’ve called. That's usually the immediate answer.
When it comes to agent development, we have training sessions to review when to call a new lead, when to make follow-up calls, and make sure agents stay sharp on tactics.
If you are interested in becoming a part of the Teamwork team or Terry’s lead generation and brokerage development strategies, you can contact Teamwork Realty here. You can also find tools on their website, including their Mentor Program, Teamwork Online Real Estate School, and Culture, Training, & Tech
tools.