A well-organized database can be the difference between missed opportunities and consistent closings. In our most recent webinar, CINC Live Team Trainer and Owner of Nashville Advantage, Lance Simpson, shared tactical strategies for cleaning up your real estate CRM and converting more leads. Whether you're managing a team or flying solo, these tips will help you make the most of your CRM and re-engage leads that may have gone cold.
Database Organization Is Critical: Leads often sit in incorrect stages. Cleaning up your pipeline improves follow-up and conversion.
Contacted ≠ Conversation: A true “contacted” lead involves a two-way exchange—not just a call, text, or email sent.
Swallow the Frog: Tackle database cleanup head-on. It’s easier than it looks and pays off quickly.
Use Pipeline Stages Strategically: Move leads through stages intentionally. Recycle stagnant ones to re-engage.
Sign-In Alerts Are Gold: Turn alerts on for past clients or unsubscribed leads to catch renewed interest.
Automation Is a Safety Net, Not a Crutch: AI and behavioral tools help, but manual outreach still drives results.
Re-Engagement Campaigns Work: Seasonal or fun campaigns (e.g., “Pumpkin Cheesecake Day”) can revive cold leads.
Team Accountability Matters: Ensure agents are actively working leads and not hoarding contacts.
Daily Habits Drive Success: Consistent prospecting—ideally two hours a day—yields the best results.
Watch the full video here or read the transcript below.
Troy Mixon: [00:00:00] Yeah, man, thank you so much for how, coming to meet with us. I feel like I've been doing this now for a year here at CINC and one thing that I always see is when the product gets discussed or people start talking about how they learn things. They bring up Lance, who they've met at CINC U and training them and going through, the biggest tips and ahas for them and their team.
So you mind, Lance, just giving everyone kind of your background and show just your experience with training a bunch of CINC clients and we'll go from there.
Lance Simpson: Yeah. I'll save the whole history of pre real estate, but I've been doing real estate now since 2003. Quick highlight reel.
Moved to Nashville 2005 and pretty much been doing real estate full time from there on fast forward to 2013, I knew internet leads was gonna be the way to go and [00:01:00] I've been on a handful of platforms, in fact, one of your predecessors. And then I got introduced to to Commissions Inc. And was really good friends with the founder of the company.
And one of the very few platforms where I was like, you know what, we're gonna actually write down some systems, processes, how to make money with this because we've been making money for internet leads for years leading up to that. Yeah, we never had anything systematized. And that's where we started doing that.
Caught the attention of a lot of CINC users, both single solo users as well as teams. And then the founder's like Lance come in and see me we gotta talk, I need you to help more of my client. Yeah. That was 2014. Fast forward, those were one-off conversations. Finally in 2015, I'm like I can't continue doing my real estate business and helping agents.
Can you gimme a training center? And August, 2015 was the launch of CINC University and
Troy Mixon: awesome.
Lance Simpson: We've been pretty much doing it every month. Since then, I think we were at eight events this year and last year. But looking at, hopefully bumping [00:02:00] that back up in maybe 10 or 12 next year, mostly in Atlanta.
But yeah, ultimately, I don't know. We found out that there's a gap in expectations learning. Yeah. What agents do with the platform and where they can make money and how they're leaving money lost on the table. And I don't know. I feel we've been able to crack the code and help agents.
Troy Mixon: Yeah, that's what I, that's what I love about Lance. 'cause as you hit to it earlier, I do have some experience with some competitors, in a previous life. That's always the kind of, the crux of it, right? One of my favorite stories that I heard like a month ago was a lady maybe not so happy with the platform CINC that she was on.
She went to CINC U and within 30 days she'd already had two, two closings where it wasn't even leads that wasn't there or they were already there. It's just she wouldn't have the right things, set up in her database, which is why I love the topic of the day. Clean up the database.
For those that have been here before I bought a little broom 'cause I'm in my daughter's playroom like, like [00:03:00] always. And with that, all that wealth of knowledge, Lance I wrote down some questions from talking to some clients that they would love to hear from you. And the first one that I think majority came from is what have you seen when you've done all these trainings?
All these what's that number one common theme that someone doesn't have in place in their database that really. Outlines it to make sure they're not leaving, money on the table.
Lance Simpson: And I'm gonna tell you probably comes outta that organization, right? Because we talk about prospecting, nurture, follow up, working our clients, each one of those fit into a different bucket.
A k, a, the pipeline. Yep. And everybody's in such a hurry to get them from a new lead to contact an appointment set and then they leave
Troy Mixon: them there.
Lance Simpson: And then they just rot away. So yeah, one of the first things we go, we start looking at that and we're like, you got a killer database of, a thousand, 5,000, 10,000 plus leads, but the majority of them are in the contacted stage and you're not touching them, you're not communicating with [00:04:00] them.
So I, for me, I always tell everybody take that time, get that database reorganized. So now you can start your week out knowing, Hey, here's what I'm gonna do. Ties into being able, who do I prospect? Who do I nurture? And then a lot of the other ones are just being able to go back in and retarget our old leads to try to get them reengaged back into the database.
Troy Mixon: Yeah, and I maybe like some of the agents zone here where I feel like I hear that and I get it right. Like I'm like, Hey, I see what you're saying. Makes total sense. But probably like them, I get word because I'm not the most organized, so then I instantly might, would go in with a good intention. I see a thousand leads.
Are there a couple tips and tricks that you could share? To really help these agents with taking their CINC database today to ensuring that, maybe piecing it at a time or do you suggest No, you gotta swallow the frog and so to speak and, put everything all at once.
Lance Simpson: I, at some point you gotta swallow the frog, but yeah.
Think once it's done. So I kinda, I think you and I were talking about this and it was [00:05:00] funny. There was actually a post not long ago in the mastermind page. That got into organizing it and there was a gentleman in there I think it was a gentleman, I forget who it was. But they had said I, I've got so many leads I can never it'll take me forever to do that.
It really doesn't whenever you really understand like who belongs into what different stages of the pipelines. For me, one of my daily routines and I spend less than five minutes a day doing this, is going through every one of my pipeline stages.
Troy Mixon: Yeah,
Lance Simpson: And it's just that quick visual, like I'm looking at the no stage set.
There should be nobody in the no stage set. I know some people have been utilizing that as like a holdover as they import leads, but here's what happens is they import leads. They're like, oh, I got it in there. I'll eventually get to it. And eventually means never, right? We gotta get those cleared out of there.
Here's another one where I see a lot of people I'll, in fact, it's funny at St. You and I'm like, Hey, click on your new lead category or pipeline stage. How many leads do y'all have in there? And people are like, excited. They're like a hundred, [00:06:00] 200 raising their hands. And I was like, that's horrible.
You ought to have zero in there, right? The only leads that should be in your new leads are what came in from eight at night to eight o'clock in the morning. Gotta get those cleared out of there. I'm gonna tell you, my attempted contact is probably my biggest portion of my database. The majority of my leads, I leave an attempted contact.
You watch people have conversations with people and they mo and not even conversations. Sometimes I'll see 'em where they say, oh, they answered the phone and hung up on me. So I moved them to contacted one that's not a contact, but they get 'em into that contacted stage too quickly. And then you look back and that lead's never logging in.
They're not responsive to any of our nurture calls, texts, emails, any type of follow up. It's like, why? Why do we want to continue? Yeah. Let's get them back into attempted contact, recycle bin. Get 'em back into attempted contact. Let 'em kinda rerun through that funnel. Yeah, appointments set.
I've watched people that [00:07:00] like had leads in the appointment set stage that haven't logged in over a year, and I'm like, how is that an appointment set?
Troy Mixon: Yeah. So
Lance Simpson: when was the last time you talked with them? A year ago. And I'm like, so when's the appointment next year? So really it's just going in and getting everybody that's gonna be tied into the right pipeline stages and yeah. Before this is over with, we'll walk through what that looks like on, on a lot of those different areas.
Troy Mixon: Oh, yeah. No, I love the, I love hearing that because it, you're the wealth of knowledge and you've seen it, right? You've seen the folks come in on what they don't have, what they do have.
I see. Mr. Gary just asked us, what about texting a lead? Is that considered a contacted lead or is there a definition of contacted lead that you you go with Lance? Good question, Mr. Gary.
Lance Simpson: Great question. All right, so I send a text message out and there's no response. Is that a conversation I look at?
Contacted as a conversation? Okay,
Troy Mixon: so can, it can be in text. It just,
Lance Simpson: it can be text, it could be email, [00:08:00]
Troy Mixon: some correspondence back. It could
Lance Simpson: be face to face phone call, but it's gotta be a conversation. We always talk about gathering two of the five W's. Okay. You know what the five W's are? I, you haven't been to class, but who, what, when, where, why?
Troy Mixon: Yeah,
Lance Simpson: That, that's what we're looking at is having that conversation of, if I text you, I call you and you're like, I'm busy, click, move on. That's not contacted. Contacted is actually you and I having a conversation back and forth, and I've actually gone to the standpoint of this over the last few months of even teaching my agents in my own team.
Leave 'em attempted contact if I even have a conversation with you. But when I hang up with you and I don't know what that, what I'm gonna say to you on that next conversation, I didn't have a good enough conversation with you. I'm gonna leave you attempted contact, put some good notes into the system, and then re prospect you again until I can get some more information from you.
So [00:09:00] if you have that call and you like, I don't know what I'm gonna say to him next, you didn't have that good of a conversation. Yeah, that's contact. Yeah, that makes sense.
Troy Mixon: Yeah, it does. Yeah. The exact, like the, yeah, I didn't just have a passing by. It was actually a meaningful, they meaningful conversation of some sort happened.
Whether it be not necessarily. I think I'm with you. That's just probably the salesman in me. That's always like a next step always needs to be put out there, right? Yeah. But if it's not, then was it good enough to maybe get a huge detail of why they came to the website, what their timeline is so much information going back and forth to where, they're not just a normal Jim, John, Joe off the street.
So
Lance Simpson: this is a great, great dialogue because it is, like we're always, as sales we're programmed, the next step is, hey, the next step is this, but sometimes. We can't, we're not ready to get to the next step yet because I, we're still in the information gathering.
Troy Mixon: Yep.
Lance Simpson: And [00:10:00] here's what happens is I feel like as real estate agents, we get overwhelmed with too many tasks, too many reminders.
So I talked to you today, I don't really gather that much information or I haven't gotten enough to really determine where you are in the sales cycle yet. Yeah. I'm probably gonna leave you attempted contact and re prospect you again later that afternoon or tomorrow so I can ask more questions.
Gives me an option. Yep, I do. I can ask more questions because what happens then is most people are gonna wait 30 days to follow back up with you and then they're gonna be like, shoot. I don't know what to say to Troy because I didn't have a great conversation with him initially. So here's what ended happening.
They don't do it to say to you, so I'm just not gonna call you. Yeah. At that point, leave 'em attempted contact. Let 'em re prospect it.
Troy Mixon: Yep. And I do like Chris's conversation and maybe I missed a step on this. You did gimme a little heartburn Lance when you talked about me in class. 'cause me in class, it was a struggle.
But Ms. Crystal, Basson, [00:11:00] any, do you have a set time? Like how long do you move them back to attempted contact? Maybe if it's stalled later in the process? Any, some guidance around that for everyone when, yeah.
Lance Simpson: So I mine varies a little bit, but let's just say for this intense purpose that I feel like this'll fill the boat for everybody.
I've got a couple criteria that I meet. If I have you contacted, which outta curiosity, anybody that's on here, go look at your contacted pipeline stage and I want you to put in two numbers. The very first number I want you to gimme total number of leads in your system. And then the second number, tell me how many leads you have contacted.
And I think that you're gonna see an overwhelming of them have a good majority in that contacted stage, which. Then I want you to ask yourself this, and you don't have to respond, but how many of those are you actually staying in touch with? It's gonna be a very small percentage of it. I look at it like this, so this is something, like I said, every day I'm in my database looking at all my pipeline stages, but at least if you [00:12:00] wanna stay up on it and make it easy.
It's those little maintenance things. Weekly, biweekly, no more than once a month. You wanna go out there and you wanna do that database cleanup. And that's where I'm looking at leads pipeline stage. Contacted last logged in 90 days to for me I put 10,000 in there 'cause I've got leads that are over 5,000 days old.
Troy Mixon: Yeah.
Lance Simpson: And when I go in and I look at that, you're gonna start realizing how many leads a either have overdue reminders or no reminders on 'em at all, and they're not logging back into your system. So is that truly a contact? And then if you also look at last touch, some of them could be 120, 300, 3000 days old.
Like we, we just haven't touched them in forever. I look at it like this, if you're not logging into my system and you're not engaging in conversation with me, I'm gonna move you back after 90 days.
Troy Mixon: Yeah, I was gonna say that's, see, I see two folks asking the questions around oh, Erica, hopefully all as well in [00:13:00] Minnesota.
I see a couple questions around, thus the, Hey, I'm getting a lot of unsubscribes or a lot of people who are just hanging up on me and not con so. In those situations, is there a different marketing employer where you keep them? I'm trying to see if I'm answering this right or if I'm asking this correctly from trying to,
Lance Simpson: is it, so they're a lot of unsubscribes.
Troy Mixon: Yes, sir. Yep.
Lance Simpson: Interesting enough about the unsubscribes. For years I always said. If you have a bad phone number and a bad email, or you've unsubscribed to all, I move you to trash. And I had a pretty hard stance on that for the longest time, and then over the last couple years. We really like on the training team started diving in, talking, asking questions about that and what we realized, and especially whenever you go out to the mastermind pages and stuff and you're like close to another unsubscribe.
Close to another unsubscribe, and I'm like, shit, let's leave 'em [00:14:00] in there. Because here's the cool thing with the unsubscribe, they can still log into our system and I can still call. I'm still, to this day, a firm believer that this is a contact business, right? Yeah. While texting, emailing, things like that help us, it's making those phone calls.
You gotta dive in every day and make those phone calls. So if you're unsubscribed from my system and you're still logging in, you're gonna hit one of my call filters. I'm gonna reach out and call you. Here's probably, in my opinion, one of the top reasons people unsubscribe. We turn them onto automation that is not important to 'em.
Meaning Hey Troy, I talked with you really quick and I didn't really get much from you, so I'm gonna turn this nurture campaign on. That's not what you want. As a consumer, what do consumers want? They wanna see houses, right? Yeah. Or they're not going in updating that safe search. Look at what they're looking at.
We teach this at St. University as well, is. Within that first week of them being a [00:15:00] lead in your database, go out and take a look at what they're looking at and modify their safe search. Some of them come in here I'm in Nashville. They'll come in looking in Franklin at that $20 million house and then reality hits and they get down to their five, six, $700,000 house.
Now I gotta safe search going out to them. That is anything from like 400 some thousand up to 20 million plus. Am I really doing them of any favors? So they're gonna unsubscribe. We no longer need the automation going out. Like meaning I had a conversation with you automation did its job, have a conversation, but then I forget to turn the automation off.
Troy Mixon: And I love Ms. Carolyn actually just said that she just had someone that unsubscribe, but yet still stays in touch via phone calls. Yeah. Great. Point out to sometimes the phone might be the way that they want to communicate. I don't know if you were able Lance to see some of these numbers.
Folks are. Are throwing out there some large databases that my game comp math can't, see where the commas go, but
Lance Simpson: Here's one. 34,000 plus [00:16:00] ish leads. 18,000 of those are contacted. Now, here's my question with that one. There is, what percentage of that 18,000 are you actually communicating with on a monthly basis?
And I, I think that's a low number. So for me, I would rather get all of those people that I'm not talking to back to attempted contact. Okay. Once it's back to attempted contact let's break down like day in a life of a real estate agent. We've got a handful of tasks that we have to do throughout the day.
Obviously we have prospecting, we have our nurture, we've got our appointments that we're doing, whether it's bio consultations, showing homes, writing contracts, things like that, right? But then we also have to work on reengaging our database, getting some of those old ones back active, looking at properties again.
So when your database is organized. You are able to [00:17:00] go in and start targeting those attempted contacts, people that haven't logged in forever, people that quit talking to us for whatever reason, to get 'em reengaged back into our database. I always ask, is buying real estate a need or a want?
Troy Mixon: Yeah,
Lance Simpson: It's both. It's depends on what that person's situation is. I feel like the majority half of my businesses needs. The other half are the wants. I got a lot of people that relocate in, so I know at least half of them that relocate in need a house. The other half I feel like they want, I want a bigger house.
I want a smaller house. Like they, they don't need it. They want it. And when you want something. Sometimes that want fades or something more important comes into play with it and their real estate needs get put on hold. So by going back reengaging it, what we're really doing is reengaging that dream of them having that home ownership.
Bigger, smaller, and we can go in and do it in targeted groups, but then I don't have to worry about messing up my entire database. Otherwise I always tell the [00:18:00] story on a reverse prospecting that we do at CINC University. For years I would always go in and. Target my entire database, and then I would just hit these blanketed emails that would go out to everybody that was on that list.
Fast forward, there was one week where I was sending it to a client that I was already having a conversation with.
Troy Mixon: Yeah.
Lance Simpson: So now he's getting mad saying, why do you keep sending me these homes knowing this is what I want? Yeah, and I had my agent say, you're blasting my sphere of influence, which that's no good either.
And so I had to really dive in and say, what are we looking at? What do we want to do? And now we have a target. Every month I focus on an area of my database. I can go into my database and say, gimme all my attempted contacts in Franklin 500 to a million. That's one little segment of my database now that I can go in and say, I'm gonna work this list on the attempted contacts and gimme everybody that hasn't logged in over 30 days.
And I want to try to get them to get reengaged, log back in, rebuild that dream [00:19:00] and see what percentage of those people that you can come back out and have that conversation with. At the end of the day, we have our pipeline stages. What new lead attempted contact contacted.
Appointment set appointment met active client, pending client, past client. The goal is to get everybody through all of those stages. Unfortunately, sometimes they hit that trap door and it moves them back to attempted contact and we gotta rerun 'em through the mouse trap.
Troy Mixon: Yeah, I see what you're saying.
And is it something when folks are like, because I saw one person mention of. Hey they're on a team, right? So if they're not maybe the owner of the platform, and I could be just assuming they're, or maybe they are the owner, but is there anything specifically for someone who just sees their little, like their leads right?
And their, that they can be doing to make sure they're, or does it need to be everyone on? Yeah. Not well.
Lance Simpson: So
Troy Mixon: She's the owner for, so she did clarify that She's the owner. He is the owner, sorry the owner. Yep. Yep. Yep.
Lance Simpson: So I look at it like this. I, so I'm the owner of [00:20:00] my platform,
Troy Mixon: so
Lance Simpson: not That's my bad.
What's that?
Troy Mixon: It was not so my bad. It was not. Thank you Chris.
Lance Simpson: I'm the owner of it and we do the pond lead routing, which is there, not gonna answer a bunch of questions on the pond on this one. That's a whole other rabbit hole. But it's my, I feel like it's my duty responsible to keep that.
Pipeline or that pond organized, clean, ready for my agents to go in and do stuff. If it's done on a round robin basis. And you're an agent yeah. As an agent, it's your responsibility to keep your house clean. You can go in and look at that and say, Hey, here's how I look at this.
And it's no different than if I'm importing my sphere of influence, have I sold you a home? If I have, you're gonna be a past client. Yeah. And then we got little things that we like to turn on. I'll turn on a monthly property report for you. I have your address, so I'll turn on the marketing report.
All my past clients, I turn on a signin alert because if you log in, I want to know your logging in so we can resell you a house. In fact, I was just telling you the [00:21:00] story right before we jumped on. This one had a lead by database over 4,000 days ago. Google Lead now. He is a past client. We have sold homes.
My agent has him back under contract for 1.17 million, closing the middle of November. Sign alert was on. We continue sending him stuff out so when the guy got ready to look again, he's getting our property alerts. Logs back into the system. If you have a past client that logs back into the system and you get alert at Troy, what should you pick up immediately?
Troy Mixon: Yeah.
Lance Simpson: Get the phone and go out and give 'em a call. And so Exactly. Yeah. So come third week of November, we've, we got a 1.17 closing from a 4,000 day old Google lead. That CINC generated for us.
Troy Mixon: Yeah. That's awesome. That's awesome. Your boy Chris Maddox just messaged me two nights ago with one that he double ended one.
A million dollar
Lance Simpson: yeah. I got that same message. Yeah. Yeah. So those are my past clients. If I'm currently working with you, meaning we're gonna go out and look, you're an active client [00:22:00] if you're. If I'm communicating with you and you're communicating back with me, but you're not ready yet you're contacted and I have a reminder no more than 30 days out, all the rest of my leads are attempted contact.
Troy Mixon: Okay?
Lance Simpson: If I went in right now, I've got 12,000 leads. Let me, I've got my other computer here. When I go in and I look at that, I will tell you what I have with my contacted dun. Pipeline stages contacted. Gimme a second while it's pulling up.
Turn off my agents.
Troy Mixon: We're getting a lot of questions about, tell us more about the signin alerts.
Lance Simpson: All right, so I would 11,000.
We got [00:23:00] 11,162 leads. How many you think I have in my contacted pipeline stage?
Troy Mixon: I feel like it's a trick question, and this is where you're gonna realize that class wasn't always my strong suit. That's all right. So 11, I'm gonna say attempt to contact, I'm gonna say 10,000.
Lance Simpson: I have 11,162 total leads. 30 of them are in the contacted pipeline stage.
Troy Mixon: Oh, contact, okay. Yeah. I see. Sorry. But here's
Lance Simpson: the deal that everyone's wow, that's so low. Is it though? Those are the 30 leads that we've had conversations with that it's kinda like the bats box, right? Like we're, yeah they're responsive to us.
They still need or wanna do real estate. And, they're either actively logging in, looking at our website. We've got some of them that are not actively logging in, but by God, every month that I reach out to [00:24:00] 'em, they respond.
Troy Mixon: Yep. Yeah. They see you as the consultant. I think that people forget sometimes because we're mostly all salespeople that are within our field talking about this, and it's just my opinion that they forget that we're, when you.
Are the trusted resource and they keep coming back to you for. Any type of question they have, like that's the place you want to be, right? It's not necessarily that you have to sell 'em within that first two days if you do great, right? But when you're the trusted resource, that means that they'll talk about you.
That means they'll send you referrals. That means that they'll, that they look at you as their guy or gal. I will say a lot of people did better in class than me. 'cause I see that a lot of 'em had around your contacted your contacted number. But yeah, that, that's a good share.
So
Lance Simpson: I, I saw Erica's in here about the trending leads. I like trending leads, but don't make that a priority over calling your P one twos and threes. Schedule your P ones and twos and threes first. [00:25:00] Get those calls knocked out of the way, and then if you have time, go back into the trending lead and retarget those ones secondary.
That, that would be my. My one there. You said somebody was asking how do you turn on the signin alert?
So
Troy Mixon: couple tell us more about it and
Lance Simpson: yeah, so super easy to do. If you click on the lead's name, it opens up into the leads detail area. Under activity, you're gonna see the little subscriptions.
It'll say filter subscriptions. Under subscriptions, there's a toggle that says, my alerts. Then it turns on to sign an alert. So what happens is every time that lead logs in. You're gonna get notified. Now, here's the deal. Don't turn that on for everybody. I asked all the time. Everyone's oh my God, that's awesome.
I'm gonna turn it on my most active leads. No, don't do it. I like to turn it on my unsubscribes, so I get notified when they log in so I can get'em a call. Or my past clients, my, my people that have already bought from me. So when they log back in, I know they're looking at possibly making another move or buying investment property.
I keep it pretty basic. If [00:26:00] you turn it on to somebody that is constantly looking or it's gonna alert you too much, what happens is it becomes white noise and you're like, ah, it's just that. And then you start ignoring it. So keep it pretty specific.
Troy Mixon: When we follow up, can we have maybe, is there like a, some documents we can send out for folks on how to do that or how to turn that on?
Or is that in the resource? There's probably something in the
Lance Simpson: help section that talks about this alert.
Troy Mixon: Yeah. Yeah, I can, we can look at that, I would think. But I'll look at that. It's all, it's one of the, one of the things that I wanna make sure that we because I know it can be hard guys, when you can't necessarily share live databases to folks because of, the contact information.
Yeah. That was one of those,
Lance Simpson: We had talked about that. 'cause as much as I'd love to be able to share my screen, we do it at Think University, but there's no recordings.
Troy Mixon: Yep. Yep. This being
Lance Simpson: recorded, we actually have our live database of their emails, addresses, phone numbers, and I don't think that's covered in the terms of [00:27:00] services and agreements.
Yeah. That the lead signed in on. Yeah. So let's jump back. 'cause I know people are trying to like, go off onto some other areas of
Troy Mixon: Yeah.
Lance Simpson: The sign alert and sick numbers and all of that. Like I wanna stay more focused on like there's definitely help sections and stuff that'll do that.
But let's talk about getting our database organized, getting it cleaned up. What does that look like? Yeah. So again, daily, I'm out there, I'm going through the different pipeline stages. I go into no stage set. If there's anybody in there, I gotta go through that list and determine where do they go.
If it's overwhelming at the end of the day, like I look at it and be like, man, there's way too many here. I'm just gonna default and move them all to attempted contact. Here's the worst thing that happens is they log in, you call them and realize it's a past client, have a great conversation with them, and then at that point you can update 'em in your database.
Yeah. Contacted, I'll look at my contacted and I'm being, again, [00:28:00] scrolling through that list and I'm making sure that, they're either being followed up with or they're still actively logging in. Appointment set, go in and you look at your appointment set. And I looked at mine the other day and I was like, shoot, I, and in real life, I was guilty.
We had three of 'em that were in there that. They hadn't logged in three months and I, so I had to reach out to my agents. I was like, Hey, is this really an appointment set or are you just trying to get extra credit?
Troy Mixon: Yeah. Yeah.
Lance Simpson: He's nah, my bad. I forgot to move 'em in the pipeline stages.
So we got them move there. Here's where it also happens. We get 'em a new active client, meaning they're ready to list or go out and look at homes. Not everybody that's willing to go look at homes with us turns into an offer or writing a contract. We leave them there and we forget about 'em. If you're no longer showing 'em homes, move 'em back to contacted with some kind of a reminder.
No more than 30 days. If they're not worth that reminder anymore, put 'em back to attempted contact. Yeah, [00:29:00] a month. It. Same thing with pending. I've watched people that they'll have a pending contract. Then appraisal, home inspection financing falls through something falls through and they're no longer pending.
They leave them there they're no longer pending. You gotta get 'em back into that right bucket. I actually have a safe filter that I create once a month that I go out. It's contacted Pipeline State, they've logged in the last 90 to 5,000 days. And when I scan through that list. If I notice my agents haven't touched them in the last 90 days, they're gonna get moved.
Yeah. They're not logging in and they're not communicating with us. They're getting moved back to attempted contact. Yeah. And the mass action that you can do, you can select everybody on that list and then do a mass action dropdown that says, move pipeline stages.
Troy Mixon: Yep. And I did see a couple asks that when that's moved, is there any automations that are going out separately in there?
Is there anything that someone should worry about [00:30:00] what might be set up in the CRM? If you move like that, it would trigger
Lance Simpson: or no. If anything, that's gonna help when you're doing the reigniting, if you have behavioral set up and then you're using ai when I move stuff back. They log back in and it's been a little while.
Yes, sir. Behaviorals gonna kick off. Yeah. Then if you are also using ai, when that behavioral kicks off, then Alex is gonna jump right back into that conversation and help resubmit that relationship with us.
Troy Mixon: Yeah, and that's been the coolest thing. Just from, I've, 12 years on the tech side of real estate that's been amazing to me is to watch Alex.
How she's grown just within our product line and the way she's handled some leads has been pretty cool to see. Not to say that replaces everything or not to. Yeah. I know at the coach you're probably like, look where you going with this? But No, you're good. It's just been, it's just been awesome to, some funny conversations.
You, you see
Lance Simpson: it it, so again, at Think University, it's so [00:31:00] funny, whenever you sit there and you're like you watch the room. So we were in Dallas, I think we had 84 people last week. It was a mix of like big teams, solo agents, right? The everything in between. It really comes down to your resources.
And if you have a lot of resources, maybe you don't need as much automation. If you don't have as much automation, you're gonna have less unsubscribes. But when you don't have a lot of resources and you're a solo agent or just like a smaller team, yeah, it's nice having that safety net of behavioral messages.
Alex, picking up some of the slack for where we left off. Just know I call it what's that show? Gold Rush. If I go out and I pan for gold, I'm less likely to like. Miss Gold pieces, it's gonna be in that little pan. But when I start running through that, what is it, the sluice box, like in the tailings coming out, there's probably gold left in those tailings, but how much money did they make on the other end,
Troy Mixon: yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure. It's been cool to see. I feel like last week we had a cool little surge of people just sharing some [00:32:00] unique stories. I always encourage everyone to do that in the owner's community 'cause that's just awesome to see. In today's day and age, now everyone shares wins like we probably should.
So it's cool to just see everyone's like wins, whether it be a short wind 'cause yeah, those are, sure. Those are. Everyone's favorites that are the cherry pick, so to speak. But it's also amazing to hear how many people's success can come off of just one person, right? Like one lead that they got, like your story earlier, there was one in the community where they had mentioned, four different transactions right off of one lead.
And it's just, it's awesome to see that. But they're all like, I'm curious to how many folks in our chat today have been to. To one of the st. U'S that Lance has ran. 'cause that's usually what I see in the CRMs all the time is Hey, I've learned so much from Lance. Like it's, I said, I gotta see all his fans from those he's helped from.
And it's cool. It's cool that how many even come back in. 'cause What would you say, Lance, from your years of people that come in, get [00:33:00] that structure cleaned up database, but then. Don't realize it and it slipped away. Is there anything that kind of an overall trend or is it just No, they just didn't stay with the basics?
Lance Simpson: They, it is staying with the basics. And what happens is, and that it, it's so funny 'cause everyone's like, where's the advanced class? And we're like, this is all in one. If you do, yeah, this, you are gonna make money and, and it is that foundation, but. We've got some of the great ones you were talking about, Chris, Chris was actually in Dallas.
Chris is probably in the lead for one of the most CINC you's attended. We got Daniel that comes to a bunch of 'em. A lot of people know Josh Rumble out there. As they're all coming through and then that's where their foundations have all been built.
Troy Mixon: Yeah.
Lance Simpson: And growing off on it.
You gotta come more than once, but. Don't feel you gotta come every month. I always say, come, yeah, learn what you can implement. And then whenever you come back you're gonna be wearing a little bit of a different hat and you're gonna hear things a little bit different. Yeah. And then you feel to absorb that point [00:34:00] to, to go back in and then implement a little bit more.
And you know where I was at in my business in 2013. It's different than today. There's different roads that we have taken to get to where we're at today and and as you go into different growth spurts and what your makeup of your team looks like, we gotta make a few changes.
We to a hundred transactions is not gonna be the exact same thing that gets you to 200 transactions.
Troy Mixon: Yeah. I appreciate that. What is there any things to that maybe I haven't asked or we haven't asked because we went on some tangents of that. You definitely wanna make sure you get the point across or for people to look into to talk to their success team.
Success coach or to call in like some kind of strategy points.
Lance Simpson: I think the leading off of this call. Everybody that's on here, especially if you're an owner, you need to take the next 30 minutes after this call and go through your database and start getting 'em organized. Now, you might not [00:35:00] be able to get 'em all done.
You might have to go back to your team to be like, Hey, tell, make a list. Hey, you got all of these people here. Are you communicating with them all? If not, yeah, we're gonna move them. And yeah, don't feel bad about moving them. Just get that data organized.
Troy Mixon: Any laws of the land that you keep, like any laws of the land for, Hey, you can only, if you're the team owner and you've got a team of four any that you say, Hey, you can only have this many attempted contacts, or.
Lance Simpson: It's not attempted contacts, but so we run what's called the pond, the contact. So all leads go into one main account, and then all my agents are allowed to go in and fish that pond. As the wildlife resource officer or our pond, I limit them to 15 leads in their own personal account.
But the only way we move that lead to their personal account is it's an appointment set at the end of the day. I feel like it's my duty to help my agents close deals.
Troy Mixon: Yep.
Lance Simpson: And, so as a team, that's what I love about the pond. As a team, the whole team nurtures everybody while they're [00:36:00] at a nurture process.
But then as they become appointments set, those people that are setting the appointments are grabbing these things and they're ready to go. And that 15 is their next 15 paychecks.
Troy Mixon: Yeah.
Lance Simpson: I don't feel like I, I don't know. When I talk with a lot of people, I feel it. It, there's like a little bit of a hoarder.
Mentality of I need to have 'em contacted because if I move you to contacted or appointment set, it makes me feel like you're,
Troy Mixon: That's where me as a sales guy, I feel like not saying I would, I'm saying with the sales reps just, and I mean that in any industry, it feels like that everyone worries about their pie.
Guinea cut. So I didn't know if there was something that you do to map that or is it just like a, I used to tell brokers and team leaders all the time. At the end of the day, if your agents don't trust you. That's a whole no system can solve that, but
Lance Simpson: yeah.
Troy Mixon: And
Lance Simpson: that, that's why again, like you stay in the pond until it's an appointment set.
Once it's an appointment set, then whoever that agent was that booked that appointment takes over the ownership of it until it closes and then we [00:37:00] move it back to the pond. But the rest of it, and again, it all they all stay in that pond and attempted contact and contacted. For that long-term nurturing follow up.
What that allows is my agents is to go out and focus on their next one. Take the, this week is fall break up here in Tennessee, and Matt's got two young boys. So when I was talking with him towards the end of last week after we got back from Dallas, he's Hey, I'm gonna be out of pocket a little bit next week, fall break.
We're gonna head out to the mountains. And I'm like, cool. Go. Do you think he's got some reminders that are due this week in the database? And he, Matt's really good about it. He's Hey, I'm still gonna log in. And I was like, but if you don't, guess what? We got agents that are here that can pick up the slack.
And so that means that all of our reminders are getting done. I would rather have more quality leads and contacted appointments. Set, appointment met. Yeah. Like I would rather have less leads in there, but quality than I
Troy Mixon: get what you're saying. Yeah. Move them
Lance Simpson: all [00:38:00] in there because I don't know, it's.
That's just reporting the numbers.
Troy Mixon: Yeah. Yeah. How many do you really have? And that's the, yeah, if they, even the age old marketing, like I've been sitting with I remember I was at Tom Ferry's office many years ago, and it was that mindset of, hey, how many contacts? 'Cause he's the same, that same verbiage, right?
Where he's 300. If he said something about his, and I was like, it seems so low that I was like, excuse me. Like how many? He's i'm not talking about just con, I've got plenty of contact information, but like how many do I really have that I'm marketing to? That I'm in direct conversations with?
And he's because everything else is just, either maybe trying to boost an ego or maybe you're trying to, compensate for something. But it's it's crazy to see like that side of, 'cause I'm not saying the other one doesn't work. You know better than me. I just, it's it's just interesting.
Lance Simpson: But again, the what? By doing this and keeping my database organized, this now lets me create different re-engagement campaigns. Yeah. And [00:39:00] so like I, I joke around about some of the silly stuff we do. We'll create pocket listings like what do we got Halloween coming up after that?
We got Thanksgiving. There was years ago, Matt and I were arguing over the best way to cook a Turkey. And originally from Michigan. I'm like, roasted. And he's no way, man. Deep fried. Which both of us, deep fried. All both of us agree now. Smoked is the best, but we were joking with it. So what we did is we went out and we created a templated email and then two pocket listings with two turkeys in there.
And we sent that to, now at this point we sent it to our entire database. This was years ago. Like I, I don't recommend that anymore. Yeah, but we got some engagement on that. And because here's what happens is if a lead in my database, they're not opening up emails and they're not logging into the system, at some point, all of our automation slowly turns off.
Troy Mixon: Yeah.
Lance Simpson: That's no good. So we have to manually send stuff out there to try to get like [00:40:00] click bait. Try to get them to open up because the second you open up an email, my automation turns back on again. We like to do that well instead of trying to blast it to the entire database, because now like our, we got quality scores for email providers and things like that.
We wanna make sure that we're more targeted. And as your database grows, you need to be a little bit more targeted with it. So I generate leads in Nashville, Franklin Hendersonville, Mount Juliet. So I've got all these little niche target markets that I can every month. I pick one. Who do I wanna focus on?
Who do I want to focus on this month? And, we'll, maybe today's I don't know what today's National Day is, but we did one, one year. It was pumpkin cheesecake day, and so we ended up popping out some, what's your favorite? Today's pumpkin cheesecake day, but what's your favorite pumpkin?
Is it pumpkin latte? Is it pumpkin pie? Is it pumpkin cheesecake? And we sent it to that, but we also created these things around certain price points. The cool thing when you create these pocket listings, say I did one in Franklin and I said, it's [00:41:00] a $750 latte, or $750,000 latte. It's gonna pull similar homes to what?
I built this thing around. So now while you're playing along with my little, I call 'em reindeer games, you're going through as a consumer, looking at everything on that sheet, right? And then all of a sudden you start seeing similar properties.
If you're looking in Franklin, and I'm sending you stuff that our house is in Franklin, I'm more targeted to you, right?
If you're looking at Hendersonville, I'm not gonna send you a retargeting campaign for Franklin. 'cause you have no desire, you don't care about those ones. So that allows me to go in and generate these little retargeting campaigns. And be able to kinda have fun with it. I'm seeing some people are coming back.
Must be Taco Day today? Yeah. Taco
Troy Mixon: Tuesday. Yeah. Taco
Lance Simpson: Tuesday, yeah. So just, it's fun things to get people reengaged back in because I still go back in and I say there's a lot of people in my database that thought about watching, oh, national Taco Estate, and then something in their life changed and they quit thinking about it.[00:42:00]
So it's our job to replant those seeds. Fertilize it in hopes that yeah, we're able to pick them out again. And this just makes it easy. We have a multi-prong approach that we do with that. I do some of my silly stuff. Matt's got some campaigns he'll send out with. For those that don't know, I think you, Matt Feathers he handles all my automation, all of our texting.
He works directly with JF and those guys over there on the AI to help make that product even better.
Troy Mixon: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. First, like I know we're coming up on time thank you. I know it can be a lot and you've just coming off of a St HU training the travel and everything to be able to meet with us and chat with us and we'll send out this to everyone that attended.
We'll send out the recording. We'll also try to maybe give some tidbits that folks could do to, maybe some reminders, some ahas to want. Three or four is something we can get with marketing to, to add in there so that we, get you in this step. I would always say go to CINC you, right?
Because, you guys do an amazing job of not only the, the [00:43:00] events and moving around the country. But also, you've even done a lot more of viral stuff or whether, if we get feedback of Hey, have Lance back home, but get in the weeds of, not to sign you up for it, Lance, but if we get feedback on certain topics, and it, 'cause I get it, like sometimes getting somewhere could be tough.
Like I'm more than happy to continue to hound and ask him. But you do an awesome job of, making sure folks understand the system, sharing your stories, but, keeping it simple. I think that's the thing we always, as sales folks want that great magical pill.
But at the end of the day, sometimes keeping it simple, stupid. That's what my granddad used to say. And it's it's really, it really goes a long way.
Lance Simpson: Yeah. Now I'm trying to think of what I can do to help 'em, the ones that were around here to be like, Hey, let's walk through. I don't know if maybe we can do like a.
Another one of these with the attendees that were just on this one? Yeah, like a prop one or something. Maybe get 'em to pop on a Zoom, but we can't record it.
Yeah. And more of a VIP invite since they made this one here. Yeah. And then I can kinda actually do a share screen [00:44:00] with them as well.
Okay. Cool. Yeah, no, if that's something that, if that's something that some of you guys would love the idea.
Troy Mixon: Hey, are you getting a lot of yeses in here? So I'll help. I'll help you. Oh yeah. A ton of 'em. So cool. It sounds like we might be sharing calendars again and yeah.
We'll get to that so that and appreciate you doing that because I know you have your, real estate as well. But yeah, it's always a wealth of knowledge and much appreciated, my man. And looking forward to continuing to make more successful thing clients, right?
And yes, he's, are you gonna be in Atlanta next month? I said, yes. I'm, you're always, IM,
Lance Simpson: I'm at all the things universities.
Troy Mixon: Yeah. I was like I'm pretty sure he knew that answer, but it's,
Lance Simpson: it's funny because since I'm up talking, the first day and a half, I noticed this in Dallas.
I've actually seen it in the past where since I'm up talking, they always go in the back to Matt or Zach for like help.
So then the afternoon that Matt goes up and talks. They wait until Matt's done talking to go back up and ask them for help [00:45:00] because they're so trained to that.
But I absolutely love this. This is one of those that when it comes to database clean up and stuff, I know there's some people out there that are trying to charge money and stuff to like, Hey, I'll clean your database up for you, save you money. You can do it yourself. And if I gotta jump on a quick webinar to help you guys and give some tidbits, those are all little things that super easy to do. I always tell everyone you can follow me on the, facebook on my Facebook page you just gotta put up with a lot of my deep content because, we do a lot of that. But Facebook messenger's always a great way. If you got like system questions like Hey, as a team, how would you run this?
Or, I'm struggling with this one. If you got stuff that's broke, I'm not technical support, I can't help you there. Stick with technical support. Yeah.
Troy Mixon: Yeah. Awesome.
Lance Simpson: Really quick, Carolyn had asked percentage of success. Once the database is cleaned up, comes down to your daily habits, at the end of the day it's really your daily habits.
This just makes it a lot easier for you to know what targets you want [00:46:00] to go after. I, I always say this, if you have zero business, you need to spend all day prospecting, spend all day on the phone. As you start getting business and you start setting up some of the appointments. Then you can scale back to 90%, 60%, but at some point you still need to prospect minimum of two hours a day, five days a week, once in the morning, one hour in the afternoon.
And and I know some of y'all jump on those conversion classes with Christina and John. Those are helpful on what to say on the phone. And yeah we'll pick out some more of these contents to help you be a little bit more successful utilizing the platform as well.
Troy Mixon: Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. Hope the weather clears up in Tennessee. Hopefully it's not coming to me in Charleston, but but thank you my friend, and see all you guys very soon.
Lance Simpson: Sounds good. Thanks bro.
Troy Mixon: Alright, brother. Yes sir. Thank you. Yeah, you
Lance Simpson: too. Bye-Bye.