Ghost leads. They’re enough to drive a sane property manager nuts.
A property management prospect goes to all the trouble to search for ‘property management your city’, find an ad, click on that ad, read the landing page, put their personal information into it, and request a quote from you. In other words, this was no accident. They were interested at least in SOME way. AND YET...these people become ‘ghosts’ at a maddening rate. Disappear. Ignore your phone calls, texts, unsubscribe from your follow up emails.
We write about how to decrease these ghost leads in our book “We Secret Shopped You”, but what I’ll address here is not how to decrease ghost leads, but rather how we deal with ghost leads from a billing standpoint.
Like everything we do, we start by asking “what is fair?”. On the one hand, why should someone pay for a lead that they never make contact with? Doesn’t seem fair.
On the other hand, what if the reason the BDM is not making contact are due to flaws in their follow up system? For example, we have had property managers who don’t bother to make a phone call at ALL and then want to get a credit for that lead due to ‘non response’. If you had provided that lead, would that seem fair to you to credit a lead in a case like that? Likely not.
We have wrestled with this. We have tried many things and this is the fairest arrangement we’ve found so far.
We approve 100% of ghost leads… but there is fine print.
We will always approve your non response invalidation if your request meets the following 3 criteria:
More than 14 days since the lead was received. Non-response invalidations are not approved if lead is less than 14 days old to allow prospect time to respond.
Less than 30 days since lead was received. After 30 days, invalidations are disabled. We have to draw the line somewhere.
Six attempts have been made. 6 total follow ups have been made to prospect, of which 3 are either phone calls or texts.
Non-response/ghost lead credits are applied to your bill when your lifetime lead volume is such that your request is 5% or less of your lifetime market lead volume.
Example: 60 lifetime Geek leads and you make 5 requests for a 'non response' invalidation. All 5 requests would be approved if follow up criteria had been met. However since 5% of 60 leads is 3 leads, only 3 of the non response credits would be applied to your bill. Your next remaining non response credit would be applied after 20 more valid leads came in for that market (since 5% of 20 leads = 1 lead). This process would repeat as needed.
5% of billed leads as a metric for applying ghost lead credits was not just created out of thin air by us: it’s the average invalidation rate for ghost/non response leads across the country for our leads. We think using an average like that as a benchmark for applying credits is fair. It balances out the responsibility that we have to provide quality leads and the PM companies responsibility to have solid follow up processes. If you are a company with good follow up practices, you WANT us to handle things this way.
Why? Because poor performers drive up lead costs for good performers like you.
Let me explain how this happens:
If we approve and apply credits immediately 100% of the time for every company. They get a lead, don’t follow up well, and what do they do? Ask for a refund. We still of course have advertising costs that have to be paid. So the net of this is that our expenses go WAY up due to something we have zero control over.
We aren’t guessing about this: we tried this approach, trusting that every company is following up leads in an excellent manner. Well, that was an ‘education’ for us.
Turns out that some PM companies are great at follow up, some are meh, and some really really suck.
This ‘everyone is doing a good job with follow up, so let’s credit ghost leads from every company immediately’ approach was a financial disaster for us; we lost tens of thousands of dollars learning this lesson.
So our policy on dripping ghost lead credits rewards those companies with good follow up by keeping their lead prices constant. It penalizes companies with poor follow up since they will accrue ghost credits that can only be applied over time. This is an incentive for them to improve their follow up, which we think is where the emphasis should be.
(Important note: credits for any leads have no cash value; if you cancel your services, any accumulated credits will be canceled at the same time.)