Sphere Of Influence For Real Estate Agents
First, what does SOI mean in real estate?
The SOI for a real estate agent is the people that know you or have a connection to you in some way. This can be as simple as your family, friends, co-workers, clients, and vendors. If someone knows who you are or what you do and has had any experience with your company or brand then they are part of your sphere of influence.
SOI is not just about knowing people but also about being known by others. You don't have to be friends with everyone on Facebook or get invited to every event but if someone knows who you are then they could refer business your way because of their knowledge of how great (or even mediocre) of an agent they think that you are!
How to Grow Your Sphere for Real Estate Agents
Build relationships with other professionals.
Get to know the people who work in other related industries, such as mortgage lenders, home builders, and title companies. When you need to refer a client to another professional, you'll already have a relationship in place.
Having a network of professionals will also help you tremendously when a client needs someone. By making the introduction, you benefit the vendor and also your client.
Stay connected with past clients.
Make sure to stay in touch with your past clients, even after the sale is complete. There are different ways to go about this and I recommend starting to do real estate pop-bys. This can be done monthly or quarterly and will help keep you front of mind. Some other ideas to stay connected:
- Put their "homeversary" in your CRM
- Add their birthdays to your calendar
- Make sure you are connected on social media
- Add to specific SOI email campaign
- Add them to receive notifications when you post a new blog
Attend community events.
There are always events and meetup groups going on and this is a great way to not only find potential clients but find others that enjoy a hobby just as much as you do!
Here are spot spots to check for upcoming meetups and Events:
Give back and volunteer
Volunteering is a great way to meet new people and give back to the community. As an agent you already have strong communication, negotiation and problem-solving skills which are all important in helping people find solutions to problems they may be experiencing. Giving back can help grow your sphere of influence for real estate agents as you can help others in need while building lasting relationships with people that may one day be clients or referrers.
SOI Marketing
The goal with any sphere of influence marketing is to simply remind them you can always take an additional client. When you think about your SOI even further, they are or are soon to be your friends. That said, marketing may not be in the terms that we think marketing to be.
For example, simply calling your SOI list every month or quarter could be considered "marketing". Now, here's what to keep in mind when making these calls:
Always start your call by asking if they know anyone looking to buy or sell. THEN hop into catching up. Otherwise, they may think you just called them and chatted for 15min to see if they can make an introduction.
SOI Calling Script
Here is the best script to use when calling your SOI:
Talk to them how you normally talk to a friend. That's it.
There's no need to follow a "script" when calling SOI. Yes, we want to ask "do you know anyone looking to buy or sell?" but any pre-written script will come off as extremely inauthentic.
How to Organize Sphere of Influence Real Estate Contacts
The two options I have used are to add my SOI into my CRM and to use a separate database, like airtable, to manage my SOI.
Managing your SOI in a separate database will help you organize your contacts and when it comes time to market to just your SOI, a separate database will come in handy.
Within Airtable, I have reminders setup for:
- Their birthdays
- Next time I need to call them
- Homeversary
I also use this to store information about their kids, birthdays, and a recap of what we spoke about last. This comes in handy when you call a few weeks or months later, you can follow up on the things you last discussed.
Conclusion
In this blog post, we’ve talked about what SOI means for real estate agents and how to grow it. We even shared some tips on how to engage with people who might have influence over your business. The most important thing is that you keep growing your SOI by staying in contact with people and building relationships—not just during the holidays but all year round!