Q: “Denise, I am a newer agent and need to generate some leads. I have a direct mail company who keeps calling saying I can mail to thousands of people every month and it won’t cost me too much. Should I do it? I am also doing some online lead generation with another company and am working a lot of open houses.”

A: While I love that you are open to the idea of different kinds of lead generation, I actually want you to slow down a bit. Doing a lot of different kinds of lead generation means you need to have materials to serve all those different clients if you want to generate leads effectively.

For example, effective open houses means you need to have compelling material at the open house to appeal to the different personality types, maybe a buyer package in the event you have an interested buyer, information for attendees to take afterwards, information and materials to follow-up, etc. I would rather you take the time and energy to really develop that system and refine it before you move onto geographical farming for listings. Otherwise, if you haven’t taken the time to really finesse that one system, you may be spending hours each week at open houses that you aren’t going to get leads from.

Agents are always throwing money at their lead generation problems and doing what I call $49ing themselves to death. But what you really need to throw instead of money is your time. Make sure your materials are up to par and really give people a clear picture of what they can expect when they work with you.

So slow down. Really get that open house system so effective it wows potential buyers. Make sure you have compelling information for the buyers you connect with at an open house. Because remember, it isn’t just what you do at the open house that is important – it is what you do to follow up afterwards and keep that potential transaction moving forward that will affect your bottom line.

Once you have that mastered, then you can add more.