Should you keep making prospecting calls in a week when you have three listings, two closings and a buyer under contract?<\/p>\n
Every agent knows the answer is yes, and almost every agent skips the block anyway, because the question as asked is the wrong one. Nobody chooses to stop prospecting. They choose to handle the inspection objection on Maple, then the appraisal on Alder, then the photographer who did not show, and at four o’clock the block is gone and it was never a decision. So the useful question is a narrower one. In a week when the calendar is full of the work that prospecting produced, which calls get cut, which calls get smaller, and which calls never get touched no matter what is happening on Maple?<\/p>\n
Look at the records behind the three signs. None of them started last week. One came from an expired seller who said “call me after the school year” in April. One is a landlord whose lease-end date you logged eleven months ago. One is a FSBO who gave you a sixty-day plan in June. The pipeline stages<\/a> piece calls those dated records, stage three, and the point of looking at them now is to see the lag. The conversation happened months before the listing did. The calls you make this week are not for this week. They are for the quarter after next, and the quarter after next is exactly when the current listings will have closed and the calendar will be empty.<\/p>\n That is the whole mechanism behind what agents call feast or famine. Neither mood nor market cycle explains it. It is a ninety-day hole in stage three, dug during a busy month and discovered when the busy month ends, and the only way to fill it retroactively is to have not dug it.<\/p>\n A full block is not going to happen in a week like this, and pretending otherwise produces the all-or-nothing skip. What works is a cut order, decided in advance, so that the shrinking happens in the right place.<\/p>\n The rotation shrinks first.<\/strong> The unworked list, stage one, the fresh expireds and the farm households and the aged FSBOs, is where volume lives, and volume is what a busy week cannot afford. Cut it to a fraction. Ten dials instead of sixty. The list will still be there next week and the prospecting schedule<\/a> has recovery rules for exactly this.<\/p>\n Event calls hold if the event is yours.<\/strong> A just-sold call on a street where a closing just happened, or a just-listed call around the house you took on Tuesday, is prospecting that the busy week generated, and it should be made this week because the event is fresh. More on that below.<\/p>\n Dated calls never shrink.<\/strong> Stage three is the priority lane, and every record in it is a homeowner who named a date and was told you would call. “Call me after the school year” was a promise, and a promise kept a week late is a different thing from a promise kept on the day. A busy week is the week most likely to break those promises, because the dated call feels less urgent than the appraisal, and it is the week in which breaking them costs the most, because the dated records are the next quarter’s listings. Whatever else goes, the dated calls are made on their dates. If there are four, that is a fifteen-minute block. If there are none, the pipeline has a problem this article cannot fix.<\/p>\nThe cut order<\/h2>\n