It’s time to talk about your real estate pipeline. Pipelines help you visualize and manage the sales process. It’s an organized way to follow a lead's progress before it turns into a sold. 

Pipelines are used in almost any sales environment. They show you where you are in the prospecting process and how many leads are at each stage. The best analogy for explaining how pipelines work is a flight of steps. Leads take steps up a staircase on their way to become a sold, the goal at the top. 

When used well, pipeline tracking helps you close sales more often and more efficiently. Almost all successful agents use pipelines. It’s essential to understanding your own game and it keeps you inspired in your game. Watching your contacts move through your pipeline parallels you stepping up towards your personal revenue goal.  

So what are the steps in the Real Estate Pipeline? Let’s go through them one by one.

Step 1. Contact Information - This is the starting point of the pipeline and the beginning of the prospect’s sales journey. If your pipeline is working efficiently, you’ll always have far more at this stage than anywhere else. 

Step 2. In contact - This includes when you are applying the 7 Touch strategy and dropping by more information each month. You are also reaching out to them, attempting to further warm the lead. This is separate from “getting the lead.” You are always adding new leads to step 1. At the same time, you are nurturing ongoing leads here in step 2 of the pipeline.

Step 3: engaging.  Leads in this stage are directly engaging with you.  It is no longer one way communication. They are engaging back. Your relationship is growing, even if they are not listing with you yet. This is an important step to reach. 

Step 4: Your lead becomes “qualified.” In this step, you are officially helping your client. Many agents begin their pipeline at this stage. However, when a lead is on this step, they are technically already in the middle of the staircase. Here you are having very qualified conversations. You have probably performed a CMA for their home. You may even be visiting other listings to help them get to know the market and start planning their move. 

Step 5: “Under Contract.” This is another milestone step. They’ve officially listed with you! You have a contract and listed their home for them. 

Step 6:  “sold.” This is worthy of celebration, as you’re almost at the top of the staircase, and you are about to earn your commission! You haven’t won the sale yet though. There may be some closing terms to meet. The reality is that sometimes sales do fall through at this late stage. 

Step 7: The final pipeline step is “Closed.”  The terms of closing have been met and the deal is done. This stage is your ultimate goal. Now is when you can celebrate it as a true win! You are at the top of the staircase! 

Now let’s talk about another important step - Reflection. This isn’t really part of the official pipeline.  But I consider it an important bonus step. It’s when you take one more step up the staircase. From there, you can look back down over the entire process. You won. You completed your sale but what can you learn from it? Could you improve anything in the process? 

It’s all about seeing the big picture. Playing your game with elite precision requires you to give yourself a high level overview of what’s happening. You need to take that step to reflect after every victory. That’s how you’ll improve your winning rate and your profitability. After all, more solds are how you’ll get paid. And that’s what everyone wants in this game, right? 

Pipeline Maturity is also important. 

When I say that, what do I mean? Pipeline maturity is about keeping your leads moving.

You don’t want too many immature leads that aren’t going anywhere. That means you don’t want leads to get stuck or build up at any one stage. For example, you don’t want your entire pipeline to be leads “in contact” or “engaging.” You want the lead progress to be spread out in the different stages. A healthy pipeline is a mature pipeline with at least a couple leads making it to the end at any given time. 

Pipeline maturity is one the points to reflect about at the end of the sale. How long did that lead take to mature to a closed sale?  Was there anywhere you could have improved your process? Your goal is to always gain insights after every pipeline victory. When you regularly reflect, you’ll improve your pipeline maturity and your winning stats in your game.   

For easy reference, you can download a summary of the real estate pipeline in the resource section after this video. 

Now for your ACTION STEP: After this video, write out your top leads and attach them to a step in the pipeline. Use the downloadable worksheet to start. Fill in your leads along the pipeline to get used to using this type of tracking. Later in the module, I’ll recommend apps and automations to help you. But first just get used to the idea by writing out some lead pipelines manually. 

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