u/InnerFaithlessness11

I was a Realtor in South Florida for a few years, and like pretty much every new agent, I was told the same thing: buy Zillow leads, buy Realtor.com leads, that's how you build your business. So I did. Looking back I probably spent thousands, and honestly I don't even know if I made my money back. Every lead felt like a race against three or four other agents, half the numbers never answered, some already had an agent, and a lot were just clicking around because they were curious. After getting frustrated I stopped paying for leads and started doing targeted outreach on Instagram instead. I'd find people in my market who looked like they might actually be thinking about buying or selling and just start real conversations with them. It definitely took more effort than buying leads, but I liked that I wasn't fighting other agents for the same person. Some people ignored me, some told me no, and some would randomly message me months later when they were finally ready. It wasn't some magic formula and I'm not saying Zillow doesn't work because I know agents that kill it there, but for me building my own pipeline through targeted outreach ended up working way better than writing another check every month. Just curious if anyone else has gone away from portal leads and found something that worked better.

Hi I started my lead generation agency 8 months ago and had the hardest time selling a 5k offer to a very wide range of people with zero testimonials. You may not want to hear this but this is how I solved my issues.

(FYI my main client acquisition channel was Cold calling.)

I would make 100 dials a day trying to get home service business on my meta ads offer for lead generation. I quickly figure out with absolutely no social proof there was such a small chance that I could actually close someone. I was able to book probably 10 meetings in my first 3 months and it was absolutely grueling work.

I ended up signing my first client in 3 months and always thought this sit he point where the dominos start to fall and with his testimonial I would be able to close twice as fast. (I would not be able to deal with another 3 months of trying to get one client)

What people don't tell you that is if your product isn't polished you will have a churn machine. Obviously after 30 days when I under delivered because I was a beginner my client did not sign up the next month.

I ended up saying screw it I will run these ads for free just to figure out the actual product I was providing. To my surprise I started closing a lot more. People are so much more receptive to the truth. I would tell people that I was just starting out and would trade my hard work and time for a testimonial and if all went well after 30 days I would charge full price for month 2.

What I didn't realize is that social proof is half the battle when you are pitching to somebody. My closing rate jumped tremendously once my prospects saw so many results from my other clients.

Also one other nugget if you really want to start selling and don't want to go through working for free for a couple months. I would suggest finding a product that already has social proof and reaching out to white label it. A lot of owners are willing to let you sell their product under your name and price it where you want. Thats way you can leverage their social proof and have an already established service/product.

Hope this helps. Let me know how you guys got over that hump of getting your first clients!