What is “Top of Mind” and Why Is It So Important?

Whether you’re watching videos or reading my blog posts, you’re bound to hear the words “top of mind” often. It’s a HUGE part of what made me successful as a real estate agent and it’s the very heart of my method of making as much money as you can in this industry. The referral leads created with a good systematic “top of mind” lead generation approach will absolutely change your life.

Top of mind simply means that you have successfully become the first person a member of your sphere of influence will think of when the topic of your industry comes up. It could be a conversation about buying or selling a home, talking about mortgage rates, or even simply driving by a “for sale” sign on the drive home from work. It is important that when it happens, you immediately come to mind. They think of real estate, they think of you. That’s top of mind. If you are able to achieve “top of mind” AND make sure everyone in your sphere understands how important referrals are to you, your sphere of influence will become a referral lead machine and you will never run out of those awesome “top of mind” referral leads! Anyway, let’s get back to “top of mind”

Thnk of who has “top of mind” with you. I’m going to give you a few occupations below. Read them and think of who comes to mind first.

You get the idea. But read a little deeper into it. You may have a close friend who is a teacher, but if your close friend never really discusses school or the kids or anything about teaching, you may have thought of someone that is just an acquaintance because that person does talk about school and the kids. I want you to keep this in mind when you think about your close friends, family, past clients and everyone else that makes up your sphere of influence. Just because you know them well does not mean they think of you when they hear real estate (or whatever industry you’re a lead generator in). The fact is they will remember the person who talks about it systematically.

One last thought on your sphere of influence and the reason “top of mind” and making sure they understand you work by referral is so important. I’m willing to bet plenty of your friends/extended family/acquaintances who know you and like you and would refer a lead to you don’t have any idea that you sell real estate. How do I know this? Well, thnk of some of your acquaintances and ask yourself if you can identify all of their jobs. In fact, you may realize after giving this some serious and deliberate thought that some of them may have jobs where you can refer leads to them as well.

What Do Your Friends See You As?

Here’s another story to help illustrate my point. Tell me if this one sounds familiar….

I had a young real estate agent working in one of my offices. He was very nice, attended all of the classes and was a very good real estate agent. He knew the contracts, the laws, marketing, technology and he was a reliable person who always returned his calls got the job done.

He was also a waiter.

Even though he considered real estate to be his full time job and waiting tables a part-time gig to help get by while he was trying to grow his real estate business, he was always talking about the restaurant. On his night off, he would go in there for dinner and drinks. He would come to the office telling everyone stories from the restaurant. He did the same with his friends as well. And of course, because he was busy waiting tables, he “didn’t have time to work his sphere of influence and achieve “top of mind”.

In fact, even though he worked in my office, I generally thought of him as a waiter, not a real estate agent. Obviously, his sphere of influence also thought of him as a waiter.

One day, he came into the office and was not in his usual happy-go-lucky mood. In fact, he looked angry. After a few minutes of watching him, I invited him into my office and asked him what was wrong. He told me that one of his friends, apparently a good friend, went out and bought a house without ever even mentioning it to him. He couldn’t believe one of his friends could do that to him.

I nodded my head, very familiar with this type of story and asked him one simple question. What does your friend do for a living? He looked at me like I was crazy and bit back his anger as he thought about it and said “I don’t know, but he has a good enough job to buy an expensive house.” My next comment hurt, but he needed to hear it. I explained that he didn’t know what kind of job his friend had so why would his friend know what kind of a job he had?

Furthermore, I told him if he spent half the time talking to his friends about real estate (or perish the thought…. actually used a consistent program to obtain top of mind) then I am willing to bet he would have been the buyer agent on his friend’s purchase.

How Does Achieving “Top of Mind” help?

Pretty simple… The person who has “top of mind” has the HUGE advantage of being called first and the person who is called first has a HUGE advantage over everyone who is called after. Here are some stats from the real estate world. I’m willing to bet most industries will have similar statistics.

• 81% of home sellers only called 1 real estate Agent! – Who do you think they are calling? The person with “top of mind” or one of the others?
• 12% of home sellers called 2-3 real estate agents – Still excellent odds for the person with “top of mind”
• 7% called more than 3 agent. The bottom line here is the longer it takes someone to think of you, the less likely you are to get the business.
• 65% of sellers got their Realtor through a referral – This number is high but should be higher. If every real estate agent focused on obtaining “top of mind” from everyone they knew, that number would be in the 90’s.

(The above statistics are courtesy of the National Association of Realtors Buyer & Seller Profile Guide 2024)

So how does it help? The first person to get called gets the business 90% of the time!!!

The stats above are kind of mind boggling. I would think any lead generator who sees stats those above would be putting their “hand waver” lead activity on the back burner and would start to focus first and foremost on their referral business activities. Unfortunately, most real estate agents do not do that. We continue to spend amazingly high amounts of time and money on the “hand wavers” which only account for 35% of the business. That means we’re doing things backward.

We spend about 80% of our time and 90% of our money on the type of leads that accounts for only 35% of the business.

Not only do the hand-waver leads account for significantly less business but they cost you considerably more time and money. (To learn more about this “click here”)

How Do I Achieve Top of Mind?

Achieving “top of mind” is not as hard as you would think. It is achieved by creating or purchasing a consistent and systematic touch campaign. (“Click here” if you want to learn about how we can do this for you)

Achieving “top of mind” is simply an unintrusive diet of reminding your sphere of influence that you sell real estate AND that you work by referral. The more you remind your sphere of what you sell and how important referrals are to you, the more likely they are to think of you first when they hear about your industry.

My years of experience show me it takes at least 30 touches a year, every year to achieve and maintain top of mind. Please keep the second part of that sentence in mind. Once you achieve top of mind, you must keep up the touches year over year and maintain that top of mind. According to my personal statistics, top of mind has an amazing return on your investment. For every 10 people you have top of mind from for at least 1 year, it accounts for at least 1 piece of business from someone in your sphere of influence or as a referral from someone in your sphere of influence.

What’s interesting is the longer you maintain that top of mind the better the numbers get. Ultimately, I was able to see roughly business from 1 out of every 7 people in my sphere of influence. I saw this return after my 5th year of building and maintaining “top of mind” with my sphere.

In the book “The Millionare Real Estate Agent”, Gary Keller reports a similar number, saying for every 12 people you get top of mind from you will get 1 piece of business and 1 referral, so that’s 1 in 6.

Even if you don’t get business from 1 out of every 6 people that you get “top of mind from ask yourself this question…
IF YOU SPEND ROUGHLY 2 TO 3 HOURS A WEEK WORKING AN EFFECTIVE SYSTEM TO CONSISTENTLY REMIND EVERYONE YOU KNOW THAT YOU SELL REAL ESTATE AND WORK BY REFERRAL, DO YOU THINK YOU WOULD DO MORE OR LESS BUSINESS EACH YEAR? The answer is most certainly “more”. And as long as you remember this you’ll be fine and the numbers will take care of themselves.

Top of Mind Gets the “Good” Leads

It’s not just that you’re going more leads… It’s that you’ll be getting REFERRAL LEADS, the good stuff!

Referral leads make it noticeably easier to do more business. “Top of mind” generates business from your friends and referral leads. I’ve said this before and I’m sure I’ll say it again. Whenever I ask a group of lead generators if they would rather have a referral lead or a “hand waver” lead, almost 100% of them (except that one woman in New Jersey) immediately answer they want the referral lead. (To learn more on why “Click here”)

In this section I intentionally used the words “Good Leads” because it’s one of those things I hear in real estate offices all the time. Lead generators are always having discussions about which internet lead generation platform provides the “good” leads. I hear some talk about Brivity®, others swear by Zillow® and still others have their favorite place for the “good leads”. You can ask 100 lead generators which internet lead generation source has the “good leads” and you are likely to get 100 different answers. The reason for that is because honestly, all of those companies are doing pretty much the same thing to collect those leads. They use information, usually homes for sale, to capture information and then they sell that information to you. This is another thing I say often…

If those leads are so “good” then why in the <bleep> are they selling them to you instead of closing them themselves?

Also, have you ever wondered what makes a lead “good?” I ask this question all the time when I’m working with real estate agents and the answer is always “conversion”. Whether they mean converting the “haven’t met” to a “met” and having a deep conversation about their wants and needs or if they are just talking about converting the lead to a sale, it’s conversion that makes a lead “good” or “bad”.

What Converts Better? “Top of Mind” Referral Leads or Hand Waver Leads?

It’s not even close. Referral leads generated by achieving “top of mind” from your sphere of influence is the undisputed king of lead conversion! The clients I have coached and consulted in the past are required to keep detailed stats to work with me and I have looked at these numbers for the last 15 years. My findings are that “Top of mind” referral leads are convert roughly 65% of the time from lead to closing. Compare that to an internet lead which averages out to about 2% of the time!

Top of Mind Referral Leads will change your life

This entire website and the products and courses I offer are all based on “top of mind” to some extent. When I was selling real estate, I focused about 75% of my time on achieving “top of mind” and as a result I probably had more referral business than the rest of my office combined. That’s the great thing about “top of mind” It generates business from people you already know and referrals from their friends. When I figured out how to systematize my lead generation activities to achieve “top of mind” my business exploded and I became very busy. It was crazy. I was selling more houses than I ever imagined and what was even crazier was that I was working LESS, not more!

You may be wondering how that is possible. It’s simple really. When you focus on “hand waver” leads, you are chasing. When you focus on “top of mind” referral leads, the leads come to you. Not only do they come to you, they convert at a much higher rate

,Based on my statistics, I would have to work 5 “hand waver” leads to get the same results I got from 1 “top of mind” referral lead. The referral lead comes with a stamp of approval from someone they already know, like, and trust so they are much more willing to take your call and work with you from beginning to end. All of this makes it much easier to run your business and stay sane while doing numbers you never thought possible.