Lead Generation Ideas for the Administrative Assistant

I absolutely LOVE getting email from you. Connecting with like-minded people is why I created this blog.

Kendall Johnson, the Inside Sales Coordinator for Capital Estate Group in Washington DC writes:

Hi Elizabeth,

First of all, THANK YOU for providing such helpful information on your blog. As a new team that is growing rapidly, the information and insight you provide is priceless.

I have a question for you that you may or may not have touched on in your blog. Do you, as an assistant/EA, participate in lead generation? We are working on building lead gen into a part of our assistants daily activities. If so, what does your lead gen look like? Aside from asking for referrals, which is part of my job, our inside team is struggling with the idea of lead generation, so we are looking for some ideas on how to approach it that isn’t the normal calls/contacts/prospecting.

Any insight you could provide would truly be helpful.

And here is what I wrote back to Kendall:

Hey Kendall,

Great question!

For an admin, lead gen activities might include:

posting to Craigslist

creating Facebook ads

publishing an online newsletter

creating Google ppc ads

sending out the 33 touch

asking for referrals from current clients

getting testimonials posted to Zillow, Realtor.com, Yelp, etc.

sending handwritten notes after listing and closing

implementing a buyer post-closing open house for buyers’ friends and inviting the new neighbors

writing blog posts

I know a lot of these seem like marketing, but that’s exactly what lead gen for admin IS. An admin should never be on the phone prospecting. That’s the agents’ job. An admin’s job is those things that make the phone ring with incoming calls or get online registrations.

Here’s why what we think of as traditional lead generation activities won’t work for an assistant. If you are the right personality type for the assistant role, meaning you are a high S or a high C on the DISC profile, you are not likely to enjoy cold calling people on the phone. If you don’t enjoy something, you are not likely to do well at it either, right? So leave those calls to the high Ds and the high Is. (They may not enjoy making calls either, but since what they are really doing is building relationships, it’s better that they be ones to get into the relationship with the prospect since they are the ones who have to sell the prospect on working with the team.And selling is for salespeople, not admin.)