Welcome to The Buyer’s Box Podcast — where real estate meets real results.
Join Ally and Andrew Burnett, founders of the Secure Home Finder Team at Realty One Group Dockside, as they unpack the tools, strategies, and stories that help agents and buyers shift their business, mindset, and life.
Each episode dives into real-world conversations on:
🧠 Building Structure & Systems for long-term success
💬 Coaching-Level Insights to help agents scale confidently
🏡 Buyer & Market Trends across the Coastal Carolinas
⚙️ Automation, CRM, and Tech Tools that make real estate smarter
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Whether you're a new agent hungry for guidance, a seasoned professional seeking clarity, or a homebuyer wanting confidence in your next move, this podcast is your ultimate toolbox for a secure foundation in real estate and beyond.
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Are you a solo agent with hundreds or even thousands of contacts in your CRM, but no clear system for what to do with them?
The problem may not be getting more leads.
You may already have opportunities sitting inside your database, you just need a better system to organize, prioritize, follow up, and reactivate them.
In Episode 34 of The Buyer's Box Podcast, Ally Burnett sits down with Elena Kee of Kee Technology to break down a practical CRM playbook for solo real estate agents.
From simplifying stages and tags to building smart lists, automating nurture campaigns, and reactivating stale leads, Elena explains how to turn an overwhelming database into a system you can actually use.
🎯 YOU'LL LEARN
✅ How to organize your CRM with simple stages and tags ✅ How to use smart lists to prioritize the right leads first ✅ How to build a 7–14–60 follow-up cadence for hot, warm, and cold leads ✅ How to automate long-term nurturing without losing the personal touch ✅ How to reactivate old leads already sitting in your database
⏰ TIMESTAMPS
00:02–01:40 – Meet Elena Key & Key Technology 01:41–05:27 – Where Solo Agents Should Start When Setting Up a CRM 05:28–08:45 – CRM Stages & the 7–14–60 Follow-Up Cadence 08:46–12:20 – Smart Lists: How to Prioritize Who to Contact First 12:21–16:21 – Lead Routing, Follow-Up & CRM Automation 16:22–18:26 – Automations for Past Clients & Your Sphere 18:27–19:55 – How to Reactivate Old & Stale Leads 19:56–End – Cleaning Up Your Database & Final CRM Advice
🎯 WHO THIS EPISODE IS FOR
Solo Real Estate Agents
Realtors overwhelmed by a messy or underused CRM
Agents struggling with consistent lead follow-up
Realtors with old or stale leads sitting in their database
Agents who want to automate their CRM without losing the personal touch
Hi, everybody. This is Allie Burnett with the Buyers Box Podcast. Today we have a very special guest, Elena Key. Welcome. Hi, thank you so much for having me. Yes, thank you so much for coming on the show. Can you tell everybody a little bit about you, Key Technology, and some of the things that you're doing in the marketplace right now?
SPEAKER_01
Sure. Yeah. So uh key technology services, solo agents, team leaders, and boutique brokerages in residential real estate coming soon, also commercial, as well as loan officers to set up their systems, automations, workflows, and even with the initial infrastructure of the CRM is needed initially before we can start building all of the fun stuff people want. So we've been doing that for almost six years since the end of 2020. And right now, as we're recording this, we service two CRMs, follow up us and Shearsend.
SPEAKER_00
Okay, awesome. Um, even when we meet single agents out there in the world, like those are the top two suggestions that we tell them that are probably the easiest to plug into and probably the most affordable. I don't know a whole lot about other CRMs, but um those seem to be the easiest, especially if you're a single agent. So um let's just say you're a single agent out there in the world, you just paid the 50 bucks, 100 bucks, whatever it is, to get your fallout boss. What do you do now?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, um, people tend whenever we we start, we we have conversations with people who are starting out with a CRM. Maybe they've been uh in the business for a couple of years or they've been able to run their business without a CRM, but at some point they've hit a tipping point where they can't scale anymore. Then we start with that first infrastructure. So talking about defining stages initially. So someone I was just on a call with yesterday, they were brand new to Follow Boss, but not new to real estate. She very, she very successful. And she was uh using tags in place of stages, and so that was a little bit of rewiring of her brain and help helping understand the difference between tags and stages. So that's a big process to undergo. I don't know if you want to go through that today in today's call, but um, stages essentially want to keep as simple as possible and define them. And it's so tempting and so easy. Like even during the call yesterday, she's like, Oh, okay, well, I have you know agents I'm actively recruiting or agents I'm actively talking to who show properties. And then after they don't show the after the property is sold, I need that for reverse prospecting. And so, in her mind, with her just wanting to be able to see everything in the stage list, she wanted to create a stage for every single scenario. And we needed to kind of rewire her brain to say, okay, let's keep stages simple. And the goal of stages is to define either they're a real estate agent, so they don't need to be a part of like your normal database for your prospects and your clients, um, and also use stages to define where someone is in the process of working with you, and then use tags to make those identifiers and segments. And she was kind of doing opposite, where she had tags as past clients, tags for agents, and then a ton of different stages. So using tags to identify, okay, these are agents that have shown one, two, three, Main Street, and then once um, and then she can create a uh well, I won't get into that, and these then these are agents who um have buyers potentially interested in this area that we can reverse prospect. These are people that are in my regular database that are not agents that are buyers, so I tag them as buyer, but we use the regular stages where you wouldn't have a bunch of different buyer stages, a bunch of different seller stages. You wouldn't want to go from 10 stages to 50 stages because the reality is, is you're really not gonna spend the majority of your time in front of the computer whenever you're needing to call someone, text someone, email someone, because the whole goal is that you work out of the CRM. Most likely you're gonna be on the go and on your phone. And so if you're using a tiny screen and on a mobile app, you're not gonna be able to scroll through 50 stages. So, goal is use stages to simplify and define what those stages mean too. Even for yourself, it's so easy to forget. And but also it's very important once you onboard an assistant, your very first assistant, comes soon after the um the CRM, once you have that infrastructure in place, or like for for your team, once you start to scale a team and you have agents, you need to have that standard operating procedure in place of okay, here are our stage definitions. And then these are the standard tags that we use. Um, so making that differentiation and defining your initial very first important stages and very first tags are the key foundation for setting up the CRM first before you do anything else.
SPEAKER_00
And we try to kind of think about um for our team too, and I will I will just put it out there. Elena set our system up um when we first kind of started thinking about scaling a team. And then over the course of time, we were bad apples and we added more stages and more pods. Um, and then some there was a time where I was like, I told Andrew, I'm like, no more, no more stages, none of it. Like, I don't care, make a pond, do a tag, and that so like um what would be some of the very like most basic um stages? Like we have like um blazing hot, hot, warm, cold, closed, pending, showing homes.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Well, so in follow-up boss, you are forced to have a couple uh three stages that you can't delete. So lead we define as someone you haven't talked to. That one you have to have in follow-up boss. Um closed, you have to have them follow up boss. That's someone that is a past client, and then trash, you have to have them follow boss. So instead of deleting someone, never delete someone out of follow up boss, just move them to trash. Uh, that way, if someone comes back in, they don't come in as brand new lead if you didn't ever want to talk to them. Um, in between, yeah, stages are very similar to yours, where we would have and initially we don't create a blazing hot because most people don't need the the blazing hot, but we do create a hot in one to three months, and people in that stage show up in a smart list, which we haven't gotten into in this conversation, but they show up in a smart list to contact every seven days, then warm, they show up every 14 days, then cold every 60 days, and then active client, penny client, or if you're using Zillow stages, then you use the Zillow stages and it is what it is. Um, and then sphere and um real estate agent, and then if you add vendors like uh roofing companies, like home vendors, or even title companies, like all of them can be lumped under vendors, but then you can use tags and custom fields to identify these are the types of vendors or these are the type of real estate agents, like these are the agents I want to recruit, these are the agents I want to reverse prospect, these are roofers, these are title companies, rather than creating a title company stage, and uh you know the stages of list could get very long.
SPEAKER_00
That makes sense, yeah, because we just have everybody launched under vendors, and then we've been recruiting two, so we have actually a pond. We keep all of our um well, I guess we have three stages for recruiting, and this may not be right, but we have um corded like working and just corded. That's it. We just have two. So like the corded is just like the lead, like we haven't talked to them, and then corded working. Oh, and then corded disqualified um of those three, but then that's it.
SPEAKER_01
Um yeah, so you could do that, or you could just have one real estate agent stage and then have those as tags, and those tags can define what smart list they show up in or what automation you kick off, or some people even go as far as like creating a deals pipeline, and then they put those um as like pipe deal pipeline stages, just whatever works best for you.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, we do have the deals, which I do think is probably a little bit better because then it's just like in a separate section of Follow Boss. Um, so going back to okay, so you get all your leads, you have them in your Excel spreadsheet, you upload them to Follow Boss, you um add the stages in. Okay, um, what do I do now? Do you think it's better to start with pawns? Do you think it's better to start with smart lists?
SPEAKER_01
Um, not pawns. That comes a lot later. So I would start out if you're a solo agent, start out with lists, or not start out next step is smart lists. So if we've talked a little bit about smart lists, but essentially rather than defaulting to tasks for telling you who to call when, create um smart lists. So smart lists are essentially save searches of your database so that you don't just have one giant, like if you go to people and follow boss or people and sure send, you would just see, you know, however many people you have in your CRM, you see 200 or a thousand. Um, but then if you use tasks, you could have 50 tasks for the day. But realistically, you're like, okay, I can't get through all 50 today. I can get through maybe 10 because I have to get on uh with my day. So with tasks, if you go that route, then there's really no way to easily sort those tasks of priority, um, even if you put like high priority, you know. Um so then the the benefit of smart lists is you say, okay, I need to create lists that are ordered from like if you look from top to bottom, that's the priority of lists. That way, if you don't have time to call all 50, you say, okay, well, the the list on the top are new leads I haven't been able to contact. So then you create filters like stages still lead or attempt to contact. And my last call attempt was more than a day ago or 12 hours ago, depending on how aggressive you want to be. If you're a solo agent, probably a day ago. Once you onboard like an ISA or something, that could be more aggressive, like 12 hours ago or six hours ago if you want to try three times a day. And then moving on to people returning to your website. That's a big one. So if you have a website that connects to Volobas and tracking that activity, those are what you might consider like hand raisers or people who have been just sitting in your CRM that shows some type of intent, you'd use a filter like last activity and phone is good. We always use phone is good because we these are calling lists. Um, and then going down, like okay, then you've got your hot, stage hot, last call, last text, last email, more than seven days ago, and so on, and then past clients and sphere. Now, some of the agents and solo agents we talked to, they don't generate leads. They are more like repeat referral. So in that case, we move up the past clients and sphere list higher on the on the list so that they prioritize their past clients and sphere so they don't get lost below new leads and nurturers. If they want to make that sort of like their source of new leads, they say, okay, I got a sort of like your cold calling list, except they're not cold calling, they're your your relationship, uh, closest relationships. Say, okay, I'm gonna call this to generate potential new business or to nurture these people, which can then feed the rest, which I could potentially create new leads that go into the new lead list and so on.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think the statistic is for every one transaction you close, there's a possible maybe it's six transactions. I can't remember what the number is. Um over the course, over the lifetime of the lead. Yeah. Um, and that's like including like person one, their sister, and then the sister has a friend, you know, like over the lifetime of the lead. Um from the first initial.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, or their parents, or then kids who grow up, or then they want to move themselves again, or I can see it.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, absolutely. Um and I'm trying to think. So, okay, so you get volatos, you get your stages set up, you get your smart list set up. What are some of the other things that you and your team set up for single agents or boutique brokerages when they're trying to manage all this?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, from there it's it's very different depending on the client. So um if they're a lead-generated type of um age solo agent or team, then a lot of times we set up their lead flow in in Follow Boss or Share Sent, where we um, if they're not a solo agent, we might consult them on how leads are routing. Um, because oftentimes, if they're a team, a lot of times leads route to a team lead who, as you scale your business, you have less and less bandwidth as a team lead. Um, I was on a call last week with a longtime client who wanted to take a look at those types of numbers and see how could they they could take it to the next level. And I said, Well, okay, over the past quarter, you've generated 200 leads, and half of those went to the team lead, and he has the least amount of bandwidth. Props to him, he's still calling. I mean, his his speed to lead was two days. Normally I see 10 days to one month. So really, I mean, props to him. I mean, two two days is still not great, but that um, and his average contact attempt was two. So we might consult and say, okay, well, let's let's take a look at who are the hungrier agents. If you have a team, okay. Well, I was on that call. I said, Okay, well, here, this person's speed to lead was six minutes. Why did she only get nine leads out of that 200? And then I went further down, and like this person's speed to lead was three minutes, and she only got three leads last quarter. I said, What's going on? And person chuckled, she's like, Oh, yeah, and they they um don't beat everyone else who does first to claim. Like, well, everyone is doing like first to claim or clinging from the pond, but then they're just holding. So uh we might consult on how leads get routed and then initiate automation to supplement and support agents and ISA's effort because you can only go so long with a lead before you need to move on. If someone's not responsive or if someone needs to be nurtured for five, seven years, then you need to have something in place to help you because you're not gonna be there every 30 days consistently for the next five to seven years.
SPEAKER_00
Sure. No, that makes sense. So you get the lead routing. Um and I think you help with all the like the API connections too, right?
SPEAKER_01
We um yeah, we'll either help them um show them how to do it. A lot of times we don't want to like log into people's platforms and have like the security risk. We primarily just log into the CRM, but we'll help with integrations. So um a lot of platforms with these like two platform uh two CRMs are both open API. So a lot of platforms are starting to build with SureSen and a law already exists with a follow-up us, where people say, Okay, I have these two tools. Now do I what do I do with them? How do I make them talk to each other? Because they integrate, um, but I don't have the time to figure out how. Um we make sure that nothing uh we'll see mistakes all the time of like, oh, this is still sending this, even though you're you're an active client. So we make sure that if something happens in um platform A, that that gets communicated in follow-ups the right way, whether the stage needs to be changed or a tag needs to be added, or an automation needs to be initiated so that people fall off lists, people stop receiving automations, um, and and vice versa, so that the the platform stops too if needed.
SPEAKER_00
Okay, yeah. I mean, for anybody that's listening, this is super, super technical. And Andrew and I, we are we like to consider ourselves tech nerds, but this was so far above our head, which is why we had to hire Elena. So, um, because you we didn't even talk about like automations and drips and getting those set up. Um, can you talk a little bit about okay, I'm a single agent out there in the world, I've have nothing. Like, where do you even start with the automations and the drips?
SPEAKER_01
Most likely you're gonna have an existing database of past clients and sphere that are gonna be your biggest potential money makers. So creating uh a campaign that's specific to each audience, don't lump them into one. Create one for past clients you worked with in the in the past, and then create one for your sphere. Um, and we're in the process of like revamping our past client campaigns where we're gonna have like a split basically. If someone bought and sold with you versus just sold with you, okay, and then and then sphere. So, like if someone bought and sold with you, that can go on for like 11 years, and then if they sold with you, then that goes for a year and then and then it segues into sphere because if someone only sold with you, they most likely moved out of the area, or they um they no longer own a home. Uh, if they didn't buy with you, so then we don't really need to send buyer content to someone who just sold. So we lump them into the sphere that runs for another five years. So with past clients, you would want to initiate some type of initial, like, hi, this is Elena. Thank you so much for um trusting us with your real estate needs and your the seller of your property. I'm gonna reach out with um some helpful, helpful information. Can I add you to can I get your permission to add you? Like if you're if you're starting like out of the blue out of nowhere, you need to have some type of introductory email. And then go on maybe once a quarter or once a month creating a campaign that either sends something of value to the past client, maybe you have a contractor list you can offer or a quick home tip, and then gently layer in asks for referrals, but that's not as that's not the primary goal of the campaign. And so that can run in the background to start to help you generate replies while you're working that smart list. I think most solo agents, that's where the majority of their database is. Some other solo agents they do say, Oh, I'm coming from the CRM that my brokerage provided, like KV Core, Bold Trail, or Lofty. And so I have a ton of leaves, and I need to reactivate those. Then we talk about strategies for not only like a stale re-engagement campaign with short reply-based emails, but also a strategy around, okay, we need to create remarketing ads, they need to see you everywhere. We need to um, we need to talk about maybe like a postcard campaign through like mailbox power. And then we need to um, if we have like remarketing ads running, let's choose a platform that integrates with follow up us. You create automations and that initiates an engagement there. That way you don't just have like the generic stale running because you don't know who is who. Now you have your marketing ads, maybe you're pushing them to a platform like Real Scout or Fellow or some type of landing page, and then once they engage, then they go in and back into Fallout Boss, the tags get added, you initiate automations, you have like high priority lists based on that activity above all other general activity on your website, and you start to see the ripple effect. So it just kind of depends on someone's business model, like mostly past clients and sphere or lead gen, or maybe it's both, and we do both.
SPEAKER_00
Sure, absolutely. And you shared some really great information. Is there anything else you want to add or encourage single agents to do with their database?
SPEAKER_01
Um, it can be really overwhelming at first. And um, because of that, agents just kind of like shut down. They say, I'm just not gonna do it. Um the call I was on yesterday with someone, they that's how they felt. Um, and they asked us, like, can you just clean up my database? And we got on the call and uh was trying to help guide her with some tips. And I was like, Well, these people appear to be agents. Can you skim this list? And she's like, Oh, actually, no, those aren't agents. And so we just kept coming across those scenarios of like, really, no one's going to know your database like you. And so you just need to time block time, whether it's just you or you plus an assistant to ensure people are in the right stage and have the right tag. You can't just pass this initial cleanup part to someone else who doesn't know your system and if or who knows your database. And if someone does promise that, you should have your uh red flag up of I shouldn't trust this person because um any vendor we've ever referred for that cleanup piece, they say the same thing. Like, I have to get on calls. We have like one hour once a week for like the next 30 to 60 days to do cleanup. Um, because I don't know the database like they do. So just do baby steps. It's okay. Something is better than nothing, and just start with those stepping stones, like I said, with the stages and the tags first, and then the lists, and then depending on what your business model is, slowly start to create your own. Um, and of course, we're always happy to help if this is not worth your time. Your dollar per hour is something that you always want to be mindful of, too.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, absolutely. And we have uh lots of vendors that um have come on our podcast over the course of time. Um I don't say this too often, but if you don't know how to do it, uh so many people were like, just don't even bother because it's not a revenue generating activity for you to clean up your database for hours and hours and hours. And so, you know, they're the experts on this. You know, you want to hire an expert that knows how to do it, do it right. And so that way, you know, you're not missing a lead. You know, what's what's the cost of missing a phone call with someone that was going to give you a $10,000 commission check? You know, so those are some of the things you want to start thinking about. And I appreciate you so much for coming on our uh podcast.
