I had a call this week with a team leader who told me they needed more leads. They're spending $8,000 a month on Zillow and Google. I pulled up their Follow Up Boss and there were 3,400 leads sitting in Lead stage. Not dead leads. Not junk. Leads that came in, got routed to an agent, and then just sat there. For months. A huge chunk of them had zero outreach. Not one call. Not one text. Nothing. The agent claimed the lead and then never touched it.

That's the real problem nobody wants to talk about. It's not that you need more leads. It's that your agents are hoarding leads they're never going to work.

The math that should make you angry

Here's what the data says. 88% of agents stop following up after the second contact. Only 12% ever make it to a third touch. But here's the part that's worse. A massive number of those leads never even get a first touch. They get assigned, the agent glances at the name, decides they're not worth it or gets busy, and the lead just sits there in their pipeline collecting dust. Meanwhile, 80% of real estate sales require five or more follow-up contacts before someone converts.

Each one of those unworked leads represents roughly $7,500 in potential commission income. If you've got agents sitting on hundreds of leads they've never even called, you're not just leaving money on the table. You're paying for leads and then locking them in a drawer.

That's what I call a lead sweep. Going through your database on a regular cadence, finding every lead that's stalled or untouched, and forcing accountability. Restage them, release them to a pond, or get them into an action plan. But stop letting agents hoard leads they have no intention of working.

How to build this in Follow Up Boss

You can set this up in FUB with a combination of Smart Lists and automations. Start by building a Smart List that filters for leads where last communication was more than 14 days ago, stage is still set to Lead, and there's no active action plan. That's your sweep list.

Then you can layer automations on top. Set up an auto-reassign rule that triggers when a new lead hasn't been called or texted within 48 hours and moves them to a different agent or back to a pond. Build a second automation that tags leads as stale after 14 days of no activity so your admins can review them in bulk. You can even set up batch re-engagement emails to poke old leads and see who's still alive based on open and click rates.

It works. But it's a lot of moving pieces. You're stitching together Smart Lists, automations, action plans, and manual reviews. Someone on your team has to own it, maintain it, and make sure it's actually running every week. Most teams set it up once and it slowly falls apart because nobody has time to babysit it.

What I built instead

This was one of the first problems I solved when I started building Trevy, because I kept hearing the same thing from every team leader I talked to. Everyone knew leads were piling up. Nobody had time to fix it. So I built a sweep engine that runs every 15 minutes, automatically.

Here's how it actually works. You set up sweep rules based on triggers and conditions. A trigger might be leads in a specific stage, from a specific source, assigned to a specific agent, in a certain price range, or in a certain city. Then you layer conditions on top. No activity for 7 days. No communication for 14 days. No call ever made. Stage unchanged for 30 days. You can stack as many conditions as you need and they all have to be true before the sweep fires.

When a lead matches, Trevy takes the action you defined. Move them to a different stage. Drop them into a pond and unassign the agent. Reassign them to someone who will actually work them. Tag them for review. Or send them a market report with real listings and real data to re-engage them automatically.

But the part that agents actually love is the embedded app. When you open a lead in Follow Up Boss, right there in the lead detail panel you see a Trevy status indicator. Green means the lead is compliant, no sweep pending. Yellow means at-risk, a sweep is coming in 3 to 7 days. Red means critical, the sweep fires in under 3 days. The agent can see exactly what rule is about to trigger and what's going to happen. "No activity for 7 days. Will move to Dead Leads pond." Right there in FUB, impossible to miss.

And here's the thing that solves the hoarding problem. If an agent sees that red status and they actually want to keep the lead, they can pause the sweep for 7, 14, 21, or 30 days. But they have to make that choice. They have to actively decide to keep the lead. If they do nothing, the lead gets swept automatically. No more sitting on 400 leads and working 12 of them. You either work the lead or you lose it.

Before the sweep even fires, agents get nudge notifications. A note appears in FUB mentioning them by name, saying "heads up, this lead is getting swept in 7 days unless there's activity." Then another nudge at 3 days. It gives agents every chance to step up. But if they don't, the system takes over and that lead goes somewhere it'll actually get worked.

The whole thing runs on its own. Every 15 minutes, Trevy scans every lead in your database, evaluates them against your rules, updates status tags, sends nudges, and executes sweeps. Your pipeline stays clean without anyone thinking about it.

The one thing to do this weekend

Open Follow Up Boss right now and filter for leads in Lead stage where last communication is blank. Not "more than 14 days ago." Blank. Never been contacted. Look at that number. Those are leads you paid for that have never received a single outreach from the agent they were assigned to.

If that number makes you uncomfortable, you have two choices. Build the automations yourself and commit to maintaining them forever. Or see what it looks like when the system enforces accountability for you.

Either way, don't keep pouring leads into a funnel with no system to enforce follow-through. Build the system first.

Talk soon,

Joey

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