In his bestselling book, The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, Gary Keller equates choosing between lead quality and lead quantity to the kind of gasoline you choose to put in your car: “The octane of your fuel is irrelevant if you don’t have enough to get to your destination.”

On the monthly “Lead Generation and Sales” call for the KW MAPS Coaching program Build Your Business to Expand, Chris Suarez of Xperience Real Estate re-focused participants on core MREA principles and how they lay the foundation for expansion success.

“When the MREA was published in 2004, it was a how-to guide for earning, netting, and receiving $1 million,” Suarez says. “Gary’s vision in developing expansion was to help business owners be able to give a million. It’s hard to give a million without making many millions, so this program, this community, is designed to break through and create a path for the Multi-Millionaire Real Estate Agent.”

Agent expansion is built on the same tenets as a successful individual agent’s business, so Suarez sought to bring expansionists back to the core principles of growing a profitable real estate business.

“How do we build replicable, expandable lead generation systems and how do we convert those leads into sales?” he asks. “If we have no leads, we have no sales, which means we have expenses going out the door and no income coming in.”

On p. 135 of The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, Keller writes: “In lead generation, the quality is in the quantity.”

 A strong expansion business should be able to develop significantly more leads than any agent could generate on their own. Through that quantity, the quality shows up.

“A lot of real estate agents think it’s the quality that matters,” Suarez observes. “And in service, that’s absolutely true. Yet, be careful that that myth doesn’t show up in your sales division. Our job as expansion businesses is to deliver consistent lead flow throughout the organization.”

Once you are generating sufficient leads, then you can focus on the quality.

“As the MREA teaches us, ‘Your database is your business,’ Suarez says. “Gary goes on: ‘Building up the number of names in your database and the relationship with those names is at the very core of what building any business is all about. The size of your real estate business will be in direct proportion to the size and quality of your database.’”

So which matters more – quantity or quality?

“Quality matters. Quantity matters. Both matter!” Suarez says. “As we build relationships, the quality of the database improves.”

One of the benefits of expansion is building an organization large enough and profitable enough to fund different leaders focused on each area.

“Early on, your director of sales and your director of lead generation are probably the same person in your organization,” Suarez observes. “And that person’s probably conflicted because they’re going after two different things – they’re chasing two rabbits. So one of your goals as a leader is for your business to earn the right to hire both a highly talented director of sales and a highly talented director of lead generation.”

In other words, first make sure you have enough fuel for the journey. Then you can afford to be picky about the blend.