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[unintelligible 00:00:04] This song cracks me up.
I love it.
It just makes me happy that Billy Ray Cyrus is back.
I don't even like country, but I like that song. I like that song and I like-- It'll come to me. One of those [unintelligible 00:00:29] songs.
All right man, how are you?
What are we going over this morning?
Couple of things, number one, I think, and it leads to what we've been talking about with quite a few different agents, I would say, over the last week. We were talking about, last week, making sure that you have enough. We had a good rule of thumb of leads, of generating on a monthly basis [crosstalk] first.
Yes. We were talking about it this morning. I think we need to just drive that point home every day live. Listen.
Every single time.
Leads are like oxygen. You can't go very long without them. Make sure you have enough, and I'm not talking about buying leads. I'm not talking about FSBOs and expireds from different aggregators. I'm talking about leads that have come to you first. I just had a little rant about this on the way in. Leads that are warm, that fell out of form, that you know how they came, you know what the formula was to get them, you understand how to do it, you can do it at will.
I do this at the beginning of every month. I sales huddle this morning. Same thing, "Hey, I need your goals written down for what the month is." That's how many calls they're going to make, how many conversations they're going to have, how many appointments they're going to set, how many appointments they're going to keep, and how many sales it's going to lead to. It's the easiest thing in the world when you just break it down to numbers because men lie, women lie, and numbers do not. That rule of thumb is-- What up, Calvin? Every time I see Calvin or I see his name, I just want to do the Alvin from the Alvin and the Chipmunks thing.
Calvin, Calvin.
Every time I see it. Anyway, when you have that dialed into the numbers-- Again, if you treat it like, "I'm going into May. I want to make this much money." Or, "I want to get on to the pace where I'm closing 2 deals a month or 5 deals a month or 10 deals a month." Whatever the number is for you, it's that consistency, but it comes from what you consistently put in to the top of your sales and marketing process. If you think of it like a damn funnel, literally, like you're-putting-oil-into-your-car funnel, you can't expect oil to come through and get into your engine if you're not putting any oil into the top. You're going to spill some, you're going to miss.
Just a little rant there, now, let's segue. For those of you who are generating and you have a lot of leads coming in, and you feel pretty good about that part of your business, what do we got for them there today, what we must tell them?
Two things here, number one, I want to continue to expand upon the myth of bad leads.
You know what? There are bad leads. There are bad leads. That's true. Like I said on Facebook today, if you put an ad out that says, "$500 down home, 500 a month," that's what kind of lead you're going to get. "I'm [unintelligible 00:03:55] $500."
You'll get ones that are bad numbers or you call and all you got was an email address and the email address was aaa@aaa.com. Then the phone number was 123-456-789. Okay, no such thing as a bad lead, right? It's not taken to an exact science. It's a mentality to have. Know that if you can have the foresight to be able to really actually just market two people, because marketing, I can't say this enough or beat this into people's head enough, but marketing is just a management of a transactional relationship which is real estate. You want to manage the relationship. The only way you can manage a relationship is if you put time into the relationship, but you can do that en masse. Who's a celebrity that you follow, that you feel if you were friends or if you got to meet him, that you guys would be boys?
Mark Wahlberg, [inaudible 00:05:19] he's very relatable. I think it'd be cool to have some beers with Mark Wahlberg.
For me, it's always been John Krasinski from the office.
Really?
Yes. I just feel him or Ryan Reynolds.
Ryan Reynolds too, he'd be fun, but he'd be a little too much like I want to punch him in the face after [inaudible 00:05:37].
I think that would be fun. It would be like we're just immediately boys, like we grew up together.
Where are you going with this?
The whole point of this is that you can create that. I've never met him, we've never met them, but you feel this crazy connection with them.
I wouldn't do that for a stalker. I just think it'd be cool to hang out with him.
My bad. You have some affinity points, you have whatever, you can relate with him, whatever it is, but they've been able to create this relationship with you without ever actually spending time with you.
In my mind.
In your mind because that's all that matters.
In real life, he might be a complete jerk.
He could be. Mark Wahlberg, if you've seen his daily regimen. If you want some motivation on how to get shit done, look at his daily.
I don't want to hang out with that part. I'm not trying to hang at that level. I know he gets up three in the morning and hits his gym and boxes and all this stuff. I do respect the fact that he likes to challenge himself though. I think that's part of what makes him cool in my mind. Who knows if he even really does that? That's a narrative that's been put out there, but maybe he did it for a time to get ready for a movie and now everybody thinks he does it all the time. I want to transition to the biggest lead generator in our business, which is Zillow. What does Zillow do to generate leads? I think that this is important. They try to get everybody, everybody. They don't care who. That's the part that people miss.
They'll run an ad on TV. They'll say, "Hey, have a good experience in shopping for your home and feel this emotion and feel that emotion," and little kid jumping into arms, "We're home. Can I help you with your home?" They do it on such a broad approach of their market, which crazy enough, is America. You're doing this in a city, and they have everybody come, and they have everybody start to hang around, and they have everybody start to use their tool. Like I said in my live yesterday, they deliver on bits of dopamine through distraction, through sending them content, which is crazy because they don't do this with their own customers. I've asked their customer like, "What do you consume from Zillow?" They're like, "Nothing." I'm like, "Really? You pay them $10,000 a month and you don't consume any information?" "No. Wide open for me. Consume my stuff."
What'll happen is eventually, you're going to hang around enough and I'm going to change the way you think about this whole thing. Anyway, until they get down to the bottom of the funnel, and then they fill out a form and they request information about apps, that's how Zillow does it. All we're saying about 10 homes, we think you're lucky. There you go. That's the amount of content that they're distracting, given they don't mean hit nurturing with. There's more to that science than what I'd spoke about yesterday, but that's the one that I think that we should be looking at as agents or prescribing to initially.
My point is, they're not saying all these are good leads, or all these are bad leads. The leads are just people, and they're just getting people who are interested in buying a home to come to them to look at their mousetrap, if you will. For us as agents, that's the name of the game and that's the goal. The things that they do after that is really what makes them strong and able to sell leads to you for $300, $400.
I got friends who pay $10,000 per month, $15,000 a month to Zillow, and they can't get off of it because that process takes a little delayed gratification. It takes maybe about 12 months of spending that money in a different area, not getting the same result at first until those leads are nurtured and incubated over time if you do it right. If you don't do it, right, it's not going to work. Then you have just a big fat pipeline of hot ready now business. That's what we're trying to tell you to do.
People are people. It's like-- it'd be really interesting to do a little case study to say, "Hey, we're going to pay these people a salary and then a bonus based off of how many closings they had, and just see what kind of changing they have." I just think when people get into a situation where they need to make a commission, all of the normal common sense type stuff on how to treat people goes completely out the window.
It happens for us. When we're running towards the end of the month and we're not hitting our goals for as many units as we need to sell, we start emailing you guys a lot. We start throwing out some weird stuff.
My personal favorite, which is a spinning wheel for a promotion--
Yes. People actually take us up on it. That's cool, but the truth is a lot of this comes from our own experience as we apply it to this particular business. The thing that's interesting about that is that there's no difference because the game plan is the same. It doesn't matter if I apply it to the mortgage industry, which I have in an [unintelligible 00:10:48] mortgage company, or if I apply it to the real estate industry. It doesn't matter. Generally speaking, if I applied to storage unit facilities that are around, the main goal is to get them to respond, get them to come in from some kind of a lead magnet, and then try to sell them on my product or service. That's the thing that most agents miss. They have all these things that the industry wants to teach you and tell you you need to be focused on. It's all crap, and it's all situational. Some of it sounds really cool. If you resonated with the message I put out yesterday and you're like, "Yes, I need to be delivering dope to my clients." Listen, if you don't have leads for them to watch this stuff, then you aren't going to it. Maybe you do suck at a listing presentation or buyer presentation, but if you don't have people in front of you to give them to, that's not the way to go.
That's your biggest problem.
Yes, [inaudible 00:11:42] now your biggest problem.
It's your biggest problem. It's just amazing because it is a complex business. It's one of the more complex businesses because everybody that's in the business has to do everything.
Yes, that's the thing. It's probably confusion, what do I do? When do I have to do it? You've got to remember, every time you open up your inbox or Facebook, not everybody is as benevolent as us, actually trying to help. A lot of times they just have something that sounds cool, but they've never done it. It's something that they heard from someone else that they think, "I could put this out on the market, sell it," but they have no activity knowledge as to whether or not that actually works in the real estate industry. There's just a crapload of shiny hubcaps out there, and it's like, "Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel."
It is so hard.
Actually, what's happening there is another little chemical process in the brain when you find something that you feel superior about finding, you have a status increase. "I got this thing," but if it doesn't work, it goes out the window pretty quick.
[unintelligible 00:12:53] increases again real quick.
Yes.
I always equate it to trying to communicate to people what it's like just internally to our team. It'd be like if you walked into Market Maker, and you had nobody in Dallas and it was only you in Missouri and it was like, "You're responsible for sending out all of the emails to our database. You're responsible for running all the ads. You're responsible for then calling all the people that we get to respond to the marketing messages." Then you're trying to have that first time appointment to show them the system. Then, once we bring them on you have to onboard them, then set up to their system, do all the technologies. When you think about it from any other business perspective, it's really overwhelming.
Dude, I don't even clean the house or make dinner [inaudible 00:13:47]. My wife is like, "Why do you need help? I do that by myself all the time." I'm like, "Babe, that's how I'm wired." [crosstalk]
If you concentrate on that, you can slowly start getting things off of your plate that you don't need to have on your plate, eventually, over time, but it's really just trying to keep it as simple as possible because at this point, if you're not generating 100 leads a month for you or each person on your team, that's where you have to start. You have to solve that problem with either money or time, and you can leverage technology to do a good portion of that now too. We've hit a honey pot with being able to teach a lot of people what we've been doing in the-
We've been getting free leads on marketplace, and it's fantastic. The cool thing about that- What? I shouldn't tell them? I'm telling everybody.
No, you should.
[inaudible 00:14:39]
Another person that got in last week, 65 leads. No cost, 65 leads. They're one of our clients already. I was going to get in clients and I saw her at an event and I was like, "Dude, you've got to get in this group." She got in the group, five days, 65 leads, and 13 conversions.
Here's the reason why it's so cool, it's because people who are shopping in that place are active shoppers. It's not interruption marketing like Facebook which is a little longer term nurture because they're scrolling through and in their newsfeed they see something about a home and they're like, "Oh yes, I'm thinking about buying a home here in the next 6, 12 months." They're shopping now so they're closer towards the bottom of the funnel. They are perceived as better leads like, "Oh, man, these leads are amazing." Well, it's just because they're shopping right now. All leads are amazing if you deal with them right.
I wanted to say, if you are generating enough leads, but you're running the same old like 1999 game plan of just calling them, literally, this is when this stuff started coming out. Just calling them and setting an appointment and then you leave the follow up call and some lame ass newsletter from your corporate brokerage that nobody reads, you are about to be humbled because the power of what we call digital branding is going to come in and smack you in the face. I had it happen to me. I had it happen to me just in a much lesser capacity. Not the smack, the smack was just as hard and humbling, but it is coming and for the agents that don't pay attention to that, man, look out, look out.
I want to talk about that only. I only want to talk about that, but the thing is there's a requisite to it first and it's having the leads which are your audience and your database and having enough of them on a consistent basis. Calvin, right? Calvin was generating more leads, doing a great job, getting appointments, getting showings, getting listings. I went to look for his ads because I was trying to show somebody an example and it was, "Oh." I went to him and I was like, "Hey Calvin, you're ads not there, what's going on?" He was like, "Well, I had so many I had to shut it off."
I was like, "Dude, I had the same feeling when I first started generating leads and I had a paradigm shift. The paradigm shift was this. I had a coach at the time, he said, "Mike, don't shut them off." He said, "Every lead that you generate is a lead that your competitor does not." I was like, "Hmm." He said, "Think about it for me." He said, "If you don't generate that lead what's going to happen to that home buyer? They're going to end up in somebody else's lead generation, whatever it is." Maybe it's they stumble into an open house, maybe they run into him at the grocery store and they say, "Hey, nice realtor pin." "Oh, yes, I'm buying a house," whatever. Maybe they don't have the same lead generation capacity or technology, but your competitor will end up generating that lead. I was like, "You know what, those suckers have enough. I'm not going to let them have them. I'm a competitive guy."
That process led me to continue to bite off more than I could chew and nibble like hell to the point where pretty soon I had a big fat pipeline and I had consistency in my business.
[inaudible 00:18:00] you didn't even have half as much automation that's available now.
Dude, we didn't have social media. We didn't even have pay per click. Pay per click was just merging.
Imagine what would have happened if you had the 29 day touch plan automatically firing off for all your leads as they came in?
Dude, you know what? Honestly, I probably wouldn't have learned some of the things that I had to learn.
That's true.
Man, I'm getting hit up to go to the derby. I was supposed to be at the Mastermind right now, I'm supposed to be at the derby and people are giving me a hard time. We [unintelligible 00:18:35] though because [inaudible 00:18:36]. Yes. I have tremendous FOMO, like fear of missing out. I just do. I told my wife this morning, I was like, "Hey miss, I think my thing that's waiting on me." She was like, "Yes, I remember that about you. You always had FOMO." I was like, "Yes."
"That's how I wrangled you in babe."
That's it. Anyway, so a couple things just to kind of wrap a nice neat bow. Number one, make sure your lead gen game is strong. Make sure you understand how to do this, don't just buy leads. If you are calling FSBOs and expireds, before you've maximized every lead generation area in your market from pay per click to the free sources and hit what we call the Law of Diminishing Returns where you can't get another dollar to get another client, in my humble opinion, you're spending your time on the wrong thing.
Now there are some of you who would push back on that and that's okay. I just hate, hate, hate FSBOs and expireds who didn't call me first. I hate it. I refuse to do it in my business and it maybe cost me money but whatever, I stand against that. I don't like it. If you're spending your time on that, maybe [crosstalk] Yes. Maybe take a look at what you're doing and say, "Okay, maybe there's a better way to do this. Maybe I should've paid attention." If you guys want us to show you how to generate those free leads, we've been selling a course on it. You'd probably twist our arm and and get in there if you're a client without paying. In fact, no, you can't do that. We'll let you in if you're a current client. Show you how to do that because we should, it's our duty to show you guys how to really dominate the market.
Then lastly, if you're not at least doing one video per week, and pushing that out to your database and pushing that out by using Market Maker, by pressing that one button which those that are onto YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, you're missing the boat. I don't care what level of production you're at, you're going to regret it.
"It's still the Wild, Wild West," Kendra said that the other day when we were talking to a group of agents. It's so true. This is such a big opportunity that not enough people are jumping on, and it's going to be too late eventually. It's like the missing link, we've talked about a little bit. It's like the missing link. Once you generate the leads, it's a prerequisite. You have to have the oil going into the top of the funnel. You've got to have a bottom of the funnel too, and that's the thing that most companies and again, like you were saying, it's your fault.
They don't tell you this stuff. They don't want you to know.
They just tell you the other part, and we've seen this, agents just respond differently to leads. People are like, "Leads. I need leads," but it's [crosstalk] "I got burned on these things." Well, it's because they didn't teach you the whole process. If you're generating leads now and spending money on it or spending time to generate leads and you don't have digital branding in place, you are missing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I'm going to decode that.
Thank you.
What happens when you generate a lead? When you generate a lead, when we run your pay per click for you, when any other company sells you a lead or when some other company runs pay per click for you, they are running it to a website, to a landing page that doesn't talk about you. Period. Yes, you got a lead, the only thing that they're going to remember about you is the phone call, which a lot of people don't make. Then if you just start spamming them with emails, with a little drip campaign, they're going to ignore that. You're going to be an annoying pest. Trying to tie this all together, you have to make sure that you have a strategy in place that retargets them, that brands you as the only person to do business with in that market above all competitors, do some unique selling propositions. You need to be putting out content.
Let me tell you, if you're scared to put out content and you don't want to do video, that's okay. You can talk into a microphone and do it on just voice. You can type it and just do it with a blog. Just whatever until you get your confidence up and what you're saying to the point where you can get on the video because that's going to be the most powerful where people can see you and they can hear you. Just like Jake was saying, having an affinity for a Mark Wahlberg, totally manufactured, never met the dude. It's just through that process. It's not through the movies. It's through the interviews and through him just being a real guy that makes me like, "Yes, I'd pick to have a beer with Mike Wahlberg."
Just to tie a bow because you said it, and it made me think because it's like a bad word to me. Drip campaigns, using drip campaigns in 2019 that is only email and canned email, is the equivalent of running newspaper ads in 2012.
That's funny because I knew somebody who did that and he refused to not do it. It was my dad actually.
They still can work. It's better than not doing anything, but how many people--? You can get on the newspapers' website too because a lot of people go to newspaper websites now to get content. You actually only had it in print on newspapers. You missed. Sure, there's still some circulation, but not nearly what it was 10, 20 years before that. Drip campaigns, if that's your answer for, "No, I got it covered. I can follow up with people, because I got a drip campaign," you're missing out.
I agree. You know what? I don't have any clothes for the derby, I don't have any of that pretty colored stuff.
Come on.
I'm going o have to borrow some at Dylan's.
Step by Dylan's on the way out of town.
The guy who dresses like an Easter egg. All right, you guys, we rambled a little bit today.
[inaudible 00:24:51] in the derby this weekend, won't you?
Probably. I probably got a little bit for that. Two key takeaways here: if you don't have enough leads, start there. If you do have enough leads, you need to implement a digital branding campaign so that these people can start to know, like and trust you, to make it so that when you do meet with them you have a level of authority. Let me just drive that home real quickly. If you're buying leads from Zillow and they fill out the little form an you're the Zillow premier agent, that ain't going to cut it. They're not going to remember who was on that form before they clicked submit.
The last time I clicked submit on that, it was on Realtor and I got like five calls from five different people. There's no branding component to that. If you're buying leads from Zillow, you need to have a digital branded strategy there as well that's agonistic, meaning not connected to Zillow's strategy. They come into your system, you're still retargeting them with your branded ads. You're still sending them out content, new videos and information about the buying process in your market.
Let me tell you something. It's way more powerful to be a human than it is to be a brand and have them try to create a relationship with that brand that's no name, in the cloud, not tied to them whatsoever. It's real easy for us to out compete on a local level, a national company like that. Even if that's your only play right now and that's what you do and you still need some digital branding. We'd love to help you.
Absolutely. All right, man. Tomorrow, live, a different time. We'll do 11:30, I believe Central for Wally's call tomorrow. We'll get that up and rolling. Jump on there, ask him questions.
As we always say here at Market Maker, it's all about building a business that works harder for you.
Than you do for it, that's right.
Go get it.
Later.
At the derby.