Dear Friend,

Welcome to the second in a three part series on optimizing your website market.

Now last week we talked about converting leads into clients, and this week we’re going to talk about getting more leads from your current website visitors.

So next week we’re going to talk about getting more visitors to your website, and we’ll wrap up the series with our web clinic where I’ll show you how to put it all together. I’ve been getting lots of submissions for our web clinic, and if you’d like me to consider your website for the clinic, just send an email to marketingmonday@gmail.com. And I’ve got some great examples to choose from so far, and I think you’re going to get a lot out of it.

Okay, so let’s get right to it and talk about how to get more leads from your website.

Now I’m going to give you seven ideas here and I’d like you just to think about these as mindsets that you can adopt here, and there’s some tactics in here too, but mostly the things that we’re talking about right now are shifting your mind first, because you want to think about things a little bit differently and that will guide your actions.

Mindset 1: Know who’s coming to your site before they get there so you can be prepared for them when they arrive.

Now that’s a different little mindset for you, but what would you do if you knew that the next 100 visitors to your website were looking for a condo, or that they were looking for a town house, or a luxury home or a golf course home, or an investment property, or any single target market that you can think of? How would you approach your website differently if you knew that the next 100 visitors were all going to be looking for a very specific thing?

You know, I bet it would be much easier for you, wouldn’t it? I mean it would be much more relaxing that that was what’s going to happen, but often we try and make our website be multi-purpose, where you don’t want to leave anybody out, so you try and make the website apply to as many possible target markets as you can.

And I’m going to show you some different kind thinking this week, and the first mindset of planning for your target market ahead of time is going to really lead into next week where we start talking about how to attract the right people, because if you know what your website is set up to do, and you know who you’re trying to attract, that 1-2 combination is very powerful, and it’s going to lead to lots of more leads for you. You know, because if you know who’s coming to the site you’re able to optimise it for exactly what they are looking for.

Mindset 2: Realize your immediately viewable screen is the most valuable piece of real estate on your website.

You know, the question that you want to ask yourself is when you go to your website, and I would encourage you to do this, go to your website and what is the first thing that you see? You know if you know who your target market is, what they’re going to be thinking when they come to your website, would they say “Jackpot,” when they get there? Would they feel like “I’ve stumbled on the gold mine of gold mines for exactly what I’m looking for?” You know, would they say that? Would your target market say “This is exactly what I’m looking for?”

You know, whatever occupies that window when they arrive, the first things that they see that sets the tone for the whole experience. So if they come there and immediately everything starts to click into place they start feeling like “This is the place that I’m supposed to be,” that’s going to be a big help for you. You know, if your target is coming to the site and they’re looking for town houses and the first thing they see are pictures of town houses, and the first words they see are “Free information on how to buy lovely town homes in Winterhaven with zero down payment,” or “Lovely condos in Winterhaven,” whatever your target market is, the more things that you can get to click into place, to let them feel like “Yes you are in the right place. You’ve absolutely arrive, and this is the site that’s going to give you all the information you need to fulfil whatever your selfish desires are.”

That’s really what we’re saying here, because that’s the thing that your prospects have on their mind above everything else, is there own selfish desires. What you’re looking to do is aim for your website to be a perfect match between what they’re looking for and what they’re seeing when they come to your website.

Mindset 3: Make your website about THEM – not about you.

The most important thing that you can do is understand the difference between a lead generating site and a personal web page.

What we’re talking about here is not about your personal web page, it’s not about a page where it’s all about you, because they don’t care about you, your prospects care about what they care about. So your best course of action is for you to care about what they care about, and pretending you’re them will help you really get into that mindset. You know, a couple of big mistakes that I see in this regard, first thing is that the first thing that I see when I go to the web sites, and I’ve been going to a lot of them, everybody who sends in a request for the web clinic or a submission for the web clinic, I go and look at their site, and more often then not the language and the tone and the sense that I get when I go to look at these sites is “Welcome to my web site.” You see a big picture of you, the agent, front and centre, right there in the first viewable screen, often there’s more then one picture of you, you’ve got a big picture in the middle and then you’ve got another little picture off on the side, and the big telltale sign is when up in the navigation side on the left, if I see that the first button says “About me,” then it’s very crystal clear what the focus of this website is, you know?

You want to look at the language that you’re using and the imagery that you’re using when you come to your website. You want to get away from thinking that it’s yours, and you want to start thinking “You get,” instead of “I’ve got.” Now that’s a little bit of a different distinction for you here. Start thinking “You get,” instead of “I’ve got.” ‘Cause when you say “You get,” you can’t fill in the rest of that sentence without filling in a benefit. “You get a free report on how to buy lovely town houses in Winterhaven with zero down payment.” “You get access to the MLS so you can see all the new listings that are on the market right now.” “You get weekly updates of all the new town houses that come on the market.” “You get a Saturday tour of all the town houses that you want to see in Winterhaven.” See how just that language of saying “You get,” promises a big benefit, as opposed to “I’ve got.” When you say “I’ve got,” it focuses on you and not on your prospects, so you can’t help but fill in that “I’ve got,” statement with language that is not very benefit oriented. You know “I’ve got one of the largest real estate teams in Winterhaven.” That doesn’t matter. “I’ve got the backing of the largest franchise company in the United States.” That doesn’t mean anything. You know, when you start saying “You get,” you can’t help but focus on your prospects. So look at your website and start thinking about “How can I use that kind of language on my website?”

Mindset 4: Make an offer

You know so often we put up all these things on our website and we sit there and we expect that because it says “Email me,” or “Contact me,” that people are going to contact you. You know we’re not wired like that, we’re not wired to take the first step in any kind of social situation. You know we often force people into that position because we don’t make an offer, we want to appear sort of not pushy, if you want to say it like that. We want to appear that we’re being accommodating and that we’re here for them, but we’re really forcing them to take the first step, which is a big obstacle for most people. Here’s an example, here’s a story that I often tell, imagine if I brought you into my living room and I sat you down in the living room and I said to you “Hey, you know what? I’m really happy you’re here.

If you are hungry or thirsty there’s lots of stuff in the fridge, feel free to help yourself. I’ll be over here in this other room if you need me, just go ahead and call if you need anything.” Now how many of you would go and take something from my fridge? You know, you wouldn’t would you. Because it’s very, you know, it takes people out of their comfort zone, it’s not polite to ask. But then again the corollary to that is that it’s rude to turn somebody down. So you’ve got that as the big win.

Imagine now if I sat you down in the living room and I came out with a plate of freshly baked cookies, and I said to you “Would you like a cookie?” It would be very hard for you not to take the cookie because I’ve already got it here, I’m offering it to you, you can see the cookie, I want you to have the cookie, and it would be much more difficult for you to turn down the cookie then it would be for you to take one, so you’ll take it. Now you would never ask me, if I said “Hey, do you need anything, or would you like anything?” You’d never say “Would you go and bake me some cookies please?” Because we never want people to go out of their way for us. So the best thing that you can do on your website is treat it just like people are coming into your living room, and that you’re not just going to say “Contact me,” or “Email me,” or “Ask the realtor.”

Don’t make people do those things because that’s not how we’re naturally wired. Think about making an offer. You know, what kind of offers can you make? You can offer a free report by email. You could offer free updates of new listings when they come on the market. You could offer a free downloadable guide or e-book. You could offer to search properties. You could offer free hot list newsletter. You could offer a Saturday tour of the homes. You could offer a free seminar, or webinar or teleclass. You could offer free video tours. You could offer audio interviews with experts like a mortgage broker or a financial planner or a home inspector or a feng shui expert, what ever it is. You could offer audio interviews, you could offer a weekly pod cast, all of these things that you can offer with an exchange.

Mindset 5: Make it easy, easy, easy to take the first step.

You know, have you ever been to a website where in order to get any kind of information or a free report, you have to fill out this four page form with your blood type and your bank balance and your political preference, you know, it’s an obstacle.

It’s such an obstacle for people to fill out these forms, and that’s why so few people will fill out those forms. You know the easiest thing to start with is to make it low resistance. And the easiest and lowest resistance offer that you can make to start a dialogue with people is something that they can get in exchange for just their email address and their name. That’s it, it’s very, very easy, it’s very low resistant, and once they have left you their name and their email address, now you’ve got a way to continue a dialogue with them. So it’s the start of the relationship.

You know, one of the keys that you want to try is that instead of making all these individuals offers where they have to leave their name and email address to get any one of them, try bundling all your offers together so they get lots of stuff just in exchange for the one email address, not once for each thing. So if you’ve got a whole series of reports, rather then having people click on it and leave their name and email for each of the reports say “Get free access to all of these free reports,” and list all the title that you have, and then just put a free instant access where they can leave their name and their email address so that they can start that dialogue with you. You know, the more that you do this, the more that you put these offers right up there on that home page, you’re going to find that you see the number of people who start a relationship with you by email increase exponentially.

Mindset 6: Begin with the end in mind and always lead to the next step.

You know, even though they start out with just an email address in exchange for a free report, or in exchange for searching properties, know that the email is going to lead to a dialogue and the next offer.

You know, you have to start looking at this like a chess master, you have to start looking at this like knowing two, three, four moves ahead where you’re actually headed, and reverse engineering that this first offer of an email in exchange for a report on how to buy lovely town homes in Winterhaven with zero down payment is going to lead to a dialogue where you’re going to send people short, personal emails expecting a reply, where you’re going to lead them step by step to the next offer.

So somebody who’s asking for a free report on how to buy lovely town homes in Winterhaven with zero down, the next step might be asking them “Hey Dean, would you like a list of town homes you can buy in Winterhaven that are for sale right now that you can buy with zero down payment?” Or “Hey Dean, would you like to come on a Saturday tour of town homes in Winterhaven?” You know, all these things where you can engage people in a dialogue, and ask them, or make them offers, ask them if they would like a cookie. You know, ask them would they like an offer, would they like to come on this Saturday tour? Would they like to come to your open house this Sunday? Would they like to get a free list? Would they like for you to email them updates? Would they like your weekly newsletter? You know, all of these things, don’t leave it up to them to ask for help, offer it ahead of time.

Mindset 7: Lather, rinse and repeat.

You know, once you know the formula for turning visitors to your website into leads, you know, why not do it again and again and again?

Why not do it for a bunch of different target markets? You know, if you know the formula is that when people come to your website that the first think you want to do is make an offer where they will their name and their email address, and then once they leave their name and email address you continue and start a dialogue with them so that they’ll share the desires of their heart, who they are, what they’re looking for, the kind of house and the price range and the area, all the kind of things that you would need to help them, once they do that now you’re ready to engage them in a relationship where they can meet with you face to face, once you know that whole formula and you’ve got all the components of it working, you know, it’s easy for you to duplicate, its easy for you to do it in other target markets.

You know, so you could have one just for town homes, you could have one for condos, you could have one for investment properties. Any target market that you can think of, once you know how the make the basic formula work you can apply it to any target market that you choose.

So that’s it for this week, tune in next time and we’re going to talk about how to get more visitors to your website. And I’m going to talk about how to get more visitors to your website without spending a ton of money, and without depending on the search engines. So tune in next time and we’ll talk about how to get more visitors to your website.

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SPECIAL INTERVIEW with Jay Kinder – #2 Coldwell Banker Agent in the world.

651 transactions and over $2.6 Million in 2009

BONUS: Video with Jay  “how to make $250,000 THIS year with zero expenses”

>Click Here for Video

Dean Jackson

Hello everybody, welcome to the marketingmonday.com live Podcast.  My name is Dean Jackson, and we truly are live today, I’ve got a special guest with us, my friend Jay Kinder from Lawton Oklahoma, that international real estate hot bed you’ve all heard about.  So Jay, welcome.

Jay Kinder

Well thank you, Dean.

Dean Jackson

Now I want to give people a little bit of background on who you are, so that it’ll set a little context for some of the things we’re going to talk about, so I’m going to ask you to brag about yourself a little bit here, so we can establish who you are.  How long have you been doing real estate first off?

Jay Kinder

Well I’m going into my thirteenth year now.

Dean Jackson

How old were you when you started?

Jay Kinder

Nineteen, 19 years old.

Dean Jackson

So I was 21 when I started, so we both have that in common, starting young.  So let’s talk a little bit about you, you’ve gone into your thirteenth year, what were some of your numbers from last year, what kind of operation are you running over there?

Jay Kinder

We had one of our best years ever.  We didn’t eclipse our best year, but we had, as far as profit goes we just dialed things in pretty good.  We ended up with 651 transactions in 2009, over $2.6million in total gross commission income into the company, so that was a pretty big year coming off of a pretty slow 2008 I guess you would say.

Dean Jackson

Yeah exactly.  Now you’re with Coldwell Banker right there in Lawton, right.  Where do you rank in terms of all of the Coldwell Banker agents right now?

Jay Kinder

Our team has ranked in the Top 10 for Coldwell Banker for the last I don’t know, probably six or seven years maybe, maybe a little bit longer than that even.  But this year it looks like somewhere around Number 2, Number 2 or Number 3, I don’t think we knocked off the Number 1 spot.  But I kind of like being not Number 1, because that means I’ve always got something to work towards. 

Dean Jackson

So the Avis of real estate agents and the Coldwell Banker, you try harder.

Jay Kinder

You try harder, that’s it.

Dean Jackson

How many agents are with Coldwell Banker?

Jay Kinder

As far as the whole franchise, or just our office?

Dean Jackson

No as far as the whole franchise, you’re Number 2 out of how many?

Jay Kinder

There was I think 120,000 last year, so probably maybe a little bit fewer than that, but probably close to 120,000 I would say.

Dean Jackson

Top of the top of the top.   So that’s exciting, and to see that you’re in a business that’s still growing, when everything else nationally might sort of characterised as slowing down, you’re still being full steam ahead.  Let’s talk a little bit about this 12 year journey, to go from zero at 19 years old, to being the Number 2 or 3 agent out of 100,000 agents, and doing $2.6million, what kind of is the trajectory and the path that you took, going from 19 to where you are today, do you remember when you first got started?

Jay Kinder

Yeah absolutely, I think if you had to draw this out on a graph, it would look like I was lost, back and forth this way, that way, and up here and back over here, and it certainly wasn’t a straight line to where we’re at.  I guess I would say probably my claim to fame is always been I wasn’t the smartest kid in class, but I always sat next to him.  So that was probably what’s propelled me to this level, over the years I’ve never stopped learning.  And at the very beginning, I think probably the thing that really probably was working to my advantage more than anything, and I got this a lot, was the first thing was I was really enthusiastic, I didn’t really know why, but I was always excited, I always kind of enjoyed what I was doing, when I was meeting with people.  And then I think secondarily it’s just I didn’t know what an average agent was supposed to do and what was the limits that were really supposed to be set upon this industry, in terms of averages and stuff like that, I just didn’t believe that there was a ceiling, and I just didn’t know any better.

Dean Jackson

And then what a 19-year-old especially is supposed to be able to do, right.

Jay Kinder

Sure.

Dean Jackson

So what was your strategy when you got started?  So you’re 19, I know you’ve got some sort of family background in real estate, but what was your experience when you first got started, what was your strategy to get off the ground?

Jay Kinder

Looking back it’s kind of interesting trying to remember what it was like in the early on days.  I know that I didn’t sell a whole bunch of houses right off the bat, I think it took me three months to close on my first deal, and I had to have some help with that one.  So I didn’t just naturally just jump right in and start doing deals, it was kind of an uphill battle.  But the very beginning was, interestingly enough I took my Dale Carnegie course which really helped me I guess in terms of kind of coming out of my shell a little bit, and I went into, taking my GOI, my very first year, and started just really trying to educate myself, because I wasn’t going to college at this point, so I figured I probably ought to learn, and if it wasn’t for my dad; actually nobody in the company, it’s actually a company that we represented a few REO properties, and nobody wanted the listings in the entire company, they were like $40,000, $30,000 listings, and I was like ‘I’ll take them’.  So I picked up a few listings, and kind of had a little bit of fun with that, and did a few deals that way.  And then started learning from; actually the guy, the very first conference I went to was Roger Butcher, if you’ve ever heard of Roger Butcher.  He’s been around, I’ve got his cassette tapes still to this day, and I just started using kind of a 30-day marketing plan, and started building this presentation for listings, and I kind of started going after for sale by owner and expireds, and the only opportunity that kind of really were coming my way, and doing open houses every Sunday, just kind of doing what these mentors told me to do to be successful.

Dean Jackson

Do you remember, because the funny thing is that the very first real estate conference that I ever went to was a Roger Butcher conference.

Jay Kinder

No way.

Dean Jackson

No it’s the truth, and I have never been to any kind of seminar like that, I was young and I’d never been to a ballroom with a few hundred people in it, kind of thing, it’s all new. So I bought all the tapes and listened to them, and the funny thing is I remember immediately going back to the office and I happened to be on floor duty that night, and it was a Wednesday night, which was when the local real estate paper, the weekly paper came out with the real estate section, so that was always like the prime time to be on the floor duty, because everybody back then, this was 1989, and there was no internet, so the Wednesday paper was like the Bible for people looking for a home.  And they would get home from work and they’d open up the paper and they’d circle the ones that they’re interested in, and then they’d start calling.  And a technique that I learned from Roger Butcher, was to tell them to get a piece of paper and write down your name and number, and then tell them about the house that they were calling on, and then I would ask them the question, ‘how would you like it if this was the last phone call that you had to make?’  Tell them, I said ‘I know you’ve got the Wednesday paper there, what other houses have you got circled, because I’ve got all the information right here, and I’d be happy to tell you about them’.  And the guy who called in, he really liked that approach, and the next day I went out and listed his 5 Acres on the outskirts of town, he was going to move into town.  And just from having; and I think this is the most important thing and it’s probably helped for you too, is knowing what to say, just having a new skill, a new ability.

Jay Kinder

Yes, absolutely.   Once you find something that works, you just latch onto it.

Dean Jackson

So your first year you’re doing open houses and learning the ropes with some REOs, and what kind of strategies did you do, advancing there, you were kind of learning and evolving, and what were some of the next things that you tried?

Jay Kinder

I think probably, it’s kind of a blur to me now just going back and looking at what strategies.  I know one thing I wouldn’t have probably called it a strategy, it was just a lot of hit and miss.  I started to really enjoy getting listings, and I’m pretty competitive, so even as a kid in high school I was very competitive and stuff like that.  In fact I know what drove me, one of the things that drove me, we used to have a star board on the wall in the office, and there was this one guy, Tom King, that always had stars all the way across, he was Number 1 in the company, and he always was.  And I just wanted more stars than him, and I didn’t care what I had to do to get more stars, I wanted more stars than him.

Dean Jackson

So what did you do to get a star, did you get a listing?

Jay Kinder

Well a listing, a sale, a listing sold we’d get a yellow star, and then with the referral into rental management I got a star too or something like that, so any way I could get a listing.  And that seemed to be the easiest way for me to get stars, and I enjoyed it, I loved meeting with people, and again it was taking a bit of what I learned from Roger Butcher to say to expires and too for sale by owners, at the time it was better than anything else I had learned and it was working.  And for sale by owners it’s so easy to set up appointments with, they show houses to just about anybody.  So we just started trying to get listings, and I enjoyed that.  And as I started to build a listing inventory, and calls would come in, it just started kind of working that way I guess you could say, and I enjoyed it a lot, so that’s kind of what I focussed on was just getting more listings, I guess I would call that my strategy now.

Dean Jackson

Yeah well that’s interesting isn’t it.  And I love the fact that what drove you was getting the stars, because I think that’s such a common thing, is that we don’t have the; we didn’t have stars in our office, but we did have a big deal board, where every time you got a listing or a sale you got to write it up on the board, and it’s something where it was that recognition.  And I think it was, I forget who told me, somebody said that Napoleon said that what changed his life was realising that men would be willing to die for a blue ribbon, and it’s interesting how we all crave that recognition, it’s funny.  So you’re going along and you’re doing the for sale by owners, are you kind learning the moves on that and developing your approach to it?

Jay Kinder

Well I didn’t have anything else to do, so follow-up wasn’t a problem at that time.  And I always followed up with them on Mondays, on the days that they were disappointed from not selling it over the weekend.  I had a marketing plan, one thing that I had, and I think a lot of agents didn’t have at the time was I had pre-printed; I went down to Staples and bought this paper with the fancy little borders on it, and I would go online and I would try to screen capture different pictures and stuff and put it into this presentation, I had no skill set whatsoever for doing stuff like that, but I tried to make this presentation, and pretty much just did what Roger Butcher or any of the other people that I had bought books or tapes from, and went to courses with, and just took some of that information and put it into a presentation.  I carried Roger Butcher’s little 30-day marketing plan, little binder thing that he sold me, and I just tried to perfect that.  And as I would go to more and learn more, I think I bought Walter Sanford’s stuff, and I think I bought Rick DeLuca, and the next one would have been probably Mike Ferry.  I started taking a little bit from each one, and I was like ‘oh I like this, this works really well’, or I would try something and it would work and I would just stick with it.  But that was the difference maker for me was, and I’d always call and find out, I was kind of amazed that people would list with me, just because I looked like I should be mowing their yard, not them paying me thousands of dollars to sell their house.  But I’d ask them that question, and they would say ‘you know what, you were real enthusiastic, and we just really believed that you can sell our house’.  And I used to beat some of the top agents in the market, on nothing more than a really good presentation, and enthusiasm and excitement.  And I still carry that to this day because I really love what I do and am passionate about it, and I think that’s something that you have to maintain and you have to have in order to be successful in anything.

Dean Jackson

What was the first thing, did you come to a point where you would run into a little bit of a feeling where you kind of realised ‘I can’t continue to do this just on my own’, where it was getting a little busier for you, can you recall what was the turbo fuel for you?

Jay Kinder

Yeah, definitely there was a point at which it got to the point I couldn’t keep up.  And it’s really kind of crazy looking back at how many deals that I did, without any buyer agents or anything, I just didn’t know any of that stuff, I didn’t know anything about building a team, and anything like that, I just knew the level of service that I wanted to provide to my clients was not possible, or if it was I certainly couldn’t communicate it back to them what I was doing.  And it got to a point where I just wasn’t able to stay in touch with them, I wasn’t getting back to my calls, and I felt bad, but you have a deal and someone’s wanting to list a house, or someone’s wanting to go look at houses, do you sit there in the office and make your calls, or do you go write up another one.  And there was a certain point, and I don’t remember exactly when it was, that I brought on my very first assistant, and that poor girl, I still feel sorry for her this day, because I just dumped everything on her plate that I didn’t like doing.  And I started to really just delegate the things that either a) I stunk at and shouldn’t have been doing in the first place, and b) I didn’t like doing, and now looking back I also delegated the things that’s really not productive in terms of dollar productivity per hour, activities that I should have been working on in the first place.  So just started delegating things off to my very first assistant, and that allowed me to be on more appointments and working with more buyers or whatever the case may be.  But whatever it was I was out there in the field, not writing ads, or shuffling papers.

Dean Jackson

And what did that do for your business, would you say that there was an immediate, that that was a trajectory changer, that you were able to handle more because of that, or was it a little bit longer before that started really having an impact?

Jay Kinder

No, and I really wish I could go back and watch this whole thing kind of evolve.  But I went from, I think it was my second year in the business I went from 39 transactions to 72 transactions or something like that.  And that was a pretty good sized growth and I had delegated quite a bit.  And I remember coming back from a Coldwell Banker conference, I was on the aeroplane and I was looking at what I’d done the last year, and I’d been through every one of those little classes at the conference, and had notes everywhere, and I remember my parents were sitting in front of me.  And my dad, he’s a broker, and he never really did a whole lot of transactions himself, he just kind of has always been a broker, and done a few deals here and there.  And I remember showing him that the President’s Premiere for Coldwell Banker was 110 transactions; no it was 100 transactions exactly, and I had broke down this whole formula, how many listings I had to take, because only half of them would sell, and how many buyers I’d have to work with, and this that and the other, and I wrote this whole plan, and I said ‘this is all I have to do to do 100 units’.  And they were like; I remember they looked at me like I was crazy, but they were like ‘okay’.    I saw it though, I saw that there was a plan, I knew what I had to do, now it was just a matter of; I saw it, all I had to do was just make them see it, at that point.

Dean Jackson

You know what’s interesting, I was telling somebody else about this, and kind of talk about you for a second.  Because when we were together in Atlanta, the one thing that struck me about you, is when we were, and you may not even remember this, but when we were at lunch, and we were talking about a website, just giving you an idea of something that you could do about a website, and I remember being there and you’re right beside me at kiddie corner there, and I remember immediately, like within 10 minutes of that idea being planted in your head, you had already implemented it and were already getting results from that.

Jay Kinder

I do remember that.

Dean Jackson

You do remember that, and I was just like, I thought there’s a guy that, a lot of people are in this environment where they’re learning, and they hear a new idea and they write it in their notebook, then they go back and put it in the pile of all the other ideas that they have in the other notebooks from the other conferences they’ve been to, and here you are right there on your smart phone, implementing the idea you’d heard literally seven minutes ago.  And I think that says a lot about you as a doer, and somebody who I think one of the characteristics of your success is that speed of implementation.

Jay Kinder

I couldn’t agree more.  The only thing I would say as a caveat to that is, and I hear a lot of different folks around the industry that say ‘you’re a typical conference-goer’ or whatever, and I went to all of them.  There’s not anybody that doesn’t have my money – I have bought everything that you can buy.  I’ve taken a little bit from everybody.  There’s not anything that I wouldn’t have bought; the challenge I think sometimes becomes focus, and I think I’ve learned as I’ve gone on, there’s so much good information, and maybe it’s just me but I certainly am not smart enough to remember all the greatest ideas that I’ve heard, so it’s probably going to get forgotten if I don’t start and plan how to implement the idea.  And that’s probably the biggest difference between success and failure in a real estate agent, is not just the innovation or the ideas, but the implementation of the ideas, the doing it, just doing it, that’s all that it takes sometimes for you to come over the edge and the success is right there.  And I agree with you on that, the implementation is something that is key for anyone to be successful in real estate, but saying focussed and planning and looking at the things that are the lowest cost to implement, the easiest to implement, and then that give you the highest return, and focussing on those things first, makes for really giant leaps in your business.  And it was three or four years almost consecutively I had doubled my business and doubled my business and doubled my business.

Dean Jackson

I was just going to say that, I was going to ask you then coming from, so you went from 30 transactions to 72 transactions, you had the realisation that hey all I need to do is get to 100 and I can be at that award level, and we know how much those awards motivate you – so how long was it from the time you had that realisation to the time you actually got to 100 transactions?

Jay Kinder

The Coldwell Banker conferences are in February, so I was trying to figure the dates out.  So if I had done the 70 whatever transactions, that year I completed; the very next year, the same year that I was at the conference I went to 131 that year, and then the next year was my blockbuster year, 233 transactions.  And as I say it was my blockbuster year, I guess I say that because that was where I really became a brand, and started to become a brand in my marketplace, and started to become well known and been around a few years, started to get a few repeat clients and stuff like that.  Then I took off another, doubling virtually in the next couple of years as well.  But that year I didn’t have any buyer agents, and I think I had four staff that I had grown to that year, and I hired my very first buyer agents at the end of that year, I think it was 2000 or 2001, 2001 I think it was.  So I was out in the field running around like a chicken with my head cut off doing transactions.  Certainly going backwards I would; what I would change is I would have put systems in place, because man, my boat had a lot of leaks.  It had lots of leaks.  I still apologise to this day to anyone who did business with me during that year, because I’m pretty sure I probably didn’t take as good of care of you as I would have liked to.

Dean Jackson

Now was there a realisation at some point where, did you start employing some marketing at any point along this trajectory, or did you start realising hey I can leverage myself a little bit with some marketing or some money spent on my business here, what came into play there?

Jay Kinder

Yeah, there was; during the year that I went up into the 200s as far as units that year, was the year that I had started doing some marketing.  I actually had taken out an ad in the newspaper, I was the only agent at that time that started that whole idea.  I started testing some different things.  Again I’m in a small town, I actually started testing radio, and actually I still have the same radio spots, the same position on the radio ever since I started that back in I think 2001.  And that was what really truly started to build my brand was radio.

Dean Jackson

That’s really interesting because, I guess we talked about before that you’re kind of on an island there in Lawton, you’re surrounded by a lot of farmland, so you’ve kind of got a self-contained kind of market there.

Jay Kinder

Yeah, I wish it was an island, but it’s definitely not an island.

Dean Jackson

Yeah, you know what I mean, that whole idea of it’s surrounded by farmland.

Jay Kinder

Surrounded by nothing.

Dean Jackson

Yeah I started up in Toronto in one of the suburbs of Toronto, and everything kind of blends right into the next town, it’s like the one town one side says ‘welcome to Mississauga’ and on the back it says ‘welcome to Brampton’.  So it’s like you’re going back and forth there.  Now what does it look like now for you in terms of your team and the kinds of roles that people have in your business right now?

Jay Kinder

Wow, it’s completely; I’ll say it’s amazing how much I didn’t know.  This whole set up now is, I have much better systems in place, I have much better people in place, I’ve learned a lot about hiring, I’ve learnt a lot about firing, I’ve learned a lot about pretty much every aspect of the business, really taking care of your customers, just better systems.  I think that’s probably one of the main things that we really do truly have a handle on now is that we’re not people dependent, we’re more systems dependent.   I have a great supporting cast around me that helps to leverage me.  And my day consists basically in terms of real estate, when you’re working in the business – I have a very, very strict schedule, it’s almost, I’m kind of proud of that, because I have always been one to just run and jump all over the place like a ball ricocheting.

Dean Jackson

Let’s talk about that then, what is your schedule, what does that look like right now?

Jay Kinder

Basically, I have built into my schedule from 7 o’clock to 9 o’clock on Monday through Thursday is what I call flex time, and that’s the time that I prepare for appointments, sometimes if I’m going to be reviewing some kind of a new product that I want to check into, or working on something that needs to be worked on, I’ll build it into that timeframe.  I try to go to the gym every morning and be at the office by 7.00am, it’s not like clockwork I can tell you that.  But that’s my goal, at least to make it at least three times a week into the gym.  So from 7.00am to 9.00am so there’s that flex time, any calls or anything that I need to have with anyone I might try to schedule into these flex times, before the day begins. The mornings are filled with impact zone meetings, which my impact zones for my company are anything really that drives the bottom line, anything that drives what our mission and core values and the things that we’re trying to accomplish, I call them pillars for my business.  And I think we have nine impact zone meetings, not all of them are weekly, some of them are monthly.  And they range from our short sell department meetings, I have one employee in the short sell department that manages all my short sells and those processes, and an REO meeting, I have our closing department meetings, I have a financial meeting obviously, I have a company-generated business meeting – I’m missing quite a few important meetings there, but those are all scheduled in the mornings.  And I schedule those meetings, the listing department, all of those meetings are scheduled weekly, Monday through Thursday, generally before 11.30am or 12.00pm, I’m in and out of those meetings, I think our recruiting and retention meeting is one of them, and a couple of others maybe.  But that’s when I’m working on the business, I’m truly working and I’m taking everything else, and marketing is my biggest one, I nearly forgot a good one.  But those are the things that – how do you forget that one, right?  But those are the things that I do in the morning time, and I meet with the particular people that are involved, along with my CEO that really runs this place, John Kitchens, and we meet in those meetings and take notes, and then we deliver action plans and action steps to implement things and to get things done, and then we follow those on project worksheets every week to see where we’re at with things, and prioritising, and keeping every one of those pillars moving.  And then the afternoons, I plan off for lunch, I didn’t used to do that, I used to work straight through lunch, and I still do that most days, but when I can I take off lunch and I’ll try to go to lunch with one of my agents or someone in the staff or team, or maybe recruit or whatnot.  From about 1.30pm to 3.00pm is more flex time for me, again returning calls, handle anything that needs to be handled, anything that needs to be scheduled in that flex time has to be approved by me.  And the rule in my office is two things, either you have to have my signature if I bought something, and you have to have eye contact if you put something in my schedule during my flex time, because if you just walk in my office and you’re talking to the back of my head, there’s a really good chance that I didn’t hear anything that you said.    But that’s it.  And then from 3.00pm, some days I allow 7.00pm appointments, but 3.00pm, 4.00pm, 5.00pm and 6.00pm are listing appointments only, or a meeting with sellers.  So if I have a seller that I need to get a price reduction on and they’re coming in the office I’ll meet with them only during the hours of 3.00pm, 4.00pm, 5.00pm, 6.00pm, and sometimes 7.00pm, that’s Monday through Thursday, and Friday is pretty much planned time off or just kind of whatever I want to do Fridays, and different things like that, and then weekends off as well for the most part.

Dean Jackson

So basically a four day work week, but a pretty structured four day work week, pretty focussed with built in attention, right.

Jay Kinder

I’ll tell you this, it whips my butt the last couple of weeks.  It sounds like it’s all perfectly structured, but there’s probably 15 files on my desk right now I’m looking at right now that need my attention, in terms of getting them listed.  And I leverage myself so well that I can only do listing appointments, but the problem is my head listing agent that sets the appointments, that’s all she does all day long, she set 77 listing appointments last month, so there’s just not enough time to go on that many, and I don’t have all of the systems perfectly in place for that second appointment in the office, where they come back into the office to do all of those appointments myself – I thought I was super-human, and I’m certainly not, I figured that out in the last couple of weeks.

Dean Jackson

Seventy-seven appointments.  And what do you do, just out of curiosity, in the times if you don’t have a listing appointment scheduled at 3.00pm, 4.00pm, 5.00pm, 6.00pm or 7.00pm, at one of those points, what do you do in that time.

Jay Kinder

Usually something else will get scheduled in there.  The way my schedule is, and I used Top Producer, just for lack of any other better options at this point, but it works pretty well for most of the things that we’re doing.  I block that time off completely, and Dina who is my inside sales agent, she’s the one setting all those appointments, she has the ability to fill in appointments at any point, so she’s kind of the only person that really messes with my schedule.  And then sometimes there’ll be something that comes up, and something that’s a problem in the short sale department for instance, and it’s a deal where I need to get involved, and we’ll schedule that to fill that space.  There is never…

Dean Jackson

You might be out at your 3 o’clock appointment, and while you’re there she fills up your 6 o’clock appointment even?

Jay Kinder

No, that happened, I used to happen and I would ghost the 6 o’clock appointment because I didn’t know, or I didn’t check my schedule or my email, so if it’s within 24 hours of time of the appointment, then the eye contact rule comes into play.

Dean Jackson

I love these little systems, what a great way to, like you said being sort of distractible, like most entrepreneurs are, and able to follow shiny objects everywhere they go, this has been a great way for you to keep yourself focussed, nothing like a meeting that’s scheduled, where other people are sitting there waiting for you, to keep you on task, right.

Jay Kinder

There were times definitely in the last three years that we actually; actually we do, I think we still have it somewhere, I just try not to be late.  But I used to have to put money in a jar whenever I would be late to appointments with staff, just because I was always running and gunning and always late.  In fact we still set to this day set my appointments, and Dina has a very specific script she uses, she says ‘Jay will be coming off of another appointment, so he’ll be there between 4.00pm and 4.15pm’.  So I’m never late now.  That kind of helps that. So it’s definitely hard to stay on schedule, and you’ve got to be careful not to plan things too closely, because you certainly can be late.

Dean Jackson

That’s what the flex time helps you kind of recalibrate and get right on track again.  So you go on a lot of listing appointments then?

Jay Kinder

It’s pretty crazy actually.

Dean Jackson

That’s the key role when you’re working in the business, is being on listing appointments.

Jay Kinder

This is the thing Dean, I have never found anything that makes more money than the listing appointment, because you look at the amount of time that I spend, and I don’t spend more than an hour in the very first meeting with a seller, and I might spend another hour total with them between maybe the closing, and I’m very seldom involved in the offer presentation, I have a listing coordinator that can manage it, she’s a licensed agent, and she’s been with me for about five or six years, she presents all my offers, she’s a certified negotiation expert, she is very good at what she does.  And I explain that, I build that into the presentation as a benefit.  And they understand that, so they don’t expect to see me, they don’t expect for me to be the one that calls, I give them my cell phone, I tell them ‘you can call me anytime 24/7, and I will answer any question for you, but here is what you should expect.  If you do call me, I may not get back to you right away, if you need something right away you should talk to Carla in my office’.  And I just manage their expectations, it’s a lot easier than you think, or especially when you present it as a benefit – you’re not probably going to get a hold of me during the day, very easily if you need an answer to something.  But that time that I pretty much whittled away everything that I do including pulling up the comparables and getting all the graphs and the reports and the package and everything ready – the seller counselling interview is done by Dina, everything is all a process.  And I literally, and I use the dentist, my dentist has a very good system that I think, kind of like unconsciously I may have copied, but he would come in and he would poke his head into the office while I was there with galls of stuff in my mouth and everything and he’d be like ‘hey’ and he’d come in and do his deal, then he’d go to the next office down the hall, and the next one and the next one and the next one, and I could hear him doing all these, working, and he’s got like eight people he’s working on at one time.  And he didn’t make the call and make sure that I was going to be there on time, and he didn’t clean up all the tools, and he didn’t do a lot of the process that kept things going there, but he did the surgery, he came his job and moved on.  And it’s such a great system, and you wouldn’t expect anything different, and I think that it works very well in real estate, getting the things off of your plate that are not the most productive.  For me the average the commission, even in little Lawton Oklahoma, $120,000 deal, it’s over, with the commission that we charge, it’s in excess of $4,000 to $5,000, sometimes $6,000, just on the listings I commission for a couple of hours – there’s nothing I can do that’s going to make more than $3,000 an hour, I can guarantee you that.

Dean Jackson

Right, exactly.  How many listing appointments would you estimate that you’ve been on in your whole career here?

Jay Kinder

Oh gosh.  We tried to figure this out the other day, and it’s probably well in excess of 4,000, maybe 5,000 appointments.  It’s got to be somewhere in there.  And who knows.

Dean Jackson

Would you say that you have learned a few things about being on a listing..?

Jay Kinder

Yeah I’ve learned just about everything, and if not, like I said I’m not the smartest guy, but when you go on that many appointments, you just start to figure things out.  It is absolutely the easiest thing to do once you have done it so many times, and you just kind of know a good method to go by.  There is a lot of things I have learned over the years, but that’s probably the thing that I’ve mastered the best is just understanding that process, and the best way to work through it and get the result that you want, and get the listing.

Dean Jackson

So what do you think the top two or three things that sellers want are, so your experience of doing that, what do you think that they really want, and how do you ensure that they get that?

Jay Kinder

The sad thing is that, and I don’t really know how to answer this, so the sad thing is is that the seller doesn’t really know what they need to…

Dean Jackson

They don’t even know what they don’t know, yeah.

Jay Kinder

Yeah, it’s unfortunately because I almost would say my presentation, a lot of it goes, if I could just walk in and give you my advice, your doctor doesn’t have to trick you or befriend you and become your best friend and go through a whole bunch of market research on what he’s going to do whenever he opens your mouth and starts working on you, you pretty much take just whatever you tell me to do is what you should do, you’re a doctor, right.  So a real estate agent is not that way, they want to believe that their house is worth more than it is, they want to believe that they have better options than what are right tin front of them, and it takes a lot longer sometimes for me to get to the point where I give advice, because I have to, Number 1 they have to know, like and trust me and believe in me before they’re ever going to listen to me and listen to my advice, and then I have to become an expert – I have to absolutely demonstrate that my knowledge of the market is so much better than anyone they’re going to speak to, so they don’t make that mistake of everything sounds good, they’re all excited and everything, and then you call back and they listed with someone else.  Those are probably two big things that I have to spend a lot of time on, and then going over before, and especially within the days of short sales now, I take all the short sale appointments because I know that no one can explain it better than me, and I just don’t feel comfortable – even if I’m not going to list the house, I do not feel comfortable without having gone through all the options for 30 minutes and explaining what would happen if they do decide to lease, what are the real costs, what is going to happen four months, three years from now when they want to sell that house, that they have to kick the renter out, do the repairs, and it sits on the market and they’re paying $1,000 a month for five months until it sells, and while they were doing the repairs, and it’s got to come out of pocket.  They don’t think about all those things, so I’ve got to paint that whole picture so they see it, and then okay now will you listen to me about the short sale, because this is probably going to be your best solution.  And then they listen.  Otherwise they’re like ‘oh no, I’ll just put it on the market with so and so, they said they could sell it for $30,000 more’, and it’s ridiculous.  But it’s sad, but with sellers you really truly have to follow those steps – if not, what I feel like, and I hope that every real estate agent is the same way, is that I feel like it’s my job to spend as much time as I have to to educate them, because I know that I’m going to give them the best advice.  I don’t know that the next person coming through the door will, but I know that I can.  So it’s my due diligence to spend the time and go through and build a rapport with them, become their friend, understand the situation, really demonstrate that I understand the marketplace and what’s going on out there and what’s real and not real, really demonstrate what they’re going to need to do to sell their home for the most money and in the timeframe that they said is important, so they don’t have more stress in their life.  They just don’t know what happens.  I asked a seller the other day, he said he wanted to be sold, and he wasn’t highly motivated, but he wanted to put his house on the market and he wanted to have it sold no more than a few months kind of deal, and I said ‘what happens if you own this house in October?’  And he looked at me kind of funny, and I said ‘if it hasn’t sold by October, what would you do?’ And he’s like ‘oh well it’s got to sell by then’, because that’s five months longer than he ever even dreamed of selling the house.  And so he mentally, I took him to a place mentally where he was very uncomfortable, and I said ‘what does it feel like?’  Or especially in the summertime like if you’re listing in the winter and you’re talking about mowing the grass in the spring – whoa, they don’t think that far ahead, so that decision of over pricing or that decision of doing something other than what I’m advising, could very well cost you making an October payment.  And that’s that pain that they need to feel unfortunately, not in a bad way, but they need to understand that that’s a very real possibility, that they could be making an October payment.

Dean Jackson

I call that pushing the accelerator pedal and going forward six months, and saying what does it look like here if we are still in this situation.  That kind of thing that you learned and are able to do naturally now, has come from all the experience of having done thousands of listing appointments.  Now you’ve got that knowledge, you take that with you no matter what.  One of the questions I always ask people, if I were for some reason, Lawton was out of the question, you were run out of Lawton and you couldn’t do business in Lawton, and you had to move up the road to Broken Arrow, which is the same population as Lawton, and we dropped you in there with no team, you don’t know anybody, it’s just you right now, how quickly do you think you could get back to the level that you’re at now?  It took you 12 years to get there the first time.

Jay Kinder

That’s a good question.  To get to where I’m at now I don’t know how many years it would take, and there’s the question of would I really do this all again?  I think I could do it a lot faster, but I think I could probably monetise my business better than I did during the building it to this point.  But without a doubt, we both know the answer to this question, the thing that I; the most valuable thing, and I say this all the time, you could strip away everything from me, as far as my business goes, but the one thing that’s the most valuable and I would never want to lose, is the knowledge, it’s the skill, because mastering that skill has allowed me to get where I’m at.  And if I go to another market, and it’s only because I’ve been mastering this skill over and over and over, going to conferences, going to places, role playing, listening to the CDs, learning it and learning it and learning it, still to this day, I’m still running my credit card every week for something, just trying to gain more knowledge about anything that has to do with anything, looking outside the industry now even more than ever.  And that’s what I take with me, and that’s what’s going to be what builds me back up.  And real quickly what I would do is I would get a presentation put together, and I would have a lot of the documentation, and the same system that I have now in terms of market, I would start learning the market, I would do everything I could to learn as much as I could about every house on the market, every sale going over the last two years.  Broker Metrics is a great product for agents and brokers for graphs and statistics and stuff like that, I love that program, it’s amazing.  You can put up so many graphs, you could make anybody think that you’re a genius just by having all this market research done.  It’s amazing, but it’s really good stuff, and then when you start really to understanding it and learning it, it’s just incredible how you use it.  But that’s what I would do first.  And then obviously, no budget, the first thing I would be going after is a for sale by owner and expireds, they’re free, they raise their hand.  And I say this all the time too, for sale by owner and expireds are the easiest thing to go after, there’s nothing else that you’ll ever do marketing dollar wise that will put you in front of, percentage wise, as many people that are motivated.  So if you had to mail to people or anything that you had to do to spend money on, you’re going to reach a whole lot more people, but how do you find 100 people that have already pretty much raised their hand and said ‘I’m interested in selling’.  Expireds and for sale by owners are waving the flag saying ‘hey look at me, I want to sell my home’.  And a lot of agents they don’t do it – just do it, just go out there and make it fun and just go out there and just try something, try anything.  And once you get one and you get the taste, it’s just like man this is so much easier than I thought it was going to be, and then you just go after it.

Dean Jackson

It’s funny you said something about making it fun, and how a lot of times people, they won’t go and put themselves out of their comfort zone to go and talk to a for sale by owner, or call an expired, yet they don’t think anything of going to the golf course and being frustrated about their game, if you’re looking at it it’s no different, where it’s a game and you’re with other people, it’s a cool mind set to have when you’re looking at it, just look at it with fascination and not frustration.

Jay Kinder

Yeah, that’s how I look at golf too though.  Golf is the most frustrating sport on the planet, even basketball I can hit 7/10 free throws left-handed, golf I can’t hit the ball down the fairway 1/10 times.  But it’s just one slight little minute change in degree that crushes the ball down the fairway.  And that’s all it is in learning the process of working with expireds or anything, it’s a skill, it’s just a matter of mastering it, changing just a little bit, just enough to nail it, and that’s when the reward comes.  It’s just with golf it doesn’t seem to come often enough for me.

Dean Jackson

And you over the years, that’s the thing, developing the ability to know what to say, how to say it, and when to say it.

Jay Kinder

Exactly.

Dean Jackson

Well Jay, I told you we’d say on for about 30 minutes, we’re coming up on an hour now.  That’s great, I think there’s a lot of learning here. What would you say in summary of, take you on a journey back to your 12 years, or 13 years, what would you say to people right now who may be struggling, maybe haven’t figured it out yet, what kind of encouragement would you give people?

Jay Kinder

The one thing that I think is out of; there’s so many things that you can latch onto that are going to help take you to success, but the one thing that you have to have is, you have to have your own why, and deep down inside you have to have a reason that you wanted to do this, you have to have a reason to want to succeed, and go and find that.  Go and find out what it is that really drives you, what it is that makes you want to achieve success, and hopefully you’ll love this industry, you’re passionate about it, even if it’s not, the market may not be what you want it to be, adapt, learn what other agents are doing and implement, and set goals, build a plan, and just do it.  Just make it happen, follow your dream.  This is no secret, like I said I certainly didn’t invent anything ingenious here in this marketplace, I just learnt…

Dean Jackson

But you do have the advantage of being in that international real estate hot bed of Lawton, Oklahoma.

Jay Kinder

Yeah.  Unfortunately if you’re just not in; I really don’t want to name my marketplace, I don’t want a bunch of realtors moving here just to get into this market.  For all the agents that used to make fun of me because of my average sell price, I think we’re about even now, so I don’t get to sell $600,000 homes, in fact there’s not a home on the market above I think $650,000 in my entire market.  And there’s only one like above $450,000.  So I just sell a bunch of small ones.

Dean Jackson

Well Jay, I really appreciate your time, I think there’s some great lessons in here for people, just even from the mind set and implementing and doing it.

Jay Kinder

I appreciate it Dean, it was my pleasure.

Dean Jackson

Thank you again.

Couple of cool things for you today.

1. I have been re-reading a great old book called The Science of Getting Rich.

It was written way back in 1911 before Think and Grow Rich…and it’s a really great read.

The language is kind of “genteel” and I like to read it with a sort of old english man narrator voice in my head

Anyway…here’s the PDF: The Science Of Getting Rich

2. Over the holidays, my friend Rob Minton sent me his cool new book about Goal Setting. Which worked out perfectly since that’s exactly what I was doing at the time

It’s a great book…and you can download the PDF here.

Welcome back!

Are you really ready for 2010?

The ONE thing that can make the biggest difference in how
much money you make next year is your ability to implement.

The difference between an average income and financial
independence is IMPLEMENTATION.

Your ability to implement is directly linked to your ability to
FOCUS on a single task.

Watch this video.

I guarantee it will change the way you think about getting
things done…

Dear friend,

We’ve got a very special Marking Monday for you this week. Recently I interviewed my friend Rob Minton.

Some of you might be familiar with Rob, he was able to build a very successful real estate practice in the cleveland ohio market and he was subsequently able to sell that business recently for more than a million dollars.

Rob has some great insights on choosing a very specific niche market and then applying direct response marketing to that business to build it in an incredible way so that clients were actually applying to work with Rob and his team.

So we’ve got some great insights for you today and I hope that you enjoy this interview and tell all your friends.

——-

Hey Rob, thanks for joining us.

You’re welcome Dean.

Hey, where in the world is Rob Minton today?

Rob Minton is calling from his home office in lovely Cleveland Ohio, and I always say lovely before I say Cleveland, little, supposed to be a little joke because it’s not really lovely here.

Cleveland Rocks.

Go Browns baby, right?

There you go. Well Rob I really appreciate you taking the time to spend with us today, and I know you’ve got an interesting story about how you built your real estate business, so can you share a little bit about your career in real estate sales?

Yeah I’d be happy to, and just kind of a quick warning, I’m struggling with a little bit of bronchitis, so if I, I’ve got cough drops and all kinds of stuff, so I will do my best not to cough up a lung as we go forward. I got my real estate license in the mid 1990’s and I was working for a small company, you know this small brokerage, and I was working with buyers and trying to get listings, and I did what everybody else did, I was out there copying other real estate agents that I thought were successful, and at some point I started to read some books on business, and I decided to open my own brokerage, and this was about near 2000. My mean strategy at that point was I’d run a lead generation advertisement offering a free report, and a prospect that would be interested in that free report would call and leave a message, or maybe they’d go to my website and request it, and then I, the idea was we would return the phone call and in that phone call try to set an appointment with the person who requests the report and, so that was kind of the main approach, and…

Did you start right out of the gate, using direct response like that? Like were you familiar with it, and you started immediately applying it to your real estate business?

No actually, no. My original broker was old school, so we weren’t doing any direct response advertising whatsoever, but when I made the decision to start my own company and I started to hire agents, I realised that I needed to do something to be able to have new clients coming into the business on a consistent basis, and when I started research marketing, direct response seemed like to be the best approach to use going forward. But the problem is once you generate the lead, what do you do with it, right? How do you get that lead to become a client, and you know, so I start my own company and I recruit a couple of agents and the idea was “Okay I’ll generate the leads, I’ll hand these leads off to my agents and then my agents will make these phone calls” – you’re laughing.

Well I laugh because we always joke that it’s like, you expect and you think that you can generate all these leads and hand somebody the ball on sort of the fifty yard line and they can take it from there, but the reality is you’ve got to, you’ve almost have to hand it to them on the goal line and push them over the edge.

That it, nobody told me that right. I’d hand them the ball and they’d fumble it like Cleveland Browns would do, and so what ended up happening was, because I own the business, I’ve got to pay for all the expenses, I ended up being the one making the phone calls because I couldn’t get them to do it. So I’m on the phone in the evenings, I’m on the phone on the weekends, I’d set the appointments, then I’d hand the appointment off to my agents, and when they had the appointment they would do fairly well. But at some point I realised, you know this is not, this strategy is not sustainable going forward because I can’t be the one driving every sale for my brokers, and if I’m an independent agent – yeah that would work – but to try to feed your agents that way, just not a really good, not a good business strategy. I didn’t have the cash flow in the business to hire like an outbound call person or a telemarketer, so I had to figure out a different way to handle this because that strategy just didn’t work for me. Maybe it does for some other agent, but the way you laughed is probably saying that it doesn’t. So did you have something to say here?

No, no that was, I just think that was funny because it’s so, you know I work with a lot of agents who have teams, and the dream is that you can generate the leads and hand them off, and people [inaudible -cough] but it just doesn’t work out that way.

They don’t appreciate it I guess if they’re not paying for it, I don’t know. But, so what ended up happening was I’m like “Okay this doesn’t work, what do I have to do?” So I went back to books and I started studying sales letters and long copy sales letters which my original broker told me if it’s, if you’re writing something long people won’t read it, you’re wasting your time, and it turned out that is not true, right. So if you have a good sales letter with a neat story the people will read it, and what, go ahead.

The same thing applies to ads though, like a lot of times the advertising sales people, and your brokers, and people who aren’t trained in direct response think you got to have a lot of white space and you got to have short punchy things because people don’t read, but you know I always get a kick out of, our mutual friend Dan Kennedy always says “Nobody reads white space”. We know that for sure.

It would without a doubt, and actually Dan Kennedy, some of his books helped me a lot, like one of his books was The Ultimate Sales Letter. So this is where I started to learn about this approach. So I sat down and I was not, I’m not a writer or anything like that, but I sat down and wrote a long copy sales letter for my business, and the goal was to lead a prospect to the conclusion that I was an expert, I was really the best agent for their real estate, their needs, and I put a call of action in the sales letter because I just didn’t want to mail this letter and so I said at the end “If you’re interested in becoming one of my clients, fill out this application and fax it in to my office”, and so my goal was to pre-sell the prospect, get them to come, raise their hand and come back to us again, and so I, we start advertising for a, I would run a free report direct response ad, but the free report I sent was the sales letter that I wrote, and slowly but surely we started to get people sending in these client applications. They would come in via fax, some would come in via mail and some actually would drive to the office and hand deliver them to the office. So that was a huge turning point in my business because I was able to then hand off these applications, client applications to my agents, and my agents were able to convert 50-70% of those client applications into exclusive buyer contracts and then take them out and sell them homes and help them with their real estate needs, and so that one sales letter removed me from having to make the phone calls and believe it or not, it actually doubled my home sales from like 2004, I’m going forward each and every year, and the end of my story in selling real estate is that I ended up, I sold my small real estate brokerage for seven figures in 2007.

Wow. That’s some pretty impressive growth numbers, but what do you think drove the increase in the number of homes that you sold?

Well a couple of things. First off, to touch back on what we just talked about is once I realised that I could run a direct response advertisement, generate a lead and then mail them a sales letter and have an application come in, I had a predictable lead conversion type strategy in my business. So if I wanted to sell more homes, all I really needed to do was generate more leads. Because the sales final worked itself out where more leads would equal more client applications, more home sales. So once I had that little formula going, I could leverage it further by just, by more marketing, so that would be one thing.

The second this was when I wrote the sales letter I decided to target a specific niche in the market, and this is different than what I think a lot of agents do. A lot of agents want to be everything to everybody and I think that it’s impossible to do that any by selecting a niche you’re saving a lot of time, you’re able to offer maybe some compelling benefits to your specific niche, and when you do that you’ll see an increase in response rates to your marketing. Another thing…

How would you describe, what would you describe as a niche? Because I, we talked about that and I’m very familiar with it, but a lot of time, I’d love to hear how you would describe what a niche market is for people who maybe don’t have a crystal clear understanding?

Okay now, I don’t have a textbook definition, but from what I…

… It’s a gap, a possible gap in the marketplace where other real estate agent’s aren’t necessarily paying attention to, where you can dominate that specific area, and in my business I decided to niche with working with real estate investors, and at that time – this is back in 2004 – nobody was really paying attention to inventors. I’m not saying that working with investors today is the best niche because of all the problems with financing and whatnot here in the States, but at that point in time no one really wanted to work with investors, they were a pain in the neck. I decided to make that our entire business. So I don’t know if that’s a textbook, but it’s finding a pocket…

Yeah, no that’s, <crosstalk> like a definable market rather than just saying anybody who wants to buy or sell a home – that’s pretty broad, but when you can narrow it down to investors would be a niche, or first time buyers would be a niche, whatever. A segment of the market like that.

Definitely segment of the market, and then you have to be able to let all other opportunities outside of that niche go which is very, very hard to do. A couple of other things real quick on what I think helped drive the number of home sales because I think that’s probably important for your listeners, is that I finally learned or felt or recognised the real value of a lead which prior to that I don’t think I truly understood that, and lead conversion systems were huge for me. Obviously the sales letter, like we talked about, once I had a lead I could mail the sales letter, and I had a predictable result, a certain percentage would apply, a certain percentage would sign a contract, a certain percentage would buy. So that lead conversion system, and then I started to focus on creating sales assets for the business versus selling homes myself. So those would probably be the high points I would think that helped drive the sales.

Now isn’t it amazing though, because we talked about a lead conversion system and for me, that’s what’s so, that’s why I believe we have so much in common, I like everything that you’re doing because everything that we do is really based in systematic results and the value of system is knowing with predictability what’s going to happen. Like you know if you generate a bundle of a hundred leads and you send out this sales letter, the start of your lead conversion process, and I love how you call them sales assets, because that’s exactly what it is. If you’ve got an add or a postcard or any type of lead generator, or a website that predictably creates a result when you drive people to it, that is an asset. You don’t have to, you put in the work, you’ve done the, you’ve done all the hard work about it, and it can continually be deployed.

Oh without a doubt sales assets are probably the most, creating or building these for your business, are the most important thing you can possibly do, and like you said an ad is a very big asset. So like in my business I had one advertorial ad that I referred to as my million dollar ad. When I would run this ad, I would generate two, three, four hundred leads, I’d mail two, three, four hundred sales letters and we would end up with twenty five new clients – clockwork.

Like clockwork, exactly.

Month after month, month after month, month after month.

Well based on what you’re saying in the market place today, what do you think is the best niche to be in right now? We’re talking here in the fall of 2009.

You know, I know probably listeners aren’t going to want to hear this, but I think foreclosures have to be something that anyone that wants to drive home sales has to pay attention to. Even though the media’s saying “We’ve hit the bottom” and you’re hearing all kinds of competition, and foreclosures in certain areas, I still firmly believe based on everything I’m seeing in the market, that foreclosure home sales, the number, the volume is going to continue to be at a very high level for the next two or three years, and so if you take the 80/20 principle and you apply it to where the money’s going to be at, it’s the twenty percent that were all that, the twenty percent volume [were all] 0:13:58.5 eighty percent commissions, or it’s going to be in foreclosures. There’s a lot of reasons for this – one, obviously our employment rate is continuing to escalate, which means more people are losing their jobs, that means more homes are going to be foreclosure. I think we have a pretty big issue headed our way with all the option arms that are going to be resetting. From what I’m reading ninety four percent of people that have those option arms, they’re only paying interest which means they’re going negative in their monthly payment, on top of the decrease in value. So I think there is going to be a, there’s going to continue to be a large number of foreclosures coming into the market over the next two or three years, and even though you might not be excited about foreclosures, I think that’s where the majority of the home sales are going to come.

Either, it’s certainly, you see all of the, like you said it’s all over the news, you know it’s got, it’s coming. There still continues to be more and more of them, and that’s way, I guess there’s some momentum in it, in that the buyers who are buying, it seems like that, to them seems like they’re getting a deal. I mean it seems like that’s what they, that’s what the buyers are really interested in, is buying <crosstalk>

Oh yeah, no. In, you said the media has trained anybody thinking about buying a home that foreclosures is, they’re trained to think foreclosures, and another reason why I think foreclosures is a niche here in the States for people to pay attention to, is because the cost per lead to generate someone interested in buying a foreclosure is very, very, very low. Like when I…

Well there’s momentum.

… Yeah because you’re riding in the wave of what the media’s telling everyone, and that drives your marketing cost down dramatically, and to give you an example; When I was running my business, and running my advertorial ads, my average cost per lead was probably about fifteen dollars, and very profitable for me and I would be happy to pay that every day because I had that sales lettering system. But today agents that are focussed on the foreclosure market, they’re generating leads sometimes for thirty, forty fifty cents, in many cases free on Craig’s list, or if they’re running an advertorial they’re generating high quality leads for a dollar, two dollars, three dollars, which where I was paying fifteen dollars on average for a lead. So that whole media, all of that exposure of foreclosures is really driving costs down on the marketing side.

See it’s kind of interesting too that you, when you have an asset like your system, the conversion system that you were talking about, you don’t, you’re not afraid to spend money to generate those leads, even though, you talked about generating two, three, four hundred leads a month, and on an average cost of fifteen dollars, you’re spending four, five, six thousand dollars in generating those leads, and a lot of people just don’t have the confidence to do that because they don’t have a system that would convert.

And rightly so. If you don’t have a system converter, you may be wasting your money.

That’s exactly right, but here you are, you knew that you’re going to spend that money, but then at the end of the day you’re going to have twenty five new clients, and you’ve got the value of that is way higher than the money that you spent to generate those.

You know it’s funny you bring this up because I, like I shared earlier, my niche was working with investors. So we would help investors invest in real estate, by getting investors buy properties, and I’d crunch the numbers. So let’s say I wanted to make an investment, I could go out and buy real estate and I knew what my return on investment would be. Or I could run an advertisement for my business which I viewed as an investment, and when I crunched the numbers, running an ad for my business and buying new clients, which is essentially what I was doing, was far more profitable than investing in real estate, investing in any other traditional type investment, was putting that money into the marketing. It was by far the best investment I could have made.

I just did the numbers, just recently, because that, to illustrate that exact point. Right now the, everybody’s pretty happy, I think the Dow is up sixteen percent over the year. Stocks are really doing, kind of rallying a little bit, and look to see, if you had the foresight to pick the top performing mutual fund that’s going right now, it’s running at about a hundred and twenty five percent, and so when you look at that, it’s like you know we’re talking about when you’re doing, running a lead generation system that we’re talking about, you know, four, five, six, ten times the amount of money that you invest as your, as an ROI…

Oh by far. But once you have, the key though like you said is you’ve got to have that system in your business, and if you don’t have systems, you can’t get those returns obviously. But <crosstalk>

You mentioned seeing the real value of a lead, and so what did you mean by that?

Well you know, when I started my brokerage – like I said – I would run an ad and I’d pick up the phone, I’d call someone, and I would use some kind of script to get them to agree to an appointment, and if I couldn’t get them to agree, or if I couldn’t get through to them, boom it was next, I was onto the next one, making the next. You know I was kind of churn and burn mentality and I didn’t, I just thought if they didn’t sign with me now, that they’re no value to me, and that was a massive mistake because I learned that just because someone didn’t sign an agreement with me now, or didn’t respond to something I did or call, didn’t mean they weren’t necessarily valuable, and how I found this was, this is what ultimately led to me focussing on investments was we found a very good investment property and I think we sent out an email to all of our leads, and most of these people hadn’t replied, or hadn’t come in for an appointment, and we had a pretty big response and we were able to sell that investment property to one of our unconverted leads. And when that happened I was like “Wow this is, there is a lot of money in the database, even if I wasn’t able to get the person to sign a contract to buy a home when they initially responded to my marketing”.

Right, right. That’s interesting. So you had that, that’s an asset as well. Having a way to communicate with people who at one point indicated that they were interested in buying – that’s an asset in itself.

Oh without a doubt, and that led to, like I’d survey the database and a lot of these people, the majority of these people aren’t converted leads. So I’d survey, asking them what are their challenges, what are their needs and identified a lot of opportunities for products and services, a lot of them I didn’t pursue, but there are several back end businesses that a real estate agent could have that could be marketed to their database whereas a person doesn’t even buy a home but you’re generating income from that lead that you have bought through your marketing.

And so what kind of things, you’re not just talking about buying other types of properties, you’re talking about other types of services even?

Oh without a doubt. Like in my specific niche, I’ll give you a few examples – property management is obviously very easy add-on service if you’re working with investors and someone doesn’t want to manage a property. If you want to have property management, or you can hire somebody to do it, or you can refer to a property manager and earn a referral fee, and so not only are your clients potentially interested in property management, but if you’re running an advertisement that attracts investors, even though they don’t use you for your services, they still might be interested in property management so you can offer that service to your entire database and generate a nice recurring monthly income from it. So that would be one example from my niche, but in, but say in the foreclosure niche, you’ve got to think about a foreclosed home, in most cases it’s going to need some painting, it’s going to need some remodelling, it’s going to need some landscaping. So I’m not saying the agent needs to go out there and swing the hammer, but the buyer is more than likely going to be hiring someone to do these things, and it might make sense for the agent to be involved in some fashion.

Even if it’s an advertising fee or something to send their contact, or their offer to your list.

Like you create this special trusted list of contractors and maybe charge a fee to have someone, whatever the case might be, but there are all kinds of opportunities outside of specifically selling a home that I think is smart for agents to pay attention to.

That’s a great idea. Let’s talk about lead conversion a little bit. Can you explain what you did to convert leads in your business?

Well the first, obviously the first thing I did was we tried the outbound call thing, and it obviously works if you’re willing to make the calls. So I’m not saying that’s, it’s not effective – it is effective – but it’s not necessarily sustainable if you don’t have a tonne of cash flow, it’s just a hard thing to make work – at least that was my experience. So the long, my first sales asset I guess or my first lead conversion tool was the long copy sales letter where the prospect then filled out this application, sent it out to our office, and we started to get a certain percentage of those who applied, and we shared, turned into clients and sales – so that worked. The next thing I did was we, I created this free class, and it was, the class was for my niche and so then I started to market this class via email, I would, I marketed it in a newsletter, as an insert, or I could just send a regular old letter, a promotional piece about the class to my database, and I’m focussing on unconverted leads so I’m inviting them to a free class, and that class is really engineered to give them helpful information, but it wasn’t necessarily – I’m not teaching them everything they need to do. The goal of the class is to lead them to the conclusion that they really need my help as an agent because there’s some cost and mistakes they can avoid, and obviously in the whole foreclosure thing, there’s a tonne of mistakes that a buyer can make that would be costly. So I think that there’s a really good opportunity for agents with regard to that, but. So we market this free class to our database and people would register for the class, they’d come attend the class and at the end of the class, we would offer a free private consultation, and the numbers were that we were able to sign half of the people that attended our class into exclusive buyer contracts, and then obviously we’d be able to turn many of those into home sales, and so what happened was I wrote the class as like a Powerpoint presentation, I taught the first couple of ones and kind of worked all the bugs out, and after that I could have my team do it. So that, the free class was one, another one was…

If I could stop you for a second because I want to talk a little bit about this class – I know you’ve got others – but the class, just my listening to you describing that, I want to point out a couple of things that you did that maybe sometimes people skip over. You talk about your class, you said you wrote the class, and you worked out the kinks, and so what I know from hearing you say that is it was in itself another asset. That you weren’t just showing up and doing a different class every time, you weren’t just getting everybody in a room and saying “Hey does anybody have any questions?” You had everything I’m assuming you said in that was said for a reason, and all leading to the single purpose which was to make them want to get together with you for a private consultation, and measuring the result that you actually got at that seminar.

You are dead on correct. That class is a sales presentation, that’s really what it is. It’s, yes you’re giving content, you’re giving useful information, but the goal of that class is to lead the person sitting in the class to the conclusion that they need you, or they’re going to make a mistake, that you’re an expert, that you’ll save them money, you’re help, you’re leading them to the conclusion that they need to hire you as their agent, and so you’re right. So we, when I say work the kinks out, I’ll give you one specific example – My first class we have, everything goes well and at the end I start taking questions, and so when these people are asking questions I want to help them. I’m answering all these questions, and at the end everyone, I had answered everyone’s questions that they felt they didn’t need me, and so I wasn’t able to turn, everyone walked off saying “Hey it was a great class”, “High Five”, “Thanks, this was awesome”, and I think maybe we got one client out of the class because I just gave them all of my knowledge, they didn’t need me. So the next class I didn’t take any questions and we were able to sign, we are, it was half the people at that point in time then signed. So we did a couple of different things, tested a couple of things, worked things out, but you’re right – the whole focus was something…

So you totally see it now, the lesson that you learned from that was if “You probably have questions right now, so it’s getting late, but what I want to do is I want to make sure you have a chance to get your questions answered, and we’re, I’d love to set up an appointment where we can get together – offer a private consultation for you” <crosstalk> Everybody’s getting their questions answered, that was it.

I turned the problem into an opportunity, into a… So no, that was a dead-on. So that was one, I’ll give you one more which might be applicable to this whole foreclosure thing, is we would market mini open houses, or specific tours of homes for our niche. So my niche was investors, which I don’t know if it is the best niche right now because of financing but, so we’d say “Hey tour the five best investment properties on the market today” and so we offer that to our database of unconverted leads, and slowly but surely we’d start pulling people out of the woodwork. They’d attend these tours and we were able to build relationships and sign them a contract and come home. So it was, once I got one thing working, it was “Okay what can we do now?” and the goal is to try to, over time continually increase the number of clients that you are able to sign from your marketing. So you might not get them at the first crack, but if you keep working at it you’ll eventually sign more and more clients from all of your advertisements.

And that’s, so you slowly just building up your sales assets?

That’s it, that’s the mission. That’s the focus.

What else can you say about that concept of sales assets? Because I think if people can really get that, that’s a deep thing for them.

Well for me, a sales asset is something in your business that converts prospects into clients, and here’s the key – without your manual labour, okay. So that’s the key, and first I’m making outbound calls, that’s my manual labour. So for me that did not qualify as a sales asset. Had I had someone else making those calls and it worked, that would be a sales asset. So it’s lead conversion without your manual labour, and the problem is I think, most real estate agents are using, or are focussed on manual labour for lead conversion, and what that does is it dramatically reduces the number of clients that you’re going to sign, and the number of homes that you’re going to sell. So like my sales letter, once I wrote the sales letter, I could run and ad, or I could give a series of ads to my advertising rep, have those ads go in on scheduled dates, leads would come in, and I could hire – this is actually what I did – I hired a high school kid to come in after school, part time, I paid him $8 an hour. They would mail the sales letter to all the leads that were generated on that day or the last twenty four hours, and next thing you know, client applications are coming in via the fax, or in the mail, and all of that happened without my physical involvement, which allowed me then to just hand those off to agents, and home sales would eventually come back into the business, so that would be one. Now the free class which is a very, very, very valuable lead conversion tool, sales asset for your business – I hope your listeners really make a note of that – because if they’re not doing free classes, they are missing the boat. But, so like I, I wrote the class which was a sales presentation, and I, like I said, I tested it, I got the bugs worked out and then after that point forward, I made my agents give that, teach that class, and we did it on a rotation basis, and so once I handed off a class to them, I could run the marketing for the free class. The class would be taught, clients would be signed, and homes would be sold. So with the sales asset, your time and effort is involved in creating the asset, working the kinks out, and then after that you’re manual labour is not required for that system to go forward.

There are a couple of, you know how I always talk about the difference between Siegfried and Roy, and the Blue Man Group? When you’re doing the actual class, you’re being Siegfried and Roy, but when you teach someone else to do it, it’s more like the Blue Man Group – you just plug anybody in and they can get the same result.

One thing about the class, you talked about it, and it’s something that I always mention to people is that a class is a much better lead conversion tool than a lead generation tool. Has that been in your experience, like did you, you were talking about you using your ad to generate the leads, and then you were inviting those people to the class. You weren’t using the class as the lead generator. Is that accurate, or were you doing that, using the class as a lead generator too?

Right, well here’s, first off I’d say this – if you have a free class, you will always have a better response rate and a better client signing ratio, if that’s what you want to call it, when you market it to your unconverted leads. Because they are warm leads, they know who you are, they hopefully know your story. So that is by far the most profitable strategy with your free class. So what we would do is I’d generate the lead, I’d send the sales letter – if the person didn’t apply to be a client then I would market a class to them as my second lead conversion strategy that was layered on top of the first one, and then what we started to do in addition to that – so I’m marketing the class to my unconverted leads, is I did start to market the class to the public via advertorial advertisement and the ad did not generate leads at a very low cost per lead, my cost per lead went up with that advertisement, but what we found which was interesting, was the quality of lead was super, super high. Because this person, if you think about it, they’re responding to a class which means they want to learn more and the lead quality was very, very high, and so you are right, that it’s more profitable to run it to your own converted leads, but if you have a class that works, I would suggest you leverage it and run some cold advertisements because you’ll be surprised at the quality of lead.

Oh that’s good advice, that’s good. That’s inside information really, something that you have tested and proven for yourself.

Oh yeah and don’t tell anybody [laughs].

It will just be our secret – and the thousands of people that are listening.

Just kidding.

Well Rob, you’ve obviously, you’ve shared a lot in our interview here, but let’s assume that you were just starting out today as a new agent. What would you do right now if you could summarise to build your business, or to rebuild your business if you were going to move somewhere sensible with [inaudible]0:36:19.7 climate somewhere?

That question brings up all kinds of issues. But moving, we won’t go into those. But what I would do, and here’s a mistake, I made this mistake myself is I, when I got my real estate license, I didn’t know what the heck to do so I looked around our marketplace – who, I was trying to see who were the top agents, and I simply copied them. Now someone might look like a top agent, but might not be making a lot of money, so that’s probably not the best strategy. So what I think might be a better approach, is to go to your multiple listing service and study the data, and the data I want you to study is not what’s listed, expired – I want you to study what is selling, and I want you to look for trends in what’s selling, because if you can see where the pockets are of actual recent closed sales, that’s where the money’s at in your market, and that is telling you in advance that if you focus on that specific area, you have a much, your likelihood of success is dramatically higher because you’re filing the money in your specific market place. And so that is what I would suggest someone do – is study recent solds because that’s where the money is. So once you study that, then you can build your niche around that finding, and what I believe you’ll probably see, depending on where you’re at is that foreclosure sales are probably going to be a higher percentage of recent closed transactions, which would lead you to believe that maybe you should think about focussing or specialising on foreclosures over the next couple of years, and if that’s the case write a lead generation ad, write several lead generation advertisements that would attract foreclosure buyers or investors to you, and then work on your own long copy sales letter explaining why you’re the expert, what benefits they get for being your client, and then copy my strategy – put an application on there, get them to apply to be your client, then once you got that sales asset working, then maybe add a free class around that niche. So your class would be around “How do you buy a foreclosed home without losing your shirt” or something like that, and just continue to build and layer these sales assets on top of each other. But the start has got to be studying where the money’s at in your market, not copying other agents in your area.

That’s interesting so, I mean you know that’s totally applicable to most areas of the country. If you look at it it’s, foreclosures are the story right now aren’t they?

They are.

It’s certainly where everything is, unless you’re, live in North Dakota, or something.

Exactly.

Well that’s kind of cool. Now I know that you’ve got some, that you’ve written a few, that you’ve written some books and, is there something where people can get more information to stay in touch with you a little bit?

There definitely is, and I’d, what I’d like to do is I’d give my book away for free to your listeners because I’d like to make that offer to them, and I’ve got a go-to website – it’s freeforeclosureboombook.com and at that site you’ll be able to request my book, go through the various strategies I use to build my business, how I recruited agents, how I managed my time, different things like that, and I even, at the end of the book start talking about selling your business, and much of what I shared in the book is what I actually, the thought process I went through for selling my business. I know that’s probably not on the top of everyone’s minds now, but you start the process of selling your business way, way before you actually get to it, so it’s something to think about now.

That’s a fantastic, what, that’s a great model, is to, because there’s not many people who have been able to build something that they could sell. Most people if they were looking at selling their business, they’d have some sign frames and lock boxes that they could sell, and if they don’t really have any real value to it, the interesting this is, I teased you about moving to a more sensible climate, but the truth is you, the asset that you have is something that would give you that freedom. Really you could move anywhere in the country, and transfer those assets and start using them right away.

Well it’s funny that you say that, is because back in 2006 my wife and I, well mainly me, I wanted to move to North Carolina, so I had two options – one was to keep the business and run it remotely from North Carolina, or the other option would be to sell it, and I had my business down where I was working one, was probably one day a week from my home office, well actually it was two days a week. I would go into the office, have a team meeting and handle any broker related issues. But I was working from home, in my jeans and a t-shirt, and so I had those two options, and low and behold, one of my clients heard that I was thinking about relocating, and stepped up and ended up buying the business, and the reason why he was attracted to the business was because I had all those built in sales assets that were working systematically, and he didn’t have to have a tonne of experience running a real estate brokerage, because it was like a machine that was in place, and so those sales assets are very valuable for current home sales, and current commissions, and they’re also very valuable because I think they drive the value of your business up if you were to sell it eventually in the future to a buyer. The sad part of my story is that my wife changed her mind at the last minute, and we never moved to North Carolina.

So, stuck in Cleveland?

Yes for now at least. I’m not done, I’m not giving up yet, but I’m still here in Cleveland.

That’s funny. Well Rob, thanks so much for spending your time with us here, and I think we’ve got a lot of really great ideas. It’s really, you’re totally in alignment with everything that we talk about at Marketing Monday, in that direct response, and using your knowledge, using systems rather than using your physical labour, manual labour of doing things. So I really appreciate you spending that, and your book offer is very generous. If people want to go and get Rob’s book, which I would highly recommend, they can go to freeforeclosureboombook.com, I like that – crystal clear.

Thanks again Rob, I look forward to maybe we can have you on again as a, and do another interview here.

You are welcome, and I hope your listeners got some value out of it.

Thanks Rob.

Thank you.

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Dear Friend,

This week we’re going to talk about the fastest ways to generate new business right now.  And if I were coaching you one on one, if I were consulting with you and I were looking at your business situation right now one of the things that I would do first is take a look at the systems and the procedures that you have in place to get what I call bankable results, and there are five bankable results that you can achieve in your business.  And the success of your business is really dependent on your ability to consistently and predictably generate these five bankable results.  I’m going to share what the five are and then I’m going to talk about them in the order that I would look at them if I were coaching you one on one in your business to get results right now.

So the five bankable results that you can achieve in your business are:

Number 1 Bankable Result: Generating the leads.

How many people are you able to find who are looking to buy or sell or get a loan in the next six months to a year?  That would be the first bankable result.  If you can get a consistent quantity of leads then we need to look at what are your systems in place to get our second bankable result

Number 2 Bankable Result: Appointments.

Now there’s a lot of skill that goes into turning a lead into an appointment and a lot of that goes into connecting with the leads very quickly, identifying who are the five star prospects and then having a way to bond with them until they’re ready to set an appointment.

Number 3 Bankable Result: Contracts

and that’s about turning your appointments into engagements for business, meaning signed listing agreements or signed buyer agency agreements or signed loan applications.  An agreement between you and the person that you’re having the appointment with that you are going forward, going to work for them and work towards getting our bankable result number four which is a closing.

Number 4 Bankable Result: Closings

And that’s about selling a listing or finding your buyer a house or closing the loans, that’s the fourth bankable result.

Number 5 Bankable Result: Referrals

and a way for you to generate a consistent stream of referrals from the business that you’re currently doing right now.  So there’s our five bankable results, leads, appointments, contracts, closings and referrals.  Now if I were looking at your business right now the first thing that I would look at is what is the fastest way for us to generate new business right now.  And the fastest way is if you’ve already got contracts, you’ve already got listing agreements, you’ve already got buyers that you’re working with right now, you’ve already got loans in process.  The very fastest way for you to get money is to fulfil on that contract and to turn that into a closing.

So if I were looking at your listing inventory right now that might be the very first place that I would focus our attention to generate some right now business.  Now not all listing agreements, not all listings are going to actually be able to turn into closings and you need to really look at each of your listings and evaluate those situations and say ‘is this listing actually going to turn into a closing?  Am I working with a five star seller?  Am I working with somebody who’s really motivated to sell?  Are they willing to do what it takes to price the property in today’s market?  Are they willing to stage the property so that it shows its very best?  Are they willing to remove any marketing obstacles?  And are they willing to help sell the property?’

If they’re not willing to do those things you don’t have a five star seller and it would be very, very beneficial for you to look at all of your listings right now with a real evaluation and say ‘is this somebody who is actually serious about selling their house?  Is this going to turn into a closing?  Is this going to get a closed transaction for me?  Are these people actually going to work out?’  And it might be a situation where if I were coaching you one on one I would look at your inventory and say ‘is it time to have a serious conversation with some of these sellers?  Is it time to let some of them go?’

And assuming that you’ve got five star sellers what can we do to do everything we can to find our own buyer for that listing in the shortest possible amount of time so that we can get that transaction closed and start generating some money for ourselves.  And so I would look at all of the current situations that you’re in right now, the buyers that you’re working with.  Are they serious, are they people who are waiting and waiting and waiting?  Are they people who are never going to find the right house for them?  Are they people who are not in a hurry?  Or are they people who are moving here from out of town and they’re homeless right now and they need to find a house?  Or are they first time buyers who are so committed to buying they’ve already given up their lease on their apartment?  You want to really look and evaluate the people that you’re working with right now and see which of those people have the highest probability of turning into a closed transaction as quickly as possible.

And if you don’t have anybody in that situation then the very next thing that we need to do is we need to focus on getting you some contracts, we need to focus on finding people who are willing to let you help them sell their house or would like to have you work with them to find a house or to get a loan.  And most of the time what turns into contracts are appointments and when we’re looking at this if you are able to generate appointments with five star prospects, people who are serious about doing something in the next six to 12 months and your language skills are not so that you can consult people as to the best course of action in today’s marketplace, that’s something that we really need to work on.  That’s something that will really be valuable for you, if you’re able to be a consultant you’re able to let people know about what’s going on in the market right now, you’re able to guide them and counsel them on what their best course of action will be going forward.  That’s going to turn into contracts for you when you’re on those appointments.

When you’re… if you’ve got the dialogue skills to educate somebody about the market, educate them about why they need to price their house the right way, educate them about why they need to stage their house because staged houses sell for more money.  If you’re able to turn any of the obstacles or any of the things that get in the way of getting the top price for their house in the shortest period of time, and you’re able to consult with them and remove those obstacles that’s going to be a very good thing for you.

If you’ve got prospects right now to get appointments with that’s where I would focus our attention next.  How many people right now do you have that you know are going to buy a house in the next six months or sell their house in the next six months?  How many do you know that are going to do something in the next 60 or 90 days?  And what are you doing to turn those leads into appointments, those prospects that you’re working with?

I’ve talked about having a… this concept of having a hot 100, how many prospects do you have right now that are going to buy a house in the next six to 12 months?  If you don’t have people who are going to buy a house in the next six months or you don’t have people who are going to sell a house in the next six months or get a loan in the next six months we need to focus all of our attention on generating leads.  So you see how it works that I’m looking backwards, I’m looking from the epicentre which would be a bankable close transaction where we’re actually going to be able to take some money and put it into our bank account.  That’s the closest thing, if we don’t have contracts that we can turn into closings we need to get appointments that we can turn into contracts, and if we don’t have appointments we need to generate leads that we can turn into appointments.  So I’m focusing on the closest thing to generating money right now.

Now if you don’t have a hot 100, if you don’t have a hundred people, a pool of ready people who are going to buy in the next six months, people who are going to sell in the next six months and we’re not focussed a hundred percent on generating leads there’s a problem.  And that is where I would focus all of my attention for the next 30, 60, 90 days is on single mindedly filling my funnel of prospects so that I know that I’ve got a big enough pool that I can consistently drive appointments from.  And I would focus on doing things like our 30 lead blitz if you’re a buyer for a only member, I would focus on doing things like our getting listings program, doing things like finding buyers where you’re focussed completely on finding people who are going to buy or sell or get a loan in the next six months.  And until you fill that prospect funnel, until you fill it where you’ve got 100 people who are ready to buy, sell or borrow in the next six months, I would not focus on anything else.

Now the fifth bankable result and the one that we’re going to work on at all times is generating referrals.  The easiest, fastest, most pleasurable way to generate new business is to have somebody recommend you to a friend and have that friend call you and say ‘my friend Bob told me that you could help me sell my house’ or ‘my friend Bob told me I need to call you because I’m going to buy a house’ or ‘my friend Bob told me to call you because I need to get out of my adjustable rate mortgage and get into something better’.  Now those are fantastic phone calls to get and they’re the kind of calls that you can completely orchestrate from beginning to end.

So I would look at what are the orchestrated referral processes that you have in place.  Do you have a group of 150 people that you’re keeping in contact with, people who know you, like you, trust you, people who you have a relationship with, your sphere of influence.  The people who if you saw them at the grocery store you’d stop, you’d recognise them by name, you’d have a nice conversation with them.  What kind of communicating are you doing with that group?  Are they getting a newsletter from you every month?  Are they hearing from you frequently?  Do you nurture that relationship so that you can at some point ask them for referrals?  Show them how they can refer people to you, let them know the kind of people they can refer to you.  When you’re looking at your business and you’re looking at it as a wheel where would be the weakest spoke in that system?  Is it generating leads?  Is it generating appointments?  Is it generating contracts?  Is it generating closings?  Or is it generating referrals?  Which one of the bankable results do you need to focus the most attention on right now?

Take this week look at your business as it stand with those five bankable results, really get clear on where the biggest, weakest link in your business is and let’s see over the next several weeks here if we can focus some of our attention on all five of these bankable results and really get an incredible plan for you over the next 30 days to really sure up your business, start getting right now business and build a consistent, predictable machine for the future.

So that’s it for this week, tune in next time and let’s talk about ways to get more listings, find more buyers and convert more leads.  Have a great week and we’ll talk to you next time.

Dear Friend,

This week I’m going to answer a very interesting question that somebody asked me and I think you’ll find it very helpful because I’ve had lots of people ask me this question in different ways but the question was basically they said Dean I’d love to see or hear a Marketing Monday where you talk about what you would do with different budget amounts, what you would spend money on if you were spending $250, $500 and $1000 on a monthly basis and I thought man that’s really a good question, I’m going to add to that and just say what I would do if I was spending zero dollars.

$0

Let’s get right to it. Here’s some of the strategies that I would use if I were spending zero dollars a month on marketing, if I had no money. Now the good news is that usually when you have no money to spend on marketing it’s usually a situation where you have an abundance of time so you have time on your side to do some marketing and use that as your currency. So with that in mind some of the things that I would do, the first thing I would is I would use craigslist.com. craigslist is a fantastic tool, a neat opportunity for you to reach lots of people who are doing real estate searches on craigslist. We’ve found that it’s an incredible strategy. If you look in our member breakthrough from a couple of months ago you’ll find a whole strategy all about how different members are using craigslist very successfully and coupled with your my phone leads and your my web leads craigslist is a wonderful opportunity for you to spend no money; takes a little of time to learn how to use it, to learn how to post ads, to learn how to create the html ads or put images or pictures in your ads but once you learn how to do it it’s very easy to maintain and it’s something that you can do again and again and something that will continue to get great results for you. So number one on my list if I had zero dollars would be craigslist.com.

The second thing that I would do if I was spending zero dollars on advertising and marketing is I would ask for referrals from every person that I run into. Now I’m going to post a link to a previous Marketing Monday where I talk about a thirty day orchestrated referral challenge so what I’m going to suggest for you is to do the steps in this thirty day orchestrated referral challenge and essentially what it is is to pick a price range, to pick a type of home that would be very popular in your area, to pick a zero down loan program, it could be an FHA program with seller concessions and to every time you run into somebody that you know you have a very short orchestrated referral dialogue with those people and you give them, and because we’re spending no money here, we give them, normally we would give them a lead generating business card that we’ve made up specifically for the purpose but since we’re spending no money I would give them one of your regular business cards and on the back of the card I would have handwritten the information about your my web leads number or your my phone leads number or your my web leads lead generating website address so that they can get more information so I’m not going to go into depth on that strategy, I’m going to post a link to it on MarketingMonday.com so that if you’re listening as a podcast on Itunes you can go to MarketingMonday.com and get the link to that strategy from the archives.

The third thing that I would if I were spending zero dollars is I would start a networking group. I would focus on finding people in my town or my city who are in complementary but non competitive industries and invite them to an after hours networking lunch or a networking get together maybe in the morning or in the evening or at lunchtime where the purpose of it is to start referring business to each other. I’ve done a previous Marketing Monday on this topic where I talk about seven cool things you can do for free to get business so I’ll post up a link to that Marketing Monday as well. I’m just realising this is going to be a very link rich Marketing Monday here, it’s like getting three in one.

If I had no money for marketing I would also partner perhaps with a realtor in my office who had listings or a listing that I could do some marketing for, that I could do open houses or that I could post on craigslist and do an open showing which is different than an open house where I would invite everybody to come to the property on Saturday at two o’clock sharp so that everybody would be there all at the same time.

Using listings is a fantastic way to generate buyer activity, to find buyers especially if you’re using things like craigslist and open houses. It’s a great situation for you to invest some time without having to spend any money.

So those are four great strategies that I would use if I had zero dollars and I’ll post up the links to those other strategies as well for you.

$250

Now if I had $250 to spend over the next thirty days the thing that I would immediately do is I would follow the steps in the thirty day lead blitz step by step. I would do everything in there. I would do the public notice flyers which is a very inexpensive way of generating new business. Public notice flyers are very inexpensive. Let’s say you do them even at a self serve copy machine you’re going to spend still five cents per flyer let’s say so let’s say you could get 100 public notice flyers for $5. Now you’re going to still invest some time in finding locations to put up your public notice flyers and if you remember public notice flyers are just a one page yellow flyer with little tear off tabs on the bottom where we would put pictures of homes and it would say lovely three and four bedroom homes, $250,00 to $450,000, zero down payment, free recorded message and your my phone leads number and your my web leads URL and put those everywhere that you can find an opportunity to put them. It could be in convenience stores, in grocery stores, in cafes, in community centres, at the library, there’s all kinds of different places where you see these bulletin boards or you see an open wall where you could ask permission to put up a flyer or if there are already a lot of flyers there you could put it up right there.

Now we have another version of the public notice flyer that does not have the tear off tabs that you could use to put everywhere that people wait. I’m remembering where we put them in Winter Haven where you put them at the tyre centre, at the oil change place, at a lot of different restaurants where people are sitting and there are things to read, at the walk in clinics, at the chiropractor office, at the dental office, at the hospital, at the * clinic, all kinds of different places where you can put these flyers where people are faced with a choice of reading either the December 2005 Reader’s Digest or something that can catch their attention so these flyers are the perfect ticket for that and what we also did was on the back of the flyers put some classified ads where we put ads about homes or ads about your home finder service or ads offering free reports, anything that you can do to get that message out to people who are just sitting around waiting for an opportunity for something to read.

Again one of the thirty day lead blitz strategies that I would use is the ugly yellow signs. Now the ugly yellow signs you’re going to spend a little money on to get 100 signs. You start off with your initial inventory of the signs but the good news is that you don’t use the signs again and again and again but it’s still going to cost you right around $100 for 100 signs and maybe another $50 for some of the H frames that you along with them but certainly $200 and you could have everything you need for doing the thirty day lead blitz strategies and included in that I would use the lead generating business cards where we’ve got little business cards that you can leave all over town where everywhere you go throughout your day if you make it your goal that if you print up 1000 of these lead generating cards everywhere you go throughout the day you could leave ten or so cards every single day. Going to the grocery store you could stop in the end of the row, leave some cards with the cars on the way. You could leave them at the cash registers of places that you frequently. You could take a newspaper, put the business card on the next newspaper. There’s all kinds of ways that you could distribute these cards and of course these cards are a great thing that you can use when you run into people and have your orchestrated referral dialogue with them.

Another strategy that I would if I had $250 to spend is to still continue to use craigslist. Everything that I’m talking about that I would do with zero dollars are still things that you can do even if you’re spending $250 so let’s bump it up now to $500 a month.

$500

If I had $500 a month to spend here are some of the things that I would do. First of all I would continue doing all the things that I’ve mentioned so far then I would add to that a getting listings campaign. I would choose a thousand homes with a good turnover.  I’d do a little bit of the research there and I would commit to sending those one thousand homes the lead generating postcard in the getting listings program to identify all the future home sellers. People will raise their hand, tell you who they are and you will have an opportunity then to send them your get top dollar newsletter, part of the getting listings program. Now I would do all of that in addition to the thirty day lead blitz so what you’re looking to do is to create little profit triangles where on one side you’re doing a thirty day lead blitz to find people who are looking for town homes in Georgetown let’s say and on the getting listings side you’re sending lead generating postcards to all the townhouse owners looking for people who are going to be selling their townhouse and your goal is to match everybody, to match your buyers to the sellers that you’re identifying with your getting listings campaign so that’s what I would do if I had $500 a month to spend.

$1000

If I had $1000 a month to spend you’re really in an opportunity where you could anything. Now you’re at a position where you can start using some of that money to save yourself some time. See the thing I really like about the getting listings campaign is that there’s not much time involved in it. Once you identify the area that you’re going to choose, once you learn how to get your postcards together, get your newsletters printed out, once you learn the mechanics of doing all that you’re going to have a ramp up period there and then once you’ve learnt how to do everything it’s very easy to maintain, in fact it’s so easy that you could have the entire process delegated where you don’t have to do anything and the only thing that happens is people call you up and say when can you come over and list my house or they’ll say when can you come over and tell me what I need to do to fix up my house or when can you come over and give me a price on my house. They call you and it’s a pretty freeing experience because you’re now getting a taste of purely investing money to generate leads which is a very satisfying place to come from if you can arrange things so that you can do that.

Now I would continue to do all the thirty day lead blitz strategies and I would add to that the finding buyers program where I would create a guide to the local real estate prices whether you were doing it for my town or whether you were doing it for a niche within that town but that’s a program that is a little bit of a front end loaded effort program meaning that you’re going to put in some effort, you’re going to spend a little money, you’re going to do a little research, get everything together but once you’ve created your guide what you’ve got then is a very valuable resource, something that you’ll be able to use again and again. The thing I like about programs like this is that there is a slight barrier to entry of any competitor coming in because it does take a little bit of disciplined effort to get it all together so you’re narrowing the field of people who are actually willing to do a little bit of work to get something valuable together like that.

What I would also look at doing if I were spending $1000 a month what that opens up for you is the opportunity to do display ads. I am a big fan of the homes magazines ads especially the ones that are the most popular in your areas. I still believe and still find that people even though they’re doing research on line there’s still something magical about being able to go up to the little box and pick up a magazine that has all the homes that are for sale in your area with nice pictures of those homes, something nice to look at over lunch or on your break or in the evenings and anybody who is a serious home hunter will be picking up that publication. So now your opportunity is to speak directly to those people and use a lead generating ad, matches perfectly with the finding buyers program, to offer information that people can get by calling the free recorded message or going to a website, lead generation, pure lead generation, nothing image building, nothing about branding yourself or anything like that. I look at the homes magazines as having a retail store in a busy mall and I use that comparison a lot because that’s really what it is. The reason that malls are very successful, the reason that every city has an auto dealer row where all the auto dealers congregate is because that creates a market, it creates a place where all the people who are looking for cars go and all the people who are looking for homes go to the homes magazines in addition to all the other things that they do.

Now if I had $1000 to spend every month another thing that I might do is look at doing some of the enhanced features on realtor.com, speaking again about where people go. Most people go on line looking for homes, we’ve got craigslist covered, we’ve got an opportunity now to enhance what you’re doing on realtor.com. I’m going to do a future Marketing Monday all about some of the lead generating things you can do using realtor.com but if you can use some of the enhanced features talking about some of the extra pictures, using the scrolling banner across the top and use that as a lead generator. It’s a very effective tool for you.

$2000

Then if I were spending $2000 what I would do is look at creating another complete profit triangle. See everything I’ve been talking about here is about choosing a niche market and going deep, completely deep into that one market. Now I would then mirror that with other markets so if I was doing town homes I might look at doing lakefront homes or I might look at doing country properties or another niche, kind of like what we talked about a couple of weeks ago on Marketing Monday.

So there’s a lot of opportunity if you start out investing your time in a way that’s going to help generate some money for you and then over time start replacing some of your time with some of that money so that’s how I would spend zero dollars, $250, $500 and $1000 and I hope you got some great ideas from that.

Again if you’ve got any questions or anything that you would like me to talk about on a future Marketing Monday just put up a little message on the message board, ask your question up there and I’ll be able to maybe look at your question and create a Marketing Monday specifically for you.

Thanks for tuning in. Tune in next time and we’ll talk about even more ways to find buyers, get listings and convert leads. Have a great week

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Dear friend,

This week we’re going to talk about four big reasons that leads don’t convert and what to do about it.  So let’s get right in.

No.1: Not connecting quickly with their leads.

You know here’s the thing you have to remember in real life is that whenever somebody asks for something on your website, a prospect, they ask for something on your website or they call your voice mail hotline and they leave their contact information for an offer that you have made in one of your direct response ads, they have never in the history of your relationship with them, been more excited about you and what you have to offer than that moment.  The moment they press submit, they are most interested in it.  They are most interested in getting whatever information you have been offering, and the time that goes by between the moment they press submit and the time that you ultimately connect with them, that excitement is rapidly declining and the best thing that you can do to improve your lead conversion is to improve the number of people that you connect with, the number of leads that you connect with.

See I see people often gathering up their leads, they will see that they have got a lead, they watch it on their Blackberry, or their Trio, or their Smartphone, or they see it come in in their email, or they get a notice that somebody has left a message on their voice mail, and they get all excited about it.  They print out the lead, you know, they gather them all up and put them in a pile and make sure they get everybody into their contact management system, and then they wait.  You know they wait because ‘I am going to gather everybody together and I am going to make my follow up calls later on in the day’ or ‘Tuesday night is lead follow up night’ and the reality is that the very best thing that you could do is start the connection process right away.  I guarantee if you take the next 10 leads that come in and you made it a game to try and connect with them while they are still on your website, while they are still sitting by their phone when they have left a voice mail for you, the faster that you can make that initial connection people are going to be wowed, and you will connect with them more because you know they are right there, right now.

Try getting into that habit even if you can’t ultimately talk with somebody right now, the very best thing you could do is call them up and say ‘hey, it’s Dean.  I just got your email, I just got your request for a website.  I am on my way out to show homes right now, is there, can I connect with you at 4 o’clock today?  I will be back in the office.  Is there a better number to reach you or will you be here?’  Or even to have somebody, an assistant call them and say ‘we just got your request, you just missed Dean, he was just in the office but he wanted me to make sure that I connected with you and see if it would be Ok if he calls you at 4 o’clock today?’  See those things, when you are connecting with people that quickly, you are going to connect with more people and it’s always impressive to them.  So it’s a win, win, win.  You can’t lose by connecting with your leads quicker.

No. 2: Giving up too soon.

They will maybe make an initial attempt to contact them, they will leave a message and maybe they will call back again and that’s it.  They don’t continue to try and connect with people, or they give up after two attempts and no returned phone call and say ‘those leads were no good’, or ‘I tried calling them and they never return my call’ or ‘they were never home.’  The very best thing that you could do to remedy this situation is to try at least seven attempts before giving up on your prospects.  If you have an orchestrated way, like we have, or a seven step connection process, where you make sure that everybody gets all seven steps before you give up on trying to connect with them, you will find that you will be able to connect with 70 to 80% of all the leads that come in.  Just connecting with them quickly is going to improve the number of people that you connect with, but also carrying on those attempts to contact somebody beyond your normal one or two tries, will yield a much higher percentage of people that you ultimately connect with.  And you want to do this with multiple forms of trying to connect with people, calling them on the phone, leaving a voice mail message, or not leaving a voice mail message, sending them an email to try and engage them in a dialogue.  So make sure that you have got enough steps in your process that you are not leaving people there without making all of the attempts that you could possibly make because you don’t want to rush to judgement and say that somebody is not going to buy a home, just because the reality is that you didn’t end up connecting with them.  Just because you don’t know whether they want to buy a home, doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to buy a home.

No. 3, Asking weak questions instead of having great conversations

This is when you actually connect with people.  A lot of times the big thing that I see people doing is calling people up and asking them weak questions.  You know, let’s say that they have asked for a report on your website, they have asked for something that you have been offering.  The worst thing that you can do is just call them up and say ‘did you get the report?  Did you get a chance to read it?’  You know, the reality is that it doesn’t matter whether they got a chance to read it, what you really want to get into is start having a conversation with people and knowing that the reason that they asked for that report on ‘How to buy bank-owned homes in Winterhaven’ is because they want to buy a bank-owned home.  So the very best thing you can do is get into a conversation with them, knowing that that’s what they want and knowing that our whole objective in having a conversation with a new lead is to determine whether they are 5-star prospects, whether they are willing to engage in a dialogue, and if they are on the phone with you right now that means that they are willing to engage in the dialogue.  If they are friendly and cooperative, now you are going to know the answer to that in the first 30 second of talking with somebody, and the bulk of your conversation is going to be around trying to determine no. 3 and 4, which is ‘do they know what they want?  And are they moving in the next 6 to 12 months?’

You can have a 15 minute conversation with somebody about those two parts of your objective where you can find our exactly what their plans are, what their hopes are, what they are looking for, what they have seen, what their intentions are, when they are planning on moving?  All of those kinds of things are the bulk of the conversation that you are going to have and it’s going to be better than having a conversation that is just kind of asking fill-in the blank questions that are not really leading to anything.

No. 4: Not knowing what to do NEXT

And we are going to know what to offer to people based on what our conversation reveals.  See the big thing that often people make is mistake no. 4, of not knowing what the next step is.  See a lot of times people want to leave those conversations by saying ‘if you have got any questions feel free to call me’ or ‘I will follow up with you a little later when you are closer to buying’, making it seem like their wrong for being at the point in the timeline that they are right now.  See the very best thing you can do is make everybody feel like wherever they are right now on the timeline is perfect.  It’s exactly where they are supposed to be, and to have a specific offer for people at each step along the timeline.  If somebody is a 5-star prospect, there’s only two options.  They are either going to buy now, meaning they are ready to go and start looking at homes right now, or they are going to buy later, and depending on how long it is down the road, you want to have different levels of ways that you connect with people or to continue to follow up with people and serve them as prospects.

So we have got, if somebody is right now or ready to start within the next 30 days, you might want to invite them to a home-buyer workshop, or you might want to invite them to your Saturday tour of homes.  Those are the things that are going to get people out of that cyber world and into the real world where they are kind of meeting with you right now face to face, and that’s what we are really looking at.  If somebody is going to buy 90 days or 6 months from now, we might want to offer them your home-finder newsletter, or a way of keeping in touch with them with all of the updates of the new properties that come on the market as soon as they come on and send them right to those prospects.  So we want to make sure that you know what the next step is and to have a next step for your prospects.  The very best thing you can do is if you can follow up with people, build a relationship with people that you are sending them valuable information for 6 to 12 months after you initially connect with them, that’s going to improve your conversion rate dramatically.

So there we have it, those are your four big lead conversion mistakes and what to do about them.  So tune in next time and we will talk about even more ways to get listings, find buyers and convert leads.

Dear friend,

This week we’re going to talk about how to video and specifically how to use your You Tube channel to generate more leads.

So last week if you were following along you had a lot of homework, I gave you about seven different things that you could do to expand your digital footprint and one of the things that we talked about was getting a You Tube channel.  Now I probably don’t need to tell you that You Tube is the number one video source on the internet by far.  There is so much activity, so much traffic on You Tube, so many videos are served up there every single day, way more than television and it’s becoming part of our mainstream culture.  So the one thing that I advised and talked about last week was the opportunity that you have to get a good name for your You Tube channel.  Now that’s just the name that you set for your account when you sign up at You Tube.  So your channel name would be YouTube.com/, whatever you choose as your channel name.  So you could have Winter Haven Real Estate for instance as your channel or you could have your name as a channel.  I would recommend getting at least both of those as a starting point.  The thing about it, is that once they’re gone, they’re gone.  If somebody already has Winter Haven Real Estate then you’re left out, you have to change and get another channel.  If somebody already has your name then you have to choose another one.  So that’s why I recommend even if you’re not sure on how you’re going to use this or even if you’re not sure what to do with it, go ahead and at least set up your account so that it’s there when you’re ready.

Now I’m going to talk about some different easy ways for you to get started and to use your You Tube channel to start generating more leads.  Now I’m going to put some links at Marketing Monday.com for you and this particular podcast you’ll see in the transcript I’ll include some links for you to some very cool uses of video that I’m going to talk about here.  So one of the easiest things you can do and one of the things that I recommend is to set up a guided tour of your town.  Now in this tour what you can do is give people a sense of the types of homes that are available, the kinds of neighborhoods that you have available.  It’s a nice welcome for people landing on your YouTube channel to find out what Winter Haven real estate is all about.  I’m going to post a link here to an example of one of these tours for you so that you can see what that might look like for you but basically you’re going to just take some time and drive around to the different neighborhoods to give people a sense of starting at the lowest priced condos, all the way up to the sort of smaller detached homes, the town homes, the luxury homes and the biggest newest homes that might be available in your marketplace.  So they get a sense of what their dollars are going to purchase in their new community.

The reason that YouTube and the reason that video would be very helpful for people is if they’re moving from out of town, if they’re moving from across the country.  We’ve even had clients who have talked about moving from other parts of the world from Europe, coming across and seeing what their dollars, what kinds of homes are available for them when they get to their new community.  So it’s a little project that you can do and you can show people all the things you would want to show them if you were taking them on a tour physically.  It gives people a sense of what they can get when they come to that town.

Now you may choose to do separate videos for the different neighborhoods.  You might choose to do a separate video just for the condos that are available or ones just for the golf course community, so that you’ll have these as an asset, a digital asset you can embed in your blogs, you can send a link to it in emails – you will have it so that when it’s appropriate you’ll be able to share it with people who are coming to your town.  You might take some time to do schools, to go by and do a tour of some of the schools and maybe do a little interview or a welcome from the Principal of the school or one of the teachers of the school to give families a sense of where their kids will be going to school.  It’s a great way for you to start building that digital asset base.

Another way that you might use video is to highlight your listings.  You might want to take people on a walk through of your new listings.  This is a fantastic way for people to get a sense of what the house is really like.  Video is becoming the new virtual tour.  Before video, before it was really easy to stream video, before it was easy for people to take advantage of video tours, that’s when virtual tours became popular because you could get that sense of almost having a video.  But now that video is available, it’s very easy for you to walk through a home, take videos of all of the different aspects of the house and give people a real sense of what that house is really like.  I’m going to post an example of some of these video tours and what that might look like for you.

Another way that you might use video is to do videos for your clients.  You might want to create a walk-through tour with the buyers of a new home where they get to be the host of the tour so that you’ll have a video for them to send to all of their friends to show off their new house and of course you can set that up on your blog so that they will send a link to it or it will be on your You Tube channel so that they can have all their friends, all the people that they’re sending that video to, will have exposure to your You Tube channel.  I’m going to post an example of this for you and let you see what my friend Jessie in San Diego with his client Diego.  He created a blog for Diego, called Diego’s First Home and this video was an example of him walking through the home with Diego on the inspection, so that Diego could give a tour of the home and let his friends see the house that he bought.

Now another great way to use video is to host a weekly video show.  Now if you’re comfortable and confident with creating video, you have a fantastic opportunity to do a weekly or a regularly scheduled highlight of a lot of different things that are coming on the market.  You may be able to do a show that highlights new listings.  I had an idea where if you do your agent inspections or your agent caravans on a particular day of the week, it might be a nice idea if every Tuesday say, after caravan, you did a little video tour for all of your prospects who are looking for a home to let them know about the new homes that have come on the market.  Let them know about the new listings that you saw that day.  That would be a fabulous use of video.  Another might be to just focus on a specific segment of the market.  If did just condos or just town homes or just historic homes or homes in specific neighborhoods.  If you have the personality and the character to carry off a weekly show like this, it’s very easy for you to become famous among prospects who are buying a home in a particular area and have them look to you as their leader.  Now I’m going to post a couple of examples of some video shows that have some personality to them.  One of my favorites is Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV.  You can find that at winelibrarytv.com.  Every single day Gary has a wine show for about 20 minutes where he tastes and tests three or four different wines and he gives his opinion on those wines.  Now another example of that is a young man who does a show called Freezer Burns and what he does is he tastes and tests different frozen foods.  So there’s so many uses for video, it’s kind of funny all the ways that you can use it, but nothing is as profitable to use video as a real estate transaction.  So you’ve got a really big advantage in that real estate is a big high-ticket item.  So you’ve got a lot of opportunity there if you’re comfortable and confident enough to do a weekly show.

Now in order to do this there’s a few little skills that you have to develop.  You’ve got to know how to shoot video and be comfortable with it.  So all you want to do is just make sure, just get your video camera just to jump in there.  If you don’t have a digital video camera, one of the easiest ones that you can use is the flip video and it’s a very easy to manage digital video recorder.  There’s even a high definition version of it, it’s a couple of hundred dollars, it’s less than $150 for the standard version of it and it comes with it’s own software that once you plug it into your computer, it automatically recognizes that software and it’s very easy to use.  So here’s what I want you to do is just play around with it and go through these six steps.  There’s just six simple steps to learning to master video.  Number one, take me on a tour of your house or your office just so you can get used to shooting video and narrating the video.  Just demonstrate your house or demonstrate your office just like you would if you were doing a listing.  Just like you would if you were doing somebody else’s home.  Second, take the video off the camera and get it on to your computer, now if you’re using the flip video, it’s as easy as just flipping the little USB attachment that’s built right into the camera, plugging it into your computer.  The computer will automatically recognize that your camera is attached and will suck in all the video that you’ve created on your flip video and have software there for you to edit that video.  So go ahead and steps 3, 4 and 5 are to add a title to the beginning and the end of your little video.  Try and do something where you’re arranging multiple clips together, that’s number 4.  Just learn how to take one clip, add it to another one, add it to another one and remember what we’re doing here is we’re not focused on the finished product here, what we’re focused on is the process.  If you can learn to do these three things, you can do them again and again and again.  Then number 6 is to upload it to your You Tube channel.  Right up there, just it’s very easy, there’s just a single button that you can click when you’re in your flip video software and it will upload automatically to your You Tube account, to your You Tube channel.

Once you’ve done those five or six steps and once you can do it, learn those moves, you can do it again and again.  Once you’re not scared of the technology you can let your creativity shine.  So the process is to get comfortable with the technology and the tools, to get confident in using those tools and then to get creative with those tools so that you can use them to generate as much new business as you possibly can.  So that’s it for this week, tune in next week and we’ll talk about even more ways to get more leads, get more appointments and get more referrals.

VIDEO LINKS:

The 3 1/2 Minute Guide To Milton House Prices:

Diego’s First Home (Client house tour):

A Single Property Video Tour: