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DJ –     Hey everybody its Dean Jackson, welcome to the marketingmonday.com live podcast, and I’ve got a very special guest with us today, my friend Dean Graziosi, so Dean welcome.

DG –    Glad to be here, its nice to have two Deans on the phone.

DJ –     Exactly, the double Dean.  A lot of our listeners are familiar with you because we’ve done a couple of different occasions where we’ve gotten together on our podcast here, and I was sharing with you last time I saw you, that I’ve been talking to a lot of real estate agents all over the country and they are really finding that the one segment of the market that’s really moving right now is the investor segment.

DG –    Absolutely.

DJ –     And there’s nobody better in the world than teaching investors, you are the one who has, you are building a lot of these investors, so I thought we would go right to the source and maybe get some good insight on maybe what you are teaching investors, and how our realtors can really kind of be there to understand the mindset of what these investors have, and how to really tap into a lot of that business that’s gone on.

DG –    And monitor, yes.  Well I’ll tell you Dean, and this probably couldn’t be more perfect, because we do share, we are fortunately the biggest out there and I feel like I’m name dropping here, but my New York Times best-selling books have been rocking it for years, because I think we are one of the few that just tell it like it is, because there is a lot of stuff out there that I see that comes across my table of supposed real estate gurus that are offering a lot of automation.  You know, ‘you don’t need a real estate agent, you don’t need anybody, this program will find cheap houses, it will find you cash buyers that will match up and spit out money.’  Basically turning your keyboard into a cash machine, you know?

I think people are about fed up with that, I know I am.  At the end of the day what we teach, one of the most important elements of what we teach is having out students find a real estate agent that can work hand in hand with them so they can grow together, make money together.  So to me, just sharing what I do, the right real estate agent to my student is the best tool in their toolbox, that is the term that we literally use.  Now the wrong agent could be a flip, like a stripped Phillips screw-driver in your toolbox, right?

So here’s a couple of things that I think are really important for all your agents and everybody to think about of where we are heading.  This is the lull, for me this is the quiet before the storm.  This is when people aren’t talking about real estate that much, its because we’ve hit, and I’m extremely confident in the States, we’ve hit the bottom.  I mean if you look at days on market wherever you live, you’ve watched it spike straight up and then you’ve watching it spike, going up you watched the days on market shrink to barely nothing and then as the market, the bubble burst and we went down, you watched days on market increase over time and get higher and higher, and if you look at those days on market in most every state in the country, now they have stabilized.  They might bounce up and down a few points, a little bit here and there, but there’s no more crashing on days on market.

Now, Dean if I digress please, I talk a lot faster than you, you can tell the faster Dean here, but if I go off just stop me, but if you combined days on market stabilizing in most areas, you combine that with the fact that 35% of all purchases in the country now are cash buyers.  The cash is coming in the market.  Combine that with the fact there’s no new builds, Dean, all the new developers when the market crashed, started pulling out, and they are surely not going to start building when you can buy cheaper than you can build.  It’s very hard for a new housing company to build new houses, so new builds, cash buyers in the market, days on market stabilizing, and lastly I just read a report where for the first time in history there are more investors purchasing properties than new home-buyers.  When you combine that its a really great place to be for investors and a really great place to be for an agent who is friendly to an investor.

DJ –     What do you mean by that when you say ‘an agent that’s friendly to an investor’?

DG –    Well I’ll put it this way, this is one thing that we teach and some of you may have heard this, we have more students than anyone on the planet, and again we push our students to find an agent that likes working with them.  Now here’s what we do.  So I’m going to give you the back, or behind the curtain shot of what we teach our students and its catching on huge.  I mean we have hundreds of thousands of people out there, so this is great info, like intel from the inside, right?  We teach our students to call a real estate agency and really talk to the receptionist or the office manager and say ‘who in your office has raised their hand and said they would like, or has experience working with investors?’  I’m just telling you the strategy we use, and you guys can pick this from the opposite side, when the receptionist gives a couple of names ‘Bob and Sally both work with investors’, what we simply ask is, our students ask the agent ‘is there properties in your area that I can come in and buy, fix and flip and sell for a 20 or $30,000 profit?’

Now everybody listening right now, it doesn’t mean that’s what we are looking for, what I teach my students to look for is someone with the right mindset because there’s two answers we get and they are pretty similar.  I mean we have done this with thousands, we do this live at our event Dean, and we get two kinds of answers.  Someone says ‘that doesn’t work this is a down market, nothing is selling.  The only way to make money is to buy, hold and rent and sell some day in the future.’  That’s not the agent we are looking for.  The answer that we get when someone says ‘hey, I’ve either done that or I have a fellow agent that’s doing that, or I know this investor that’s doing that in this town, I would love to be able to help you find those.’  We are really just looking for that shift, that mind shift, the mindset because what I don’t want, and neither does every one of your agents, you don’t want to work with somebody if you are not in alignment.  Everybody on the phone knows they have to have those annoying clients, they are asking for one thing and you are thinking another one, and its one of those things where you get an email or you see their number come up on your cell phone and you cringe, right?

So we don’t want that on either side, so that question, what we’ve realized is that question, in most cases the quickest way for someone to say ‘absolutely Dean, I can help you, let’s see where we can find those, I’ll get some over to you’, or if they say ‘it doesn’t work’, then that’s not the person that’s open-minded enough to what we want to do.  Does that make sense?

DJ –     It absolutely does.  So tip number one is if you want to work with investors let your receptionist know that that’s what you are doing, because they are probably getting calls.  I mean I know you’ve got students in every city in the country right now that are out following your methods there, so they are probably getting a call at your office right now, somebody might be asking ‘who is somebody who works with investors?’  So if that’s you, let your receptionist know.

DG –    And let me tell you a behind the curtain filtering process that we’ve perfected, and just so you know on the opposite side of whether you are an agent or an agent investor as well, there’s never been a better time to get involved in real estate, and that’s what obviously you are promoting and sharing, but what we’ve done is, I have so many successful students and Dean I think this is why our stuff works so well.  It’s because, and you know this, I partner with my top students.  So I find the guys that used to be a machine-shop worker, the house Mom, the nurse, the mechanic.  I have a butcher, we have, it sounds like a butcher and a baker, but I have a butcher, I have a plumber that, guys or girls that were struggling, got involved in real estate, did really well and I partner with them and I never stop robbing what they are doing, and when they come up with an obstacle, they bring it to me, I try to solve it and they go back on the ground.  So its like I’m investing times 10, because I’ve invested with 10 of my stop students.

So one thing that I know is overwhelming in today’s world, someone will call an agent and say ‘I want to invest’ and say ‘send me everything in this certain area that’s in this price range’, and then the agent will put you on an auto-responder so you get all these get deals, and let me just tell you what happens on the investment, on the investor side so you can be aware.  All of them get overwhelmed.  They get an email every day of all these listings, they don’t know how to shift through them, they don’t know which ones are the good deals, they are calling you to look at 20 different houses, they don’t know which one is the right one and all of a sudden overwhelm happens and they don’t do anything.  We all, Dean we know that overwhelm can cause you to be paralyzed quicken than underwhelm, right?

So what we do, and this is something on the opposite side that if you guys offered this out of the gate, you bring an asset that is just doing amazing for our students, we teach our students that when they have an investor-friendly agent that says ‘yes I’ll send you the right stuff, I’ll send you what you are looking for.’  We ask the agent to only send listings that have three things.  It could be one of these three and if it has two its even better, and the three things are, and you should write this down, because if you offered this you are going to blow people’s minds.  Our students only want listings that have either ‘as is’ in the title, ‘vacant’ and has had a price reduction.  Literally you will take 100 listings that you think you want to send this new client of yours, who is an investor, and when you sift those out those 100 will turn down to 25.

DJ –     And that’s a valuable thing for people isn’t it?  When you can be an interpreter a little bit?

DG –    Exactly.

DJ –     You can sift through some of that data rather than just sending them everything, yes you are absolutely right.  I can see how somebody would…

DG –    Well I’ll give you an example.  Sometimes I go on vacations and I get a hare up my butt, like I’m in La Hoya right now, so now I’m like ‘you know I am going to buy a house here.’  I rented one here for a month with my family to get out of the heat in Arizona, its 115 there right now.  So we get out of the heat and I’m in La Hoya and I have to, and I’ve done this before on a vacation in Hawaii and I see an open house and I just walk in for the fun of it and meet an agent.  I tend to like people right off the bat, like if I like you I like you, and I said ‘let me give this agent a shot’, and I’ll give an agent the criteria, they are excited especially if they recognize me and they’ll go ‘oh’, and literally within three days they send me 100 properties.              I go ‘I don’t have the time to look at any of these’, and I move on.

If they would have sent me an email, and again, there’s a lot smarter agents on this phone because they are learning from you Dean, then a lot of the out there, but if they had some kind of filtering process where they proactively got to me and said ‘hey listen Dean, I know you are looking for a great deal, so I didn’t send you anything unless it had these three things, one of these three things’, either ‘as is’, because if its ‘as is’, they probably don’t have the money to fix up the little things.  If its vacant, well someone is paying the bills and no one’s lived there, and if they had a price reduction they are aggressive.  I know a lot of guys teach or a lot of people teach ‘just go after days on market’, but there’s a lot of houses on the market that people don’t care if they sell.  So if its on 200 days and a person just hopes to sell, or if its been on for three weeks and they’ve had three price reductions, which one do you want to go after?  Price reductions, right?

DJ –     Absolute, but that’s one of the biggest fears I think of the realtors about investors, is that they maybe fear that an investor is just going to come in and they will want to make an offer on every vacant property,’ just send them out 50% of the asking price and let’s just see what happens.’  Then the agents are just running around trying to go crazy just putting on ultra low ball offers.

DG –    I couldn’t agree more and that’s why we filter the process, because the one thing we do is we teach the complete opposite.  We say ‘do not find a great agent and burn them out by making 50% offers on 200 properties having them go crazy.  If you help the agent filter out the ones that are aggressive…’  Because here’s what I know, I’m going to tell you guys again, this is what I teach on the opposite side and some of you might be saying ‘I wouldn’t work with an investor if my life depended on it’ and I get that, but there’s still a great side, you should be buying real estate for yourself then.

Here’s what I know, when you filter out, and you have ‘as is’, ‘vacant’ or had a price reduction that will knock say 100 down to 30 or whatever the number is.  Then they are the one’s that get sent to our students.  What we ask our students to do, just so you guys know, and this is a great strategy to teach as an investor, especially a new one who wants to get in the market and I’ll talk about new cash buyers in a minute, what we teach them to do is to go through all the notes on the listing, and if somebody says example, this is how we teach it.  If someone says ‘great schools, great location, recently rehab perfect condition, love the house’, that’s not the same notes compared to somebody might be vacant and have a price reduction but they might not be as urgent as someone says in the notes ‘already moved, house vacant, need to sell’, right?

So we start with the criteria for the agent, but then when those 100 turn into 50 and come to our students we teach them an internal process to narrow the 50 down to 25 then only make offers on say 25.  What we found around the entire country is that doing that filtering process one out of 25 deals always gets accepted, that’s our national average when someone follows that process.

DJ –     At what..?

DG –    I’ll tell you what the average is, its .7 of the asking price.  That’s our national, if you filter it, if its got one of those criteria, the notes shows that someone is urgent and you offer about .7 of what they are asking, they are asking 100, offer 75, we are getting them at about .7.

DJ –     I mean that’s good data to have.

DG –    And that’s real data.  I don’t think anyone has the day to day data like I have with hundreds of thousands of people out there doing it, you know?

DJ –     And I think that there’s a misconception maybe that some people have, some realtors have about investors that they are all either buying high volume and they are making lots of offers and going to burn you out, but there’s probably a lot of people who are getting into investing right now and they are not looking to do it full-time and do it as buy 20 or 30 properties, they are probably a lot of people coming in who might look to buy one or two properties as an investment and just get into the real estate market.  It seems like if realtors have, if you’ve got a great system to educate new investors and hold their hand, there’s probably a lot bigger market of those types of people?

DG –    You couldn’t hit the nail on the head any harder, because what we call them Dean is new cash buyers.  What the new cash buyer is, I think people do sometimes, even our students get the, when they are wholesaling, they think the perspective of a buyer is just what you said, buying a whole bunch, making tight deals, being rude out it, just take it or leave it kind of thing, and they biggest wave of cash buyers and investors right now are these new cash buyers.  Its electricians and carpenters and your chiropractor and your dentist and your doctor and the guy that owns the machine shop down the street who has some cash, saves up their money.  They make their money doing what they do best, they make money being a chiropractor or a dentist, but their money sitting in the stock market that recovered and they are afraid its going to bottom out, or its in a savings account collecting 2% interest if they are lucky, and they want to get into a bottom real estate market, but they are scared to death.

DJ –     And they probably don’t have time to sift through, to go through and do all of this?

DG –    No they don’t have the time, and that’s what we teach.  We teach people how to make it easy.  Like literally I have agents right now, and just so you know Dean, this is something I did, you know but I’ll share it with everybody on the phone, I bought 50 properties in the last 35 days, and I’m talking and I don’t mean a 50 unit complex, I mean 50 different individual houses all over the country, and I have agents that know what I like.  They won’t send me a deal unless it meets my criteria, they’ll filter it out, they’ll knock them, so if becomes a process and the easier an agent makes it for me, the easier it is for me to close on that many deals.  Even if I have an offer that I will make a blanket, an offer and sign it without filling in the details, so my agent instead of having to get back to me and fax back and forth, we have a process where there’s a signed blank document, she’ll fill it in and she’ll email it to me as an attachment and say ‘is this good?’  And I’ll say ‘fine, send it out we are done’, and I can look at in on my Blackberry.

So again, its all about the convenience and here’s what I know, I’ve created investors all over the country that are buying two to five deals a week with the same system, and the agent that they stuck with, I teach loyalty.  Its like the agent that gets you out of, this is from Joe Polish, ‘the agent that gets you out of Egypt, you have got to stick with them so they can take you to the promised land’, you know?  We’ve done that, so again if you can think of that your investor/buyer is a chiropractor or a dentist that works 45 hours a week, doesn’t really know about real estate, but has got some money and would buy as many as you could, that’s the kind of thing that we teach.  We even teach our agents and our wholesales, we teach the train an agent, or train to be a wholesaler how to, the exact criteria: to find a local bank that will refinance our investors without seasoning and they will do it quick.

So we create a process, we literally give the process on how to ask a bank to, like when you are going through a job process, sorry I just went blank, when you are in the hiring process, you are interviewing, God I couldn’t think of the word interview sorry, when you interview somebody we teach somebody the exact steps on how to interview a bank that can be stand-by to refinance our investors’ properties.  So again, we have John Smith the dentist who buys two properties at, let’s just use round numbers, at $100,000 each.  He used up all his cash.  If we give him this process and we say ‘we found a bank down the street, So and So Savings company or credit union, will refinance your properties at 80% loan to value of the appraised value, and there’s no seasoning, why don’t you call Bob?’  He calls Bob, he gets most of his money back what’s he got?  He’s got his money freed up for you to buy two more properties for him.

So again, its all about thinking a little different in these different times that we are in.  You know, I’m sure everybody on the phone would love to go back to the fun they have in ’04, ’05 and ’06, but this the time, and this is what you teach Dean, to reinvent yourself and you are the ones that will come out so on top because you went in a little different direction.  I truly don’t think with the wave of money I see coming into the market, and the market is still going to be flat for a while, I don’t see a better way to have consistent cash flow than being a turn key agent, to get a handful of cool investors in your area that you like working with that you could just keep turning and burning.

DJ –     Yes.  I mean that is amazing, because when you do think about it, no matter how bad the perception of the market gets, you know, we used to have a saying in tennis that every shot makes somebody happy.  Its either the guy who hit it is happy if it goes in, or the guy who is on the other end is happy if it goes out.

DG –    Fantastic, I love that.

DJ –     Every shot makes somebody happy and every market makes somebody happy.  I mean investors have got to be just kind of jumping up and down right now.  There’s probably no better investor market than…

DG –    I’m in, this is my 22 year of buying and selling real estate.  I have never stopped making money and I am buying more and I’m very excited about the market than ever before in my life.  When I say I bought 50, I bought 50 and next Monday I’m closing on 200 properties at one time.  I’m happy as hell and there’s a lot of people out there that are happy.  So again, it might be a little mind shift, it might be a little annoying at first, but its like anything in life.  Anything new is a pain, anything new is a little scary, but again, systemizing any of this, any part of what you do makes it easy, and I’m telling you again, making it so it can be easy for especially these new cash buyers to buy and then rebuy and then buy again, I think its a phenomenal strategy and its the kind of stuff we share behind the curtain stuff.

DJ –     That’s amazing.  I think if I were doing this right now, I would really be concentrating on building my little network, my team of people who can usher somebody right through the process, where you are leading with really good information, I’ve told you Dean about, we have a program called Bank Owned Weekly, our advertised on Craig’s list and on other places to find people who are interesting in the current inventory of bank owned homes, its always a good start to find investors and communicating with them.  But the more you can make that process seamless for them, the more that you can take out the friction in the process, the better off that you are going to be.

DG –    You hit the nail on the head with friction.  So think about this, again going one step deeper, you have a chiropractor down the street that’s got some money, wants to invest in the market, little scared.  Not only do you find him a deal by sifting out and say ‘hey, I brought you these deals because they are either vacant, they are as is and they’ve had a price reduction, I think these are good ones to make a deal on.  Plus they are in an area that rent is very well and very strong, and here’s the research on why it rents.  Now I think the place needs a little clean up, or a little rehab, nothing major.  Well here’s Joe who I’ve used for years and I highly recommend him.  He rehabs very efficiently’, again a lot of you on the line know all these stuff and you already have all these people on your Rolodex.  But just think, when you make things so easy and say ‘here’s the property, it rents in a great area, its going to rent for $800 a month, here’s your cash on cash return that you could get potentially when its done.  Here’s Joe Smith who can give you a price on getting it just’, you know, one of my best lines that one of my students, Greg Murphy, uses, he goes ‘people rehab too much when they are going to rent’.  He goes ‘I just knock the ugly off it.’  I love that.  ‘I knock the ugly off it.’  Paint and carpets and a good clean, you know?  ‘Here’s Joe Smith who can knock the ugly off it for you, and then after you get it rented, here’s Mike down at Federal Credit, they refinance with no seasoning based on appraised value.  So here’s the whole process, let me know how I can help you through it.’  Because the quicker you can get that person cleaned up, bought, rented and refinanced, what do they do?  They come back to you and say ‘I need two more of those.’

DJ –     Yes, and then you could either keep it or sell it

DG –    Exactly.  So…

DJ –     I think if you have that conversation with your chiropractor or with somebody who is thinking about maybe getting into the market, where all they really have to put up is their money and all of the details and stuff can be taken care of, it makes it far more attractive to them.

DG –    Yes, there’s a new system that I’m working on.  I have a whole section called the ‘human automation network.’

DJ –     I love it.

DG –    That was inspired by all these magic money machines I see a lot of these real estate gurus like to sell.  Of course its very sexy, if I said to you ‘Dean, you stay home and this computer program finds really great deals in your area, finds cash buyers, they match them up and you just kind of walk out to your mail box and get checks.’  I mean that’s very sexy.  I’d like to do that, I’d like to go and get a check out of my mail box right now.  It frustrated me so much that I created the human automation network to show people how to connect all these people I’m talking about. You have professional, motivated people all out for the same reason.  An investor has to realize that a good agent wants him to win, wants him to make money because that’s how they make money.

A good rehabber wants him to make money because he’ll hire him more.  An investor wants a good title company that handles the process easily and carefully.  All that human automation network, as I call it, is having all these professionals in line that in most cases they talk to each other.  So as an agent when you set them up with the rehabber, the flow can go continuously from the rehabber, to the inspection, to the banker, to the insurance company and a lot of times the agent and the investor himself don’t even have to be involved, that’s when you start cranking deals out.

DJ –     That’s exciting isn’t it?  I mean I get excited about the potential of that, what our agents can do, you know?  I just see it as such a big opportunity and really just deciding that that’s what you are going to do and going deep into it.

DG –    And one last thing Dean, I know I can go on and on here, but one last thing.  What we teach our students is, as an agent, let me wear that hat for a minute, is if you truly sift out deals where you know a certain part of town is where your investor should be investing, and a certain part that crosses the tracks and there’s nothing renting over there, its not good, if you know that a property is priced too high, or doesn’t have one of the three key elements we talked about, I wouldn’t send it to your potential investor, there’s nothing worse than getting bombarded and you have to, as an investor now, we have to sift out all the deals.  Now listen, that’s how most all agents work they do what the investor tells them.  ‘Send me cheap deals in that area’, but I wouldn’t listen to them because that’s not really what they want.  They want the deals that could work for them, so if you just send them everything they want they get overwhelmed, you scare them aware and they go back to cleaning teeth.

If you refine the search and say ‘here’s this, and this is the connection once this happens’, all of a sudden it doesn’t become overwhelming, it becomes ‘oh my God, I can make X return on my money and this agent is my hero’, and remember when you are the hero you never get squished out because you become the lynchpin.

DJ –     I’m just thinking Dean, when I’m hearing you say that, I’m thinking about the realtors that would love to maybe invest in real estate themselves, but are having a little bit of a hard time with the market right now, and they are just kind of getting by.  But I’m realizing that the real differentiation might be to start really thinking like an investor yourself, at least going through all of that stuff getting all, everything all lined up just like you were actually going to invest in the properties.  Then its probably easier to find people like the chiropractor, or people right there in the community.  The money is probably the easiest thing to find, the deals are the thing that takes the real skill and the effort.

DG –    Hands down, and the thing is we teach people how to be wholesalers as well.  So its the same exact strategies that we teach people exactly how to use unique and Ninja marketing to kick up these cash buyers, literally in days, have these cash buyers in your area on the list that most people don’t know are right down the street.

DJ –     Is it really an advantage to be a real estate right now in this market?

DG –    You know it is.  Of course you have, there’s so many advantages to it, but again I mean we have our students doing amazingly well without being real estate agents, but I mean for me, if I was an agent I would be using these strategies to find cash buyers and killer deals.  If I could keep the killer deals myself I surely would if I was an agent, and if not I would just be the matchmaker to start making these things happen.

DJ –     So Dean, what can people do to start getting more educated and start going down that path

DG –    Well we are in the process of launching my best product to date.  In fact I have training videos that are the best I’ve ever put together, hands down.  I’ll send you a link Dean that you could put hopefully maybe right below this video, where people can opt in and literally we, I’ve been working on these training videos for about a month now, and its going to blow people’s minds.

DJ –     Perfect, I’m very excited.  I’m really looking forward to this, to see all the stuff that you are going to teach everybody.

DG –    Yes, and again.  If you keep your mind open to seeing both sides, because of course there’s frustrations on every level of every business and everything you, personal relationships, business and all of it, I really think whether you want to be an investor or take care of investors or just be a better agent, if you look at how we share and the marketing techniques we teach people on how to find cash buyers and how to find deals no one else can find, it fits in to make an agent, I believe takes them to the next level and be, stand so far, head and shoulders above anybody else in your industry.  So yes, I’ll give you that link, put it below, you guys got to check it out.

DJ –     Awesome.  Dean, thank you so much.

DG –    Dean, thank you.

Q Hello everybody, it’s Dean Jackson. Welcome to the Marketing Monday.com live podcast. We truly are live today. We’ve got my good friend Scott Ginsberg with us and you may remember Scott’s been a guest, this is your third time now Scott on Marketing Monday?

A I tell you man your audience is going to be sick of me by today.

Q They know all about you. They’ve seen everything. Now you may remember that Scott is the guy who has become I’m going to say world famous for wearing a name tag 24/7 and we first talked to Scott when he wrote his, was it your first book about wearing your name tag all the time?

A Man it seems so long ago but yes 2001 is when I started writing it when I was in college and [‘Hello, My Name is Scott’] *0.00.54 that’s what started it all.

Q So what day are we up to now Scott, how many days in a row have you been wearing your name tag?

A I don’t even know. I’m going to have to look at my website. That’s why I have that counter there because I can’t remember. Apparently 3,774 days so that’s past a decade onto the year 11.

Q Right on and in case you lose your name tag you’ve got it tattooed right on your chest there so you’re never without it?

A That’s the permanent one, that’s why I’m all about commitment. Commitment is not something I do, it’s who I am.

Q Perfect. So Scott’s got a brand new book out right now called ‘Ideas Are Free, Execution is Priceless’. Scott I am very impressed with your book, I love it. I’ve always loved your stuff but this one I think you’ve hit a new level here with this book.

A I think essentially this book is me just getting pissed off at people not taking action on what is important to them and I just channelled that, not negative energy but just channelled that energy into the book and I think it came out great. I’m thrilled with it. I couldn’t be happier.

Q The great thing about the book is that it’s written into daily, you know one page a day for an entire year, it’s a calendar dated so you can take one little piece, one little nugget every single day and I think what I did is I’ve gone through it and read all of it and now I’m still going back and reading the daily ones too because they’re just such great things. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about the idea behind the book is because I know you’re saying it’s not about productivity? I know what you mean because it’s deeper than that but I’d love to hear your take on it.

A I grew up reading devotionals and I’ve always liked that concept because it’s one page a day and a devotion is a commitment, it’s something you do for a small amount of time each day over a period over a year because you want to get better at something and execution is not a skill, it’s not something you just read a 200 page book on an airplane trip from Phoenix New York and then bam you’ve got it, it doesn’t work that way. Execution is a lifestyle. It’s a philosophy. It’s an attitude. It’s a mindset. And so I wanted to do the devotional but no one’s ever done a business devotional so I wanted to be the first person to do it and it’s not exactly that, I call it a non friction business devotional.

Q A non friction, I love that.

A Yeah because it goes down easy because it’s one page a day, you read it in the bathroom, you read it on the way to work or whatever.

Q Or put it on your desk or wherever.

A I write books for me. I wanted to read this book. I wanted the devotional so people love the format, they’ve responded really well and most likely the next four or five books will also be devotional with exactly the same, so it’s all in the package because I want people, if they want to get better, if they want to improve their business or whatever they want to get better at devoting themselves is going to do it.

Q And what a great way, I don’t know how you wrote the book, did you write it one a day or did you write it all in?

A I write modules and those are uncategorised chunks of creative material so I had, I don’t know, a couple of hundred modules all around the execution topic and I just pulled out the small chunks within the modules that were half a page essentially and just distilled them down. They’re in alphabetically order so the book is not set up like well it’s spring time so we’re going to talk about *0.05.02.8, none of that crap. It’s alphabetical so there’s no organisation, there’s no structure whatsoever. The whole point is for like the book to meet you where you are.

Q And each day is an individual clock, and that’s the thing, some meditation to think on for that day right, you’re not building.

A Right. On Monday June 10^th or something you can read an article about on how feedback is overrated and just be careful what you listen to because that can block you from executing. And then the next day it could be on a complete other end of the spectrum and it could be more philosophical about don’t worry about being ready, you don’t need to be ready, you need to know why you’re doing to do it. So it challenges people not to get stuck on just one topic and it hits the whole well rounded idea of execution from every angle and by doing it in that non organised way I think it sort of gets people’s different brain circuits working and gets them thinking and making their own connections. I mean as of now it’s only March but people that have emailed me have said it’s been terrific.

Q It really is. I mean it really is terrific. Now you are a guy who knows a lot about execution. This is your twelfth book now in less than ten years so you’re on a pretty prolific pace there and in addition to that you write your blog every day at hello my name is blog, is that the main blog?

A That’s the one.

Q You already write all the segments at nametagtv.com?

A Yeah and so all the different areas of my business, my occupation as a writer because it occupies most of my time so writing is a baseline which I spend most of my time on, four to seven hours a day and then from there writing will become a video or a blog post or a book or a speech or a coaching program or whatever I do so I find that by focusing on the writing part it will disseminate wherever it needs to go.

Q Well I remember you know one of my favourite sayings that you have is that writing is the basis of all wealth and I don’t remember what book that you said that in or whether you said that on your blog but I really find that to be absolutely true and I think that when real estate agents here that they may think but I don’t write for a living, I’m not a writer and I think that what you’re really saying is that there’s a deeper meaning to writing than just writing a book.

A Yeah writing is about taking what’s in your head and putting it in front of people’s faces so it helps them including their own face. You don’t have to be an author. You don’t have to be a blogger. Writing is an extension of thinking so it’s about organising your thoughts, clarifying what’s important to you, getting an idea, whether it’s just a brainstorming for yourself or you’re writing something for a customer or for your home buyer who’s terrified and making a list of fifty questions they’re probably asking but afraid to ask, that’s writing and those are the kind of things that add so much value to your life, to the other people’s lives and the world that it comes back to you, it reciprocates in the form of wealth, whatever *0.08.26.2.

Q And you see the thing that really jumps out at me when you say, you just kind of go so lightening quick and say you know it’s writing down the fifty questions that first time home buyers should know, like you automatically think like you can put yourself in that position of being a real estate agent and think well what do I know and what can I get out on paper. Another thing that you have said, I love a lot of the quotes that you have put, but the question that you ask is is everything I know written down somewhere.

A It’s almost impossible if you really think about it but I ask myself that question every day and everything I know is written down somewhere. If that sounds ridiculous it is but so am I. the thing is I write everything down that I know and if I don’t, if I think of something I’ll know if I’ve written it down or not because writing it sort of etches it into your consciousness. So if I have a thought and it’s not written I’ll go write it down. If I have a thought and I don’t know if it’s written I’ll go look and I’ll find it and it is so I have access to everything too and I think, George [name]*0.09.36.9 said was the secret of his success is not just that he wrote twenty pages a day, that he could find anything immediately and I can do the same. So every challenge that a realtor faces is okay so a. how do I get to my thoughts down on paper organised and by paper I probably would mean digital just because it’s easier and not only how do I get it on paper then number two, how do I access it and how do I go back to the stuff I said and then number three, what do I do with it, who do I share it with. So every time I write something I always ask who needs to read this and then I send it to them.

Q If you think about all the occasions that a real estate agent could write down stuff especially thinking about everything they know, like if they just experienced something in a negotiation or a multiple offer situation and they write down everything that they remember and learn and got the distinction from that then any time that situation comes up again they’ve already got that. Writing something down is really the big leverage. It’s almost like a lever to leverage.

A It is, it is a lever and you can use it in the sales process. I’ll give you an example. So any time a company is going to hire me to give a presentation or do a consulting gig or whatever they hire me for, you have a conference call kind of like you and I are having the difference is on the conference call I’ll be taking notes and I will write every single thing that they say down, not summarised, not what I hear you saying is, literally word for word and then what I do at the end of the call they’ll go okay Scott well we’re really excited, we hope that we can work together, we have a couple of other speakers to choose from so we’ll get back to you in a couple of days and I’m like cool, thank you. Now before I go I just want to let you guys know I’ve been taking notes the whole time and I want to make sure everyone’s on the same page and I don’t want anyone to have to remember anything so in five minutes from right now you’re going to get an email from me, I’m just going to have a summary that’s going to have my exact notes non edited, exactly what I just said to you and I was sort of doing this years ago and clients loved it because a. it’s respectful, b. it reflects their reality, c. they have a revelation because they look at their own work and think wow I’m pretty smart and then ultimately it’s a perfect reinforcement, that’s the last benefit, because they can go back five months later so I’ve gotten business just from doing that and that’s writing and it’s just listening so any realtor can do the same and I think it will work for them.

Q One of the things that we encourage people to do is when they go to meet with a couple about selling their house or they go to meet with some new buyers to take notes, listen to what they say and then send in a letter form here’s what I heard you say so it lets them know that they understand that you understand what they’re doing.

A That’s the biggest complaint from customers about sales people, I read the report from the Supply Chain Management Association. Every year they do a report about customer complaints and the biggest one is that sales people don’t listen so what better way to position yourself as the right person to sell your home with as oh yeah, he was the one that actually listened and not just listened but showed that he listened by emailing me the notes, I love that guy man, there’s a million of these people, why don’t we take him because he uses his ears for us.

Q It’s interesting that it demonstrates that you’re paying attention to the details when nobody is really expecting you to pay attention to them so if you’re paying attention to the details when they’re not expecting it it must be a good indication that when it really matters that you’re really going to pay attention.

A Good point.

Q Interesting. I’m going to share with you some of my favourites from the book here and I want to talk a little bit about them because some of these are, I think they’re good to talk about because you and I maybe have different office environments, different than realtors have but one of my favourites is actually on March 3^rd, convert your work space into a progress rich environment. So this one is very short, can I just read it so they can know what we’re talking about?

A Go for it.

Q So it’s emotionally invigorating to surround yourself with evidence of your achievements. What’s more keeping past progress in front of your nose stimulates focus even if it’s incremental. I learnt from making ideas happen as a human being you are motivated by progress. When you see concrete evidence of progress you’re more inclined to take further action. Surround yourself with it, celebrate it. Come to my office some time, I’ll show you how it’s done son.

A I wrote that one for my brother because that’s one of our inside jokes. I realise now there’s a typo. I don’t have an office. I have a work space. I shouldn’t have wrote that. I don’t believe in offices. My work space fuels my creativity and it’s set up to sort of be in touch with my obsessive compulsive, control freak tendencies and not everyone’s office will be like that but I think the secret is how do we set it up where we can remind ourselves of our victories because there’s those days when you don’t want to go in or you’re tired, you’re like oh god I suck or the market sucks and it’s like what are you going to do to remind yourself that the work you do matters and that you’re helping people and that you’ve done awesome before and you’re going to repeat those victories again. I mean this is the kind of stuff you’ve got to do especially if you work by yourself which a lot of realtors do is you’ve got to have that progress environment set up for you.

Q So tell me about your work space and then I’ll describe mine because I’ve never been to yours.

A Well I work in my living room. I have a lot of stuff on the wall. I work on the floor quite a bit, kind of got my laptop here on a desk in the corner. A lot of window space, lot of natural light. I don’t have lights in my office except for like one light because there’s usually sunlight. I’m a big fan of creating a portable environment for work so my office is everywhere. My office is me as Van Gogh once said and therefore if I’m taking a train or if I’m in a hotel room I can work anywhere. I think all of us need to know how to do that especially in this increasingly mobile workforce. We have sort of our baseline creative space where we’re going to get stuff done free of distractions and then we need to know how to thrive in a lot of different environments and have the tools to do so available on demand.

Q What kind of tools do you have use most often? I know I have seen a lot of the index cards and post it notes and things that you lay out.

A Yeah big fan of those, I have a little notepad that I carry with me and I’m still kind of analogue in that way. I-phones are great. I don’t use any apps on the I-phone. I think apps are like, the whole point of apps is to make you less bored and I’m not bored so I don’t really use apps. I keep little notepads kind of with me wherever I go. I’ve got my Mac Book Pro that I love but I’m not big on tools and special software and all that kind of fancy stuff. I mean I’m a writer. I need paper, that’s about it so I don’t have anything fancy but I know what I need.

Q And you’ve got the ability to concentrate in whatever space you’re in, you’ve got that too.

A Well that comes from yoga because one of the things you learn in yoga is how to stay focused and how to keep your breath consistent even when you’re tired or there’s a car alarm or the guy next to you is just sweating disgusting all over your mat. You learn how to sort of be a force of calm at a time of turmoil and I think that relates to the business world too. If you can get work done at an airport hell you can get work done anywhere.

Q You know what’s amazing is that so much of really being able to write and I use write again in that broader term of documenting stuff, getting stuff out, essentially that is being able to just get yourself to sit down and still yourself to focus on that one thing. Have you heard me talk about my acronym for golf?

A No, what is it?

Q Okay here it is. When I started thinking about this because so much of being able to concentrate on something is I started thinking why is it so effortless for me to go play golf because you know I can put it in my calendar, I can know what’s going to happen, I block it off, it’s four and a half hours from door to door and I get there at the right time, nothing gets in the way of it. And I started thinking well what if I could make playing golf, what if I could make getting things done or being productive the same sort of a situation, what are the elements of it that are common. So I started thinking about it and I made up this acronym for golf and g stands for a goal and the goal means I know what I’m going to do and I heard one time that goal comes from something to do with decision and decision is that you’ve cut off all other options. When I’m going to play golf that rules out that I can’t at the same time go to the movies or I can’t go bowling or I can’t do something else, I’ve chosen that that’s what I’m going to do and that I know that I’m committed to that as an activity. So when you’re going to spend some time in your work environment knowing what is that you’re going to work on, having that goal is one of the first prerequisites for it. Then o stands for an optimal environment and the golf course is an optimal environment for playing golf because it’s set up specifically for the task. It’s got eighteen holes, you start on number one, you go right through and you go to number two and then you go to number three and off you go and you’re in an environment that’s completely supportive to that, they’ve even got people who ride around on carts to bring out food and beverages to you, all of the needs that you have to keep yourself focused on golf for four and a half hours is right there for you. So how can you translate that into your work space, how can you create an optimal environment for what it is that you’re going to do? Then l is for limited distractions. When you’re on the golf course there’s not much there to distract you, everything is designed to keep you focused on the task and then f is a fixed timeframe, you know that golf is going to take four hours to play and so you take that same kind of application into the work blocks that you have set up. If I put now a block where I’m going to focus on something I know because I’ve been practicing this now for years that I know that I can focus for that four hour block on that one thing that I want to get done. And I was interested to hear you do something similar because you said you write about four to seven hours a day.

A Yeah I have a combination of regiment and then also keep it open to whatever happens so I can just kind of play it by ear. You can over regiment but then again you can not regiment at all and be all over the place. So doing both has served me well. In terms of prioritising it’s pretty easy. I just ask myself questions so for example is what you’re doing right now consistent with your number one goal, if it’s not don’t do it. Is what you’re doing right now leading to making money, if it’s not don’t do it. So questions like this keep me focused. Another good one to ask is and this is more of a filter I think for weeding out distractions or people trying to violate your boundaries and take advantage of you, I ask the big question which is is this an opportunity or an opportunity to be used.

Q I like that. That sounds like a distinction come to by wisdom. That seems like that experience led to that.

A Not so much by wisdom but my screwing up and by being a lunch whore for too many years; I posted this the other day, I wrote a module called how to keep backbone engaged and it’s about creating a filter for your life, it’s about establishing healthy boundaries and it’s about maintaining the integrity so it’s about before blood suckers try to siphon your genius without paying any money and before you know it you’ve given yourself away and I’ve been there before and that’s one of those moments where you’re too approachable and you’ve got to draw the line or else people will draw it for you and then they’ll violate it and tell their little friends it’s okay to do the same.

Q And then you’ve established that as the pattern too and you start to believe it right? That’s kind of interesting thing because so many times people can, real estate agents can run into that same thing too, it’s very easy for people to take advantage of them too. Here’s another one of my favourites from July 18^th, make a public and purposeful choice to play big.

A You’ve got to do it man. You’ve got to show the world that you’re serious about commitment. Commitment I mentioned this earlier with the tattoo, commitment is who I am and I think there’s this cool thing that happens when you commit and when you give it with both feet and when you communicate to the world that you’re fully committed, not only do they pay attention, they start to pay dividends and that’s kind of a cool thing because I didn’t make any money for a good two and a half years when I started my business but then I sort of went full time, I was sort of playing for keeps and I committed with both feet and started making money, I started making a difference and I started making history and it’s a beautiful thing that we all have to get to that point where it’s like okay well what’s going to push me over the edge. I mean you can’t slide down the mountain on your butt, you’ve got to jump and you’ve got to hope that you’ll learn how to swim before the water fills your lungs.

Q The good news is that when you do something big like make a commitment to wearing your name tag 24/7 you know what you’ve got going for you now is there’s nobody in the world that can catch you now. You’re already 3700 days ahead of anybody that starts next.

A And more importantly I mean the fact that I wear a name tag every day no one’s going to beat that most likely. In addition to being ahead by 3700 days I’m also ahead by twelve books and an entire enterprise that no one else has ever done or will ever do and that to me is the real differentiator and that’s why people pay me money. I don’t wear a name tag every day. I made a career out of wearing a name tag every day.

Q Exactly. What’s one of your favourites? What one do you think is one of the most important ones in the book?

A It’s so hard to pick because there’s like 366 of them and they all rock. I’m going to go with the last one so if you have your book there at December 31^st. Every time I write a book there’s always one part of the book that it’s like I just do it for me. There’s like one line in the book that I just love and I don’t care if anyone likes it but I love it and the last chapter, December 31^st it says your ship never comes in, only your dock gets bigger and it’s about permission, it’s about not waiting until you’re ready, it’s about just go, don’t wait for permission, don’t wait for perfection, just do it, just go. You’ll screw up and you’ll doubt yourself and it will be painful and it will be the best thing ever and that’s what people need to do, that’s the jump that are afraid to take, that’s the execution part, like people talk about ready, aim, fire or ready, fire, aim or ready aim, ready aim, ready aim or ready ready ready or aim aim aim, I say instead of ready, aim, fire like get rid of all three of those words, how about try, listen, leverage. Instead of ready, aim, fire how about try, listen, leverage because a. you’re never ready so don’t wait for that one, aim, I don’t know, aim is kind of overrated, I’d rather just kind of put it out there and let the customers aim for me and then as opposed to a fire, fire is kind of a dangerous word I replace it so try, listen, leverage. Try, you just try stuff, just give it a shot, just see what happens, run experiments. My whole life is an experiment. And the listen that’s the big one, you try stuff and then you listen, what works, what sucks, what do people love, what do people latch onto and then leverage so now that you have done it and now that you’ve listened to what works how do I leverage it, how do I say okay you know that stuff I was doing last week man that really killed, let’s leverage that, let’s do more of that because the stuff I did this week really sucked.

Q These are great words, stop waiting for things to happen to you, start happening to things.

A It’s totally cheesy and I love writing cheesy stuff because cheesy makes funny.

Q But it’s brilliant.

A There’s a great song by Mark Cohen called Life on this Train and he says life is curious to see what you will do. It’s like are you sitting around waiting to see what is going to happen or is life curious waiting for you and I love that Mark Cohen song, I listen to it all the time. It kind of pumps me up. That’s what execution is, it’s like I’m going to make stuff happen, I’m going to do this. The door has to be opened from the inside otherwise we’re screwed.

Q I love on the back cover, you don’t need an idea, you need an I did.

A Originally I had a different line on the back of the book. I was coming home from yoga and I get ideas in yoga all the time and I’m in my car and I’m like wait a minute, idea, I did, oh that should be the line on the back of the book so I switched it and that’s like one of my favourite lines in the book, it’s like ideas, a lot of people have ideas, I have I did and I did’s make me money.

Q That’s perfect.

A If I may say so that’s really damn good. I hate to say it though because that’s an idea.

Q There we go. I’m going to recommend that everybody gets your book ‘Ideas Are Free, Execution is Priceless: 366 Actionable Ideas, Challenging Insights and Disturbing Questions to help you take action on what matters’. I am a big fan. I love this. I’ve been reading it all the way through and I’ll continue to read it day by day. I think everybody who’s listening would really benefit from reading this book. It’s frictionless, there’s no friction in reading it.

A That’s correct, no friction.

Q Available everywhere books are sold is that where we?

A Yeah just go on Amazon.

Q Go to amazon.com and I’ll put a link right up to it from Marketing Monday here so people can get right to it and I’m going to recommend that people check out your blog too, you write really great stuff at hellomynameisblog.com and even yournametagtv.com, all kinds of great videos. I’m going to encourage people to use you as a model here even for, you know imagine if you could apply yourself to getting your ideas about everything you know about helping people buy homes in your town or sell homes and use that same kind of a model, get all of those ideas out there on your blog and on video. You’ve got to be a packager of all of your thoughts.

A That’s right.

Q Fantastic Scott. Thank you so much for joining us again. When’s the next book?

A Already done.

Q Already done? You see there we go.

A I don’t when it’s going to come out, probably the Fall but it’s done. I’ve got some other projects I’ve got to wrap up before I start down the, the book production process but it’s done, I can’t wait. It’s quite a bit different from execution but it’s going to rock man. I can’t wait.

Q Perfect. And then I’ve got an idea for your next book after that.

A Okay.

Q Scott thank you so much for being with us and I will talk to everybody on our next Marketing Monday.

END OF TRANSCRIPT

Dean:     Hey, everybody, it’s Dean Jackson.  I’m here today with a friend, Kurt Nilsen.  Kurt is up in Portland.  Welcome, Kurt, first of all.

Kurt:      Thank you very much, Dean.  I appreciate the opportunity to be on the call here with you.

Dean:     I shared with you that the reason that I wanted to talk with you specifically is because I’ve been watching you for the last year.  I had it in my mind here, that I wanted to kind of keep an eye on people who’ve been doing great things in 2010.  So, really doing great things in tough times.

I know that you’ve been very consistent, among the most consistent people that I’ve seen with following the Finding Buyers Program, and sending out your weekly emails.

So, what I want to kind of do is get you to share maybe some of the process and the mindset and the way that you have been applying the Finding Buyers Program.  And I think what’s very specifically interesting is that you are a lender.  I think that that shows a lot of resourcefulness, to really take a program like this, that a lot of lenders might look at and say, “Well, this is clearly for realtors,” and you’ve thought out-of-the-box.

I’d love to get your kind of experience, what led you to do this program and maybe some of the experiences that you’ve had along the way here.

Kurt:      Yeah, I’d be happy to, Dean.  When you mentioned changing times, it has been an interesting market here for the last couple of years.  I feel like if I’m adept at anything, it’s seeking out mentors and seeking out people that have got systems that work.  I’ve followed your stuff for a long time.  I’ve always admired the programs that you put out.  And when you came out with Finding Buyers here, a little over a year ago, or whatever it was, there was no hesitation on my part, to join the program and star doing what I’m doing here.

To kind of address what you’re talking about, as far as a mortgage broker, I had kind of a little bit of an ulterior motive, in that my wife is a real estate agent.  Obviously, being a lender, if there was a way for me to create more business for her, through Finding Buyers, if there was a program out there that could do that, obviously it would help my mortgage business too.

So, I kind of used her as a guinea pig, when we started the program a year ago.  And it’s really, really paid off in a big way.  I can certainly go over some of the numbers with you a little bit later, if you want to.

Dean:     I’d love that, yeah.

Kurt:      The bottom line is, as I say, we started about a year ago, and really just followed the program that you laid out.

We just began placing ads in CraigsList, in the “Real Estate For Sale By Brokers” area, the type of ads that you suggested that we do.  And it was really nothing more than offering an instant list of bank-owned homes, and also offering free ongoing weekly updates in that CraigsList ad.

So, that was the draw that gets people.  You offer something as value-driven as that, get them to just click on the link, and obviously that link takes them to the Web page that you’ve already pre-created for all of us.  They leave their name and email address, and, bingo, we have them in our system as a contact.

Dean:     Do you remember the first time that you placed your first ad with this?  There’s 3 parts to the Finding Buyers Program.  We had the first-time buyer program, the relocation guide, an the bank-owned buyer program.

So, you primarily focused on the bank-owned buyer element of this.  Right?

Kurt:      Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Dean:     Okay.  Now, do you remember when you placed your first ad and what happened, kind of like through the chronology of how it all progressed here?

Kurt:      Are you referring to our excitement level when the leads started rolling in or just kind of the…?

Dean:     Were you excited?  I didn’t want to lead the witness.  That’s why I left it up to you.  I didn’t want to put words in your mouth.  But were you excited when you got your first leads, and do you remember maybe how long between when you placed the ad and when you got your first leads, and how that all evolved?

Kurt:      Yeah, it’s still pretty clear in my mind.  It was just about exactly 13 months ago, when we began offering the bank-owned list, and the ongoing weekly updated list.  And frankly, the leads started coming in immediately.  They really do.

When my wife Shirley first began, we were only placing 2 to 4 ads a day, and we were getting sometimes 5, 6, 7, 8 leads a day coming in.  Well, I won’t jump ahead yet.

Initially, we started placing on 2 to 4 ads, and the leads started coming in right away.

The way you teach the system is that once they respond to the CraigsList ad and put their name and email address in, we have it set up to where the prospect automatically receives the instant list of bank-owned homes, which they certainly appreciate.  Obviously, that’s what we’ve offered and that’s what we’re giving them.

And then from that point, once they put their name and their email address, they get the instant list.  And then the next day, on day one, they get another email from us that simply asks if they’d like to get your “Pinpoint Home Search.”  It asks them if they want to get a more specific list of homes that meet their needs.  And I can’t tell you the percentage of people that ask for that.  But a pretty high percentage.

From that point, it gets the agent in dialogue.

Dean:     Yeah, you’re getting them engaged.  Exactly.

Kurt:      Yeah, exactly right.  So, it was very exciting.  But since that time, I’ve kind of always thought, “Gosh, as a mortgage person, if I could kind of the rainmaker, if you will, if there was a program out there that I could use to teach to real estate agents, to help them get more leads and more buyers and more listings as well, because listings come out of this, what a killer way for me to gain the loyalty of those agents.”

So, I could probably take it a lot further than I have.  But at this point, it’s now my wife and then 3 other agents that I’m helping with this system.

Actually, in the last year, I think we’ve figured out that between my wife and the other 3 agents, there’s been almost 4,500 leads generated.

Dean:     Wow!  That’s awesome.  That’s really good.

I love the way that you were thinking with this.  You’re working with different realtors in sort of different surrounding areas, they have different target markets kind of thing?

Kurt:      Exactly right.

Dean:     Or you were just rotating the leads around?

Kurt:      No.  We’ve got 4 different agents that their specific market or the area that they kind of specialize in is different from the other 3.  It’s a little different around the country, but in our circumstance out there, each agent has been assigned a couple different multiple listing areas that they advertise for.

But it’s fantastic.  It goes back to what you had taught, is be specific in the CraigsList ad that you’re attracting people to a specific area.  I think that really seems true, that people that are a little bit further along in the process know what area they want to be in, it seems like.

Dean:     Yeah.  After about 2 or 3 times that you go to CraigsList, that’s always been my observation, that after 2 or 3 times they’re going to figure out where the search bar is up at the top, and they’re going to choose to narrow their search a little bit.  And that’s where you get an opportunity to really stand out that way.

Now, do you remember when the first transaction that you got and how fast that came, and how it actually happened?

Kurt:      Shirley, my wife, I’m trying to think of how long it took to close the transaction, but she had $5,000 in her pocket in the first 45 days.

Dean:     That’s great.

Kurt:      Yeah, it was really great.  So many cool things have happened since then.  That was just the beginning that literally made us grab each other and dance around the room in happiness.  Because we thought, “Gosh, if we can make it happen this early in the game, think about what’s going to happen a year from now!”

Now, looking back, there’s been really great things that have happened.

Anyway, in that circumstance, it was a gal named Molly.  She had been working with another agent, previously.  And she responded to the day one drip campaign, which asked, “Are you looking for a more specific list of homes?”  She answered the questions on that, and then one of the questions in that was, “Are you currently working with another agent?”  And she went on to explain that she kind of fired her other agent and needed a new one.  She already had her house picked out.

Shirley, my wife, went out and showed it to her, wrote the offer, full price, and 45 days later it was closed, $5,000.

Dean:     Isn’t that amazing?  I don’t know if you had been on any of the member calls, but we had Susan in Phoenix had placed the ad on Friday, her very first ad, showed a house to a couple on Monday, and they bought it on Tuesday.  Literally, that fast.  We’ve had story after story like that, of people getting fast action here.

I’ve always found that I think CraigsList is a kind of place that a person who is already on top of what’s going on in the MLS or on Realtor.com or wherever, that I think when they get to where they’re really kind of ready, they want to kind of go above and beyond what’s available to them on the MLS or on Realtor.com.  So, they start scouring, really, on CraigsList.

CraigsList isn’t really the first kind of place that you would think to kind of browse real estate.  I think casual browsers like the formatting and the ease of using a site like Realtor.com or using an MLS.  But I think people who are really looking for something specific are probably gravitating towards CraigsList.  Wouldn’t you say?

Kurt:      I couldn’t agree more.  In fact, there’s a funny little story that just happened recently.  Well, let me back up.

When we first started this, we were questioning, a little bit, about – how do I say it nicely – the potential quality of the CraigsList leads that were coming in.  We thought, “Oh, it’s going to be looky-loo’s and none of them are going to be serious, and none of them are going to have any money.”

Well, we quickly learned nothing could be further from the truth.

Dean:     Right.

Kurt:      Just a cool start to 2011, Shirley got an email from a couple named Carrie and Greg, and these people were cash buyers in the $500,000 range.  My wife went out and showed them 2 houses.  They made an offer on the house on Saturday, so 4 or 5 days ago, and it’s going to close next week.  They made a cash offer on a $540,000 house, and it’s going to be a $13,500 commission to my wife.

So, I’m just saying that if anybody out there thinks that CraigsList doesn’t have quality people coming to it, looking for houses, they’re sorely mistaken.  There’s some quality people out there looking on CraigsList.

Dean:     What do you think your total has been, so far, in commissions that you’ve been able to generate from the CraigsList?

Kurt:      I know exactly what it is, because I surveyed the 4 agents at the end of 2010.  The commissions that were received by the 4 agents totaled just a shade under $135,000.  As a mortgage person, I made an extra $30,000 in commissions, just from doing the loans from the agents that referred me their buyers.

Dean:     That’s fantastic.

Kurt:      It goes way deeper than that, at this point, because these agents are deeply, deeply engrained to me.  I don’t know how to say it.

Dean:     Here you are, and that’s what I love about what you’ve been able to do, is that you have the resourcefulness to really kind of see that this is something, as a lender, that you could do.  And most of the time, the challenge that I find with lenders specifically is that they think, “I’m a lender.  I need a lender lead generation program.”

The thing is that it really is one of the most valuable things that you can bring to a relationship with a realtor, is the ability to generate leads for them.

Kurt:      Yeah, that’s exactly right.  It creates kind of what I call a “chain of disconnect,” as well.

Dean:     Yeah.

Kurt:      They don’t want to leave that program.  They don’t want to leave that system, because it’s working.  And they’re not just a referral source, but what I’m really seeing is that they’re fiercely loyal to me.  They’re not just casually mentioning to their borrowers, “Oh, you need to call Kurt Nilsen.”  It’s, “This is the guy you’ve got to call.  He’s the man.”

So, it’s not a situation where, “Gee, Mr. and Mrs. Buyer, I’ve got 3 different mortgage people for you to choose from, Kurt Nilsen’s one of them.  Call him.”  It’s, “Kurt’s the guy.”

So, it’s really a neat dynamic that’s happening.

Dean:     So, that’s kind of cool.  You’ve done the $30,000 from just the direct CraigsList things, but you’ve probably also generated countless commissions in people that you’re able to help just because of the relationship and them referring their other transactions to you.

Kurt:      That’s exactly right.  The $30,000 in commissions came from just the CraigsList stuff.  But yeah, now it’s the other buyers that they’re referring to me, and that’s not even counting what’s going to happen off into the future, with the loyalty from these agents.

The other neat thing that I’m just kind of starting to get my head around in a stronger way, and this is probably for another call or conversation, but now that there’s 4,500 people, as far as leads that we have, as far as a mortgage person, these are obviously people that I can market to as well, which we do.

Digressing here a little bit, people have signed up for the instant list, but then every week they get the updated list of bank-owned homes on Wednesday, like clockwork, and then every Saturday I send them a little tickler email.  One week, it would revolve around a real estate-related question, and then on week 2 it would be more of a mortgage-related question.  So, there’s lots of opportunities here.

Dean:     That’s fantastic.  Did you notice, when you did that first transaction within the first 30 or 40 days there, that that sort of started, then, the consistent flow of it?  Has it been pretty consistent month after month, or has it come in spurts?  What kind of flow have you noticed?

Kurt:      I’ve noticed that 3 of the agents have been very consistent with the program, meaning they’re placing their ads consistently, they’re very good at their follow-up, and it’s those agents that are seeing the consistent results.  It’s as simple as if you work the program, it’s going to pay you.

The other agent, that’s been kind of hit-and-miss, and so has his income from it.

If I were to do it all over again, it would almost be a little bit of a contractual way, that, “Hey, Mr. Realtor, we’re not even going to begin this program together unless we can come to an agreement that you’re going to be consistent, because I’ve got a lot of other people that want to take advantage of this.”  It’s kind of a positioning tool, if you will.  I don’t say it to be cocky, but it’s the truth.

Dean:     I was showing Sony my in-box, my gmail, because I isolated just the email address that you send all of those emails from.  And there’s page after page.  It goes all the way back from January, like every single week there was something consistently from you in my in-box.

That kind of consistency is really what pays off.  So, you’re a real testament to that.

What would you say would be the sort of Kurt Nilsen tips to success with this program, that you’ve learned along the way?  Is there things that you would say are the secret?

Kurt:      Number one, obviously, is making sure that the ads get placed consistently.  That’s key.  We promised these people a weekly updated list from the original CraigsList ad.  It’s critical that we keep that promise.

So, like I say, be consistent with that.

The way it works for me, as a lender anyway, is that the agents are simply on a program to where they email me the updated list of bank-owned loans sometime in the pm on Tuesday, and then I send out the updated list to the prospects on Wednesday, like clockwork.  And then, those prospects are getting that list within a 4-hour window on Wednesday, every single week, come heck or high water.  That’s just the way it goes.

And it’s neat, because the prospect, a lot of times, will email us back and say things like, “Hey, Kurt and Shirley, thanks for keeping me on your list.  We’re not quite ready yet.  We really appreciate the consistency.  We’re getting a lot of value out of the list.”

So, it’s never, ever a situation where the people are emailing us and being angry, or having a mean tone.  It’s an attitude of gratefulness and thanks for continuing to provide that service to them.  That’s the critical thing, like you’ve taught me, Dean, of building that relationship through constant communication.

To get back to your question, sending the weekly updated list on time, and then throwing in a tickler email on Saturday, or whatever day you choose.

An email that’s one of our favorites, like you’ve taught me, is “Are you still looking for a home in blank community or blank town?”  That is, bar none, the most incredible dialogue-creating email I’ve ever seen.  And I struggled with that.  When you first talked about it, I thought, “Well, I need to add more verbiage to it, and I need to add more verbiage to it, and I need to say more, and I need to ask more questions.

Dean:     The natural tendency is that you think, “I’ve got to add to this.”

The fact that you want to add to it really shows why it’s so powerful, because our brains can’t stand an unsolved mystery.  So, we have to, “Why is he asking me this?  Does he know something?”  It’s not a complete thing.

So, you need to complete that loop.  I always use the analogy of if you were in line with somebody at Starbucks, and you turned to them and you asked them a question, and you just stood there, it would be very difficult for them not to answer you.  You know?

Kurt:      Yeah.  Yeah.  Exactly right.  I resisted that temptation, and I just did it like you said.  And it creates dialogue.

I can sure send you everything that we’ve done, but another one that we asked, I believe we got it from you as well, is, “Are you only interested in bank-owned homes?”  And that creates dialogue.

Dean:     We’ve got such a whole collection of them now.  But I call them short, personal, expecting-a-reply messages.  Those are the 3 elements that we’re looking for.

We’ve had a lot of success asking people, “Are you an investor or are you looking for a home to live in?”  And that gets people to respond, as well.

I’m looking in my in-box, and I see exactly your 3 tips to success here, being played out right there in my in-box.  Because sure enough, I see those weekly emails and I see the weekly short, personal, expecting-a-reply messages.  From my observation, that is why you are such a success with this program, is that you’re doing it.

Kurt:      Yeah.  And you know, I would be remiss without mentioning the seriousness of the agents that are taking advantage of this.  And this may be the most important thing that I say.  But I watch my wife, because she sits 10 feet from me in the office, I watch the way she works with systems, and there’s not necessarily any secret to it, but it’s the way that she gets back to the people that have responded to her; meaning that if we asked a question, “Are you still looking for a home in blank,” and the prospect emails back and says, “Yes,” then she doesn’t just send them a short little snip-it.  She’s very friendly.  “Hi, thanks for getting back to us.  We’ll be here when you’re ready.”  How do I put it?

Dean:     I get it.  I think that I know what you’re trying to say, because my observation of it is that when people generate leads, I think it really starts from your baseline or your default attitude about it.  There’s really 2 attitudes you can take.  And number one is that you can have the attitude that people who respond are not 5-star prospects until they prove that they are; or you can have the default attitude that the people who respond are 5-star prospects until they prove that they aren’t.  And you treat them like they are a 5-star prospect.

That’s really the winning formula.  Because when you look at it, if you take 10 leads and you just look at those email addresses, you can’t tell which one of those 10 are 5-star prospects just by looking at their email address.

But we know, for sure, that out of those 10 there are 5-star prospects in there.  There are people who are going to buy a home.

The best course of action we can have is to treat everybody like they’re the one, like they are the one who’s going to buy.  And that sounds exactly like what Shirley does.  Her attitude is that these people really want my help, and I’m here to help them, and we’re going to be able to work together.

And sure enough, it ends up that you are able to work together.

Kurt:      Bingo.  You absolutely hit the nail on the head.  I’ve heard you articulate that before, and I certainly couldn’t have said it better myself.  But that is the reason that the agents are successful with this program, is they’re treating these people with respect, just like they’re 5-star prospects, unless they prove themselves differently.

Dean:     Yeah.  That’s awesome.  I think, like you said, that’s kind of the big first obstacle that people have to overcome, is any preconceived notion that they might have about the quality of people that you’re getting on CraigsList.  You said that that was kind of your initial thought, but you were open enough to try it and to see, and to discover for yourself exactly what happens.

Kurt:      Yeah, exactly right, Dean.

Dean:     So, what are your big plans for moving forward in 2011 here?  Are you going to stay the course and continue on?

Kurt:      I’m going to stay the course, I’m going to expand, I’m going to add another 3 or 4 different agents with some different areas that are available out here, that we haven’t tapped into yet; areas that there’s a lot of property moving.

The other thing that I’m really beginning to learn more about, at least from my mortgage business, is I’ve done some different things regarding the home loan reports and a few different ideas in that respect.

For myself personally, and maybe I didn’t give it enough time, I wasn’t able to make the home loan report work for me like I wanted it to work, in that it seemed like I couldn’t get out of email dialogue with people.

But if I were able to find a way, or when I found a way, to get people to communicate with me on the telephone, it was basically a done deal.

So, I created a little PowerPoint video presentation, 3 or 4 minutes long, where essentially I’m kind of doing a Jing screen cast.  It’s not me doing a video of myself, it’s basically a PowerPoint slide with my friendly picture on there, and then the prospect hears me talking about what I call my express home loan pre-approval service.

And basically, what I’m marketing is I go into a little explanation over essentially what is a 10-minute, quick-and-easy, over-the-phone pre-approval conversation, where I articulate to them in my little video that it’s going to be low-key, that there’s not going to be any pressure.  They can kind of tell, by my voice, that I’m a friendly guy.  It just kind of brings me out from behind the wall of the email.

Dean:     Yeah, makes you a real person, right.

Kurt:      Yeah, exactly.  That’s been a lot more successful for me, as far as getting people to call me on the telephone, because they kind of get to know me a little bit better.

But I’m going to be doing more of that, and more actual maybe videos, and sending out video tips about the mortgage world or about the pre-approval process.  And I want to just get out there with the videos and, again, do whatever I can to come out from behind the email wall.  And I would say that anytime a realtor or a mortgage person can incorporate those types of things into this program that you’ve already put together for us, the better off we’re going to be.

Shirley and I have noticed, even in the last month, where we put a little link on the bank-owned list of homes that says, “Click here to meet Kurt and Shirley,” and we each do a 30-second – again, it’s not a video of us – audio, and shows our picture on the screen of, “Hi, thanks for joining Shirley’s list of bank-owned homes.  We look forward to helping you in your home-buying search.  We’ll be here when you’re ready.  Feel free,” and whatever.  It’s just a way to connect with these people at a little deeper level.

Dean:     Fantastic idea.  I like that a lot.  That’s a nice innovation.  Do you notice or have a way of knowing if people are going to that page to watch you or to listen?

Kurt:      Yeah.  I haven’t tracked the statistics.  But with the GetResponse program, it’s got a way that you can take a look at your performance statistics and see who’s clicking on the link.

Dean:     Good for you.  That’s a great innovation.  I like that a lot.

Kurt:      Thank you.  It’s all Dean Jackson.  I’m willing to do anything else that you’ve got going out there.  So, let’s say I’ve just been following your stuff.  I’ll tell you, I don’t even remember what the investment for your Finding Buyers Program was.

Dean:     $349.

Kurt:      Yeah, one time.

Dean:     Right.  Yeah.

Kurt:      That’s a screaming deal.

Dean:     People ask me, a lot.  They say, “Why do you do it just for $349, like one time?  Why don’t you just charge a monthly fee for it?”  And I do exactly the same thing with the Getting Listings Program.

I know that getting listings and finding buyers are the 2 core things that people need, if you’re going to be successful in real estate.  I know how to do those things.  I’ve got 2 programs that help people do them.  And from the very beginning on this, I wanted to set it up so that people are investing in something that they’re going to have as an asset throughout their career.

We have people who have been doing the Getting Listings Program now for 6 years, and now people who start out with it and maybe take a break from it, but it’s always something that they can come back to.  And I wanted to have it so that once you’re a member of that, that you’re always a member.  There’s nobody out there saying, “Oh yeah, I was a Getting Listings member, but I stopped that.”  Our membership grows every month, because we just continue to embrace all the new people.

A lot of times, people are thrilled.  I just got some emails today from people who have started again.  They took a couple of years off of getting listings, and they’ve gone back and started mailing out, and already are getting results.

That’s why I do that.  I really want to build that great community.

Kurt:      Yeah, very smart.  I just can’t tell you how much I appreciate you coming up with these programs.  It’s been just a heck of a boon to my business and the other 4 agents that I’m working with.

The other thing is when we started doing this, I don’t want to be negative, but there were some down times.  People were feeling pretty low about what was going on with the market.  And I can’t tell you what this program has done for us, as far as shifting our mindset about the market, and our attitude, and just the way we feel about moving forward.  There’s a tremendous amount of value in just having a great attitude about what you’re getting up and doing every day.

Dean:     And you know what?  I don’t know that we didn’t gloss over it, but the fact that you generated all of these leads for free, once you’re placing the ads.  It’s not that you’re spending a lot of money to generate all of these leads.  You’re placing the ads, and the as are generating the leads.

Kurt:      That’s exactly right.  I’ve looked back at $165,000 in income created in 2010 from your program.  Let me do the math here, real quick.  That looks to be…

Dean:     I should charge you more money.

Kurt:      That’s a 450:1 ratio on return on investment, it looks like, to me.

Dean:     There we go.  That’s awesome.  Well, Kurt, I thank you so much for sharing.  I think you’re going to be a big encouragement for a lot of people, to do something, take some action, and know that it’s all going to work out for them.

Kurt:      Absolutely.  The program works.  Thanks, again, for everything that you’ve created, Dean.  And I’ll be in touch.

Dean:     Thanks a lot, Kurt.

Watch the video…and then listen to the podcast!

Marketing Monday 1–3-2011

Hello and welcome to the Marketing Monday.com live podcast.

My name is Dean Jackson and I am very excited about today’s podcast, you can probably tell from my video how excited I am. I’ve been working literally on this for months and working specifically on an easy way to automate the process of getting referrals and I’m very excited about this because I know that this is going to make you a lot of money this year.

It’s good timing right now, first week of the year – you probably spent a little time reflecting on last year and if you look back and you have a category of your business for repeat and referral business…you start thinking and looking at that and saying “how much referral business did I actually do in the last 12 months?”

If you look at that what we’re calling your referral business we’re including your repeat business because even that is an accomplishment – because according to NAR 80 plus percent of people say they would use the realtor that they used to buy the house that they’re in when they sell it, or they would use the realtor again, but some small percentage like 11 percent of them actually do. So just being enough on somebody’s mind that they would consider you again when it’s time for them to sell is an accomplishment and that’s not something to take lightly, you probably did something to keep in front of your clients so that at least you get that repeat business.

But here’s where when we really start taking it up a level and start looking at that group of people in a strategic way that you see where the real opportunity is.

If I were to ask you of the last 10 people who referred you… if you looked back at those and you told me the story about how that referral came about and if it’s a repeat that’s fine too, but it’s going to have come about in one of three different ways and these are the three types of referrals that we talk about.

1. PASSIVE Referrals
Passive referrals are the best kind to get, those are the ones when people call you up and say my friend Bob told me that you could help me sell my house and we need to be in Poughkeepsie by April.

That is a wonderful call to get because you weren’t expecting it, you didn’t do anything specifically to make it happen and it can brighten up your day whenever it happens and everybody gets those calls. Or your client who you sold a house to four or five years ago calls you up and says “hey we’re looking now to buy a bigger home when can you come over and get together with us?”

That’s another form of passive referral – they’re calling you up and presenting themselves as business to you. That makes up about 80 percent of all of the referrals that you get are that passive type of referral.

2. REACTIVE Referrals
Now the next type is what we call the reactive referral and that’s where your client calls you up and says “hey my friend Bob is going to be moving you should give him a call I told him about you.” Now we call that a reactive referral because you still have to react to that phone call and you have to do something now to make that connection so you have to call their friend, introduce yourself or you have to get that friend to arrange somehow for you to meet that person but you have to react to that circumstance.

And if you look at the remaining portion of your business that’s how it happened. If we do this exercise and I’ve done it hundreds of times you end up with an 80/20 situation where 80 percent of the referrals you get are passive, 20 percent are reactive and what that leaves is the most strategic type of referral…

3. ORCHESTRATED Referrals
An orchestrated referral is when you ask for and get a very specific type of referral. And that’s what I’m really concerned about here that’s what I’m focused on is how can we orchestrate that referral process?

If we apply all of the Direct Response principles that we know and use in your before unit to attract people who don’t know you, don’t like you, don’t trust you yet they’re even more effective if we can apply those same direct response strategies to communicating with people who already know you, like you and trust you.

So in order to make that happen, in order to orchestrate those referrals, we need to look at first the dynamics of how referrals happen.

All referrals happen as a result of a conversation.

If you think about this it’s absolutely true for any type of referral whether you’re referring a movie or a book or anything like that and I’ll give you an example.

Last year I was at lunch with a friend Josh who had twisted his back and I had just come from my massage therapist Jenna and he was complaining about his back and how tight it was and I had told him “I’ve just come from my massage therapist Jenna let me give her a call and see if she can get you in right after lunch because I had the same thing and she got right to it for me.”

So I called Jenna, passed the phone over to Josh, they got an appointment arranged for that afternoon; he went to her and next time I saw him he couldn’t thank me enough for setting that up with Jenna because she fixed his back and he was feeling great. And that made me feel good.

You think about that same thing for you, you think about any time that you refer somebody the thing that always makes you feel best is the next time you see them if they took your advice and they thank you for recommending that movie or recommending that restaurant or recommending that book that’s what’s very powerful.

The Referral Myth is that people refer things as a favour to YOU.

Your clients don’t refer you as a favour to you – they refer you because it’s going to make THEM look good, it’s going to make them feel good about themselves when their friend tells them “wow that was a great experience” so they refer because it makes them feel good.

And on a real primal level it raises their STATUS and we’re all wired subconsciously with this need for approval and status and we look at when we do something for somebody, when we do something and introduce something to somebody that makes a positive impact on their life we feel good when that person thanks us.

So think about how YOU refer and even if it is something like a movie or a book or a restaurant you want to know how that worked out because you want to feel good. And when they say did you go see that move oh yeah we loved it; I told you you’d love it.

So you have that same thing where now you’re feeling good because you brought that good thing into somebody’s life.

So if all referrals happen as a result of conversation then how can we use that knowledge to orchestrate referrals?

In order for a referral to take place within a conversation three things have to happen.

1. They have to NOTICE that the conversation is about real estate.

2. They have to THINK about you and…

3. They have to INTRODUCE you into the conversation.

So, those three things all have to happen in order for a referral to take place…and it’s happening all the time.

Your clients are surrounded by conversations at work, at the golf course, at the bowling alley, at their kids’ soccer games, at school, at church, at lunch, everywhere they go that’s what we do – we are a conversational society.

You go you run into people and you talk you have conversations.

So while we’re surrounded by all these people talking the odds are very high that in the next 30 days every single one of the people you know are going to encounter a conversation about real estate.

They’re going to run into somebody talking about buying their first home or they’re going to run into somebody talking about selling a home or buying a bigger home or looking for an investment property or moving out of town or somebody getting a job transfer or a divorce or somebody is getting married or somebody’s kids are going off to college and they’re considering buying a house for the kids while they’re away at school.

So all of those conversations are very high probability conversations and so many of them are about real estate and your clients and your sphere and the people who know you, like you and trust you they may not even notice that that conversation is about real estate.

Or they may notice that it’s about real estate but they might not think about you, that might not immediately trigger that thought about you and they may notice it, they may think about you and they may not say anything or they may think about you and they may introduce you into the conversation by saying you should call my realtor Julie and maybe they will call you and you’ll get that passive referral that we really love.

But for every time that happens there are probably three to five times as many more occasions where they didn’t call you and you find out about it months later when you run into your client at the grocery store and they say “hey did my friend Bob call you?”

“No, no he didn’t”,

“Well I told him all about you I wondered what had happened I saw that he’d listed with Humpty Dumpty Realty instead of you” – and that happens all the time.

But if you could implant a listening device in all of your client’s ears and just like homeland security you could monitor all of their conversations for the next 12 months and when you heard a conversation about real estate you could take over the conversation and you could tell them exactly what to say, you’d probably do a really great job of getting you introduced into the conversation

But since you don’t have homeland security’s technology or their budget what would be the next best thing?

The next best thing would be to use the power of suggestion and the subconscious mind to stimulate their awareness of those conversations and let them know in advance exactly what to do when they notice a conversation about real estate.

So that’s where I had the idea for “The World’s Most Interesting Postcard”

It’s just a super-easy way to keep in touch with the people who know you, like you and trust you each month to raise their awareness of a conversation to look out for and exactly what to do when they hear it.

So The World’s Most Interesting Postcard is a combination of a great client newsletter and a direct response referral getter.

So each month the front of the card is packed with really interesting fun and entertaining facts and things that are easy to read and then the back of the card stimulates their awareness of a specific conversation and inviting them and telling them exactly what to do if they hear it.

For instance this month is about what to do when they hear someone talking about selling their home or getting their house ready to sell in the spring and what we want them to do instead of passively telling their friend to call you what we want is we want for your client to call YOU so that you can give them your new report on “How to make your house look like a model home in one weekend –for less than $200″.

See they already know you, like you and trust you and your clients are not going to have any kind of reluctance to call you.

PLUS: we’re giving them total control of the situation by offering to give them the report to give to their friend which is often a very easy way for them to introduce you into the conversation.

This way they look good because it was really thoughtful of them just like if they were having that conversation and then they saw an article in the newspaper and they clipped it out and brought it into work with them the next day for them.

Of course when your clients call you you can figure out the best way to get you and their friend connected but the purpose of that card, the purpose of planting that thought was to get them to call you so that now instead of just depending on their friend to call you on their recommendation we’re letting them be in control of this, we’re encouraging your client to call you. And after just a few months of this pattern your clients will really start to notice these conversations and they’ll know exactly what to do when they hear them.

Now another element of the back side of the card is a little dialogue box just above your picture… and you saw that in the video there and this is a fantastic place to ask for EXACTLY the kind of referral that you would like RIGHT NOW.

Maybe you’re working with some buyers who are looking for a particular type of home just like the example I gave of “I’m working with a couple from Atlanta who are looking for a three-bedroom house with a pool so give me a call if you know anyone who has one.”

Or, maybe you just got a brand new listing and you’re excited about that.

Or, maybe you’re having a home buyer workshop in a couple of weeks and you want people to tell their friends about that;

something specific that could stimulate a quick call from your clients something that might be on the top of their mind. They might say “I know who has a pool house that they want to sell” or “I know who should go to that home buyer workshop”, those kind of things we’re getting at the TOP of their mind.

Now I think you can tell I’m pretty excited about this and I am because I know that this is going to make you a lot of money this year and I’ve really got an easy way for you to implement the strategy

so here’s what I’ve got for you…

I’m going to write these postcards for you every month, The World’s Most Interesting Postcard on the front with lots of fun stuff each month and then I’m going to write the referral getting notes on the back side and the free reports that you’ll be offering.

For instance this month’s free report is the report called “How To Make Your House Show like A Model Home In One Weekend for less than $200″ so I’ve already written that for you and this is to stimulate referrals of people who are going to be selling their house – And we’re planting that seed NOW to be ready for the spring market when those conversations are really going to kick into high gear, your clients will already be on alert to be looking for those kind of conversations and they’ll know what to do.

So each month we’ll talk about something different.

Next month we’ll talk about move up buyers so we’ll plant that seed of getting the ability for your clients to notice a conversation about people talking about maybe buying a bigger house…and then one month we’ll talk about first time buyers and then we’ll talk about people who may be talking about investment properties.

So I’m going to write these for you every month and I’m going to provide them for you in a format that you can edit to include your contact information and your picture and your company logo just like it looks in the video there.

You’ll be able to put your picture, your contact information and then you can either print or mail these cards yourself or you can just email us your card once you’ve edited with your picture along with your mailing list and we’ll print the cards, we’ll address them and we’ll mail them for you cheaper than you could do it yourself.

You can mail as few or as many cards as you like, there’s no maximum on these you can mail these to just your top 100 clients, you could mail them to all 500 of your clients if you wanted to, it’s very affordable to do.

So each month also you can join us for a Referrals Every Month Coaching Call where we’ll talk about each month’s offer and I’ll explain a little bit about how everything works with that and we’ll share some new Referral-Getting ideas and then you’ll also get access to the Referrals Every Month Members Forum so that you can share your results, you can exchange ideas, you can have conversations with all the other agents around the country who are doing this.

So that’s what I’ve got for you!

“The World’s Most Interesting Postcard” subscription and the Referrals Every Month membership is $199 for the full year or $29 a month.

Our Grand Opening is going to be on January 11th at 1.00 pm, that’s going to be our kick-off call and of course all of our calls will be recorded and transcribed and then they’ll be available for you to download in the members’ area.

So here’s what to do right now…

Just click on The World’s Most Interesting Postcard button below or go to TheWorldsMostInterestingPostcard.com and make sure that you’re one of the first 100 people to join me on Tuesday.

I can’t wait to get started!

I know this is going to make you a lot of money this year and I’m really looking forward to working with you.

So go do that right now and then I’ll send you an email this week with all the coaching call details and what to do next.

This is going to be a great year!

Hello and welcome to the Marketing Monday.com live podcast. My name is Dean Jackson and today we’re going to talk about how to turn your sold listing into your next listing and it really begins right when you take the new listing.

There’s a great opportunity for you to leverage your efforts with listings even more than you can leverage your effort with buyers because it’s such a visible thing when you take a listing. So we’re going to talk about here’s eight things that you can do right from the moment you get a new listing all the way to when that listing is sold to maybe even get the listing right around either the listing that you just sold or to get referrals from the sellers who you just helped sell their house.

1. It starts with sending out a just listed card.

Now a few weeks ago I gave you a sample of a just listed card that you can download and you can send out and you probably noticed that it’s a little bit different than what typical just listed cards look like.

My whole philosophy around the way you communicate to the neighbours of a listing is to communicate to them just like you would if you were to go and knock on their doors, to go up and visit with them in person. So when you go up and the headline on our just listed card is ‘Do you know what your neighbours at 22 Greystone did last night, it may come as a surprise to you but they’ve been plotting for a long time’ and that’s kind of an attention getting headline.

It looks very different than typical just listed where you’re just sending out a card that says “just listed” and there’s not really any other kind of information on there.

This is way for you to differentiate yourself from what most other people are doing.

See just listed cards have been around for a very long time and a lot of people are very used to seeing the standard just listed so it kind of becomes invisible and this is your opportunity to stand out a little bit and be different than what other people are doing in a conversation way and you’re certainly going to get their attention so it all starts with that very first impression that they have of you.

Let’s imagine that our universe that we’re trying to influence is the 100 homeowners right around that listing that you just took. Now those people are the ones who are going to be the most interested in what’s going on around them. They’re going to be the most invested in what’s happening in the neighbour so they’re going to have this desire to see what the houses are selling for in their neighbourhood…especially if they’re going to be selling their own house. If they’re going to be selling their own house it’s going to be amplified their interest in this so they’re watching not only to see what’s going on in the neighbourhood but they’re also watching you to see what you do differently than what other real estate agents do. So this is your opportunity to really shine especially to those 100 people.

2. Use infobox flyers.

Infobox flyers are a fantastic way to get information into the hands of people who are driving by the home who are interested enough to stop and get out of their car and walk up to the box and take one of your flyers. So don’t take that lightly. You might have this idea that well those info box flyers get taken by nosey neighbours and that’s absolutely true… but some of those nosey neighbours are likely to be future sellers. So, one of the things that we’ve always done is using the info box flyers, and the back of the info box flyer specifically, to make offers that would be interesting to sellers.

“Find out how much your River Oaks home is worth for free over the phone” or some such offer that’s going to let people who are living in River Oaks, if that’s where your new listing is, or the name of the subdivision where your listing is, know that you’ve got information that would be valuable to them.

So the info box flyers you’re not only speaking to the buyers or the potential buyers for that home but you’re speaking to the potential future sellers so we want to make some offers that would be appealing to those people as well.

3. “Preview” open houses.

Now in the just listed card that I offered for you to download two weeks ago you have the option of putting in there an invitation to a preview open house on Sunday at 2.00pm on Saturday at 2.00pm and you know it’s a good idea to invite the neighbours, the immediate neighbours around, to come and see the house because they may know somebody who’s looking for a house in the neighbourhood or they may be looking to see what the competition is going to be or what their house would be compared to the one that you’ve got for sale. So it’s a great opportunity for you meet the people from those 100 homes right around your new listing.

4. use a single property website.

One of the greatest things that you can do to showcase a new listing is to create a web page that uses the address of the property as the domain name. So if I were listing 22 Greystone Crescent as a new listing I would use 22Greystone.com as my domain name for that particular listing and that’s great way for people to remember what the URL is.

They’ll remember to go to that when they get back home or when they get back to their computer so they can look on line and go and take a look at that. Now with QR codes and with cell phones you don’t even have to wait for that to happen, people can just scan a QR code and go right to a website all about that property. And so using single property websites is a great way to find buyers but it’s also a great way to impress the future sellers right around that listing.

5. Use voicemail hotlines.

One of the greatest things that you can do is make sure that any time you’re offering information you give people the option of calling and listening to a free recorded message to get all of the information that they are looking for and you will be able to tell who they are, by their telephone number and their name on your caller ID and you can see who’s been calling about your property.

You can choose to call them back or you could choose to not call them back but that’s a valuable way to get information into the hands of buyers and into the ears of the people who live in those 100 homes who might be curious about how you are going about marketing the property.

You’ve got to keep in mind that everything you’re doing is being monitored and being observed by those 100 people because in the back of their mind they’re thinking that you might be a candidate to sell their house… so the more you can do to impress them the better you’ll be.

6. put a notice on your seller’s Facebook page

This is great if your sellers are on Facebook, which most people are, and they want to get involved in helping to find a buyer…the good news is that the people on their Facebook page even if they’re not going to buy the home are the people that they would be most likely to refer you to if they were to refer to you somebody. So the friends of your sellers are going to be observing as well so if you’ve got a way to put a link from say a picture gallery onto your seller’s website they’d be more than happy to do that on your seller’s Facebook page and will link people to your single property website specifically for that property. So they’re getting to come and see the kind of exposure that you’re giving their home.

7. use a just sold card.

[click image to download the Microsoft Word Doc]

Now similar to our just listed card this is a card that is very sort of newsworthy style and I put up a copy of the card here for you to download as a Word document so you can customize it and use it yourself. But here’s what it says,

‘Your neighbours the Smiths got exactly what they deserved and it could happen to you next.

You might be surprised when you find out.

You may remember that less than sixty days ago your neighbours the Smiths put their house on the market with John Adams of ABC Realty. Well they got what they deserved, a buyer for their beautiful home. The home was on the market only 47 days and they got the price they wanted. They’ll be moving on the 14^th. The Smiths are really excited about their move and they’re looking forward to moving into their new four bedroom colonial home in River Oaks just in time for the New Year. John’s prepared a special report called The Ten Dumbest Mistakes Smart People Make when Buying or Selling a Home. In this report he addresses some of the most costly mistakes he’s seen people make over the years and it gives them insightful tips on how to make sure you avoid them.

If you’re going to be selling your house in the next six to twelve months this report could save you thousands of dollars and help you sell your house much faster. To receive a free copy call 1800 twenty-four hours for a twenty-four hour free recorded message’.

Now that postcard is something that you can use right around the property that you just sold.

You wouldn’t want to send probably more than 100 of those cards or if you’re in a small community with a planned community maybe up to 200 or 250 homes that would make sense especially if it’s a named planned community because everybody in there would be interested to see what the neighbours got for their house or they’re going to be interested to see how that sale came about. So you’re speaking to the people who could potentially be the next sellers in that neighbourhood.

8. send a letter from the sellers to the neighbors.

Now one of the greatest things that you can do is send a testimonial letter or a letter that tells the story of what happened from the sellers’ perspective. Now this takes a little bit of creative effort. It takes a little bit of understanding of how to get the story into words and to send that out to the neighbours but it’s worth taking the time and it’s worth the effort because nothing is as valuable as somebody else saying how great you are and giving you their highest recommendation.

So there’s the eight things that you can do to really get a great opportunity to turn your listing into not only your next listing but when you get that next listing starting that whole cycle again and turning that listing into even more listings.

So there’s some great tips for you. Download that postcard and if you look back in the archives you can see the just listed card that’s available for you to download as well and you’ll have the complete set.

Let me know how it works out for you. If you have any questions about this process leave them in the comments and I’ll make sure and comment back.

That’s it for this week. Tune in next time. We’ll talk about even more ways to get listings, find buyers and convert leads.

Could this be the best Powerpoint presentation in the world?

Maybe…if you vote for our own design guru Jesse Desjardins in the World’s Best Presentation contest on Slideshare today.

He only needs 16 more votes to take over first place…and he’s currently #2 out of 1373 entries

The contest closes today – so take a look and then go cast your vote!

That way we can all take credit for his win

I told him if we get him to number 1 he has to do a killer powerpoint training…and some fancy real estate templates for all of us on Marketing Monday.

So go vote!

Click here to give Jesse a vote. Look for this thumbs up:

Here’s a downloadable version of the Just Listed postcard for you!

Just click on the image to download.

Welcome to the Marketing Monday dot com live pod cast.

My name is Dean Jackson and today we’ve got a little different Marketing Monday for you.  We’ve got an audio from an interview that Julie Escobar from Prospects Plus just did with me.  We launched a new program called Getting Listings Sold recently and its been in BETA testing and the very interesting thing that’s happened, is they have been tracking everything, every piece of data that goes along with this and they’ve found that one particular just listed card that we’ve been sending is getting over three times the response of the standard just listed post cards and so Julie was very curious to find out the psychology of this and what’s going on, that one post card is getting so much more response.

So, take a look at the post card first off and you’ll see that it’s very different than the standard kind of just listed cards that you might be used to seeing or used to sending and then Julie and I had a great conversation.

I shared with her a lot of the psychology behind why this post card gets more response and what’s actually going on in the mind of the people around your new listing as they getting this post card.

So listen to this interview and then I’ll join you after the interview and we’ll talk a little bit more about it.

J: Hi Dean, thanks for joining us.

D: Hey Julie, thanks good to be here.

J: Always a pleasure to talk to somebody whose been in the business for as long as you have.  Today we wanted to talk a little bit about why direct mail, or direct response post cards are really outperforming traditional just listed post cards.  Obviously we just launched, Getting Listings Sold and we’ve been monitoring those response rates and we’ve really found something surprising for us that the new just listed post card, the one that’s got all the direct response on it, is really getting over three times the response rate of our traditional just listed post cards, almost 60 per cent of the time we’re getting over 5 per cent response rates.  What’s going on with that?  Can you tell us a little bit about why this card is outperforming traditional cards because I’m sure – - -

D: Yes, isn’t that great.

J: I would really like to know.

D: You know it’s really great to have the data too, I mean it’s amazing, but it’s not really surprising to me.  The reason that the direct response card out performs traditional cards is a few different reasons.  But most of all, if you look at that card it does not look like your standard just listed card that people have seen again and again.  I mean if you were to ask just people on the street, what to draw, what a just listed card looks like, they’d probably about to draw something pretty similar to a standard just listed card, because everybody has seen them.  They get them in the mail and they become largely invisible.  It’s something that we know what it is; we’re kind of used to seeing it; and it just kind of gets sorted right through and this card where we’re seeing it looks a newspaper article, or it looks like a magazine feature, it’s kind of a little bit has a tone of almost being breaking news.  You know, did you know what your neighbour at 22 Greystone did last night.  It’s kind of like, it draws you in, you don’t immediately know that this is regarding real estate.  So people are kind of – they pay attention to it.  It’s almost just like something that you have to do to almost like it’s kind of pinch somebody a little bit, you know, it’s kind of like something different that they’ve seen and they kind of sit up a little bit and their eyes dilate a little and you pay attention to it and you see what it is, and when you get into it then you realise that it’s the story about your neighbours have put their house on the market and it goes on to kind of tell the story and to invite them to tell their neighbour or tell their friends who might be thinking about buying a home in the neighbourhood.  You know that’s really where a lot of the time homes are actually sold.  Somebody who lives right across the street, or next door, or somebody has been over to their house and said we really love your neighbourhood, as soon as, if anything comes for sale in here, just let us know.  So that really it sets the tone, it kind of tells that story and it lets people take some kind of action.  We encourage them to tell anybody that they know or to pass that card on and of course, the main difference is that we’re giving people something to do to take action because of that card.  We’re inviting them to go to, to take an online tour of this house and we give them the online house tours dot com URL to put in the code to see that particular listing.  That’s what really drives direct response is giving people something to do.

J: Sure and you really get to play into that, that natural curiosity we as human beings all have too.  So one is the curious what is this, it’s different from what I’ve seen in the past.  And two, wow let me look inside my neighbours, which is a little – we all are guilty of wanting to do I think and it gives a play on both of that.

D: Yes, that’s exactly and even you just want to compare your house to their house, that really.

J: Absolutely so you can list driving that response, that it’s all based on human curiosity, so that’s very interesting.

D: Yes, right absolutely.

J: What really goes on in the mind?  I mean I know there’s a lot of psychology behind telling a story and the difference between just giving a post card that is strictly information, in other words, here’s a listing, here’s how many bedroom; here’s how many bathrooms; here’s the square footage and telling a story.  So there’s a lot of psychology behind a post card that’s written in those terms.  So tell me a little bit psychologically what’s going on in the minds of people when they get a card like that.

D: Sure, first of all when we – you look at the opportunity that we have with our mail system.  That literally we can get something for 50 cents we can get something.  We can get a uniformed government employee to deliver a message right to somebody’s door.

J: It’s amazing, isn’t it?

D: Well, the reason you know it was so funny I thought about it.  My wife and I were in Wyoming and we drove past this outpost that was one of the original pony express outposts, the mail things where people would take a message over the mountains and get it out to the west coast and risk their lives to do it.  I thought to myself, you know those guys would kind of roll over in their graves if they saw some of the things that we were actually sending people.  It’s almost like there’s no conversation going on.  If you really look at it the opportunity you have and the reason that we send post cards at all, is to send the post card in lieu of you.  We’ve got a message that’s important enough that we want to deliver it to you, but we can’t go and deliver it personally to every person but we can send this post card.  So if you take that mind set and you start kind of thinking what would I say if I was actually delivering this message in person to somebody.  So you look at, you start to paint that picture and if you take the standard kind of just listed card, first of all whose language is just listed?  It’s kind of a real estate term, right?  Like that’s not the way real people talk, that’s the way realtors talk you know.  So can you imagine hiring somebody to go and knock on the door and when somebody opens the door you stand there with the for sale sign and say “just listed, goodnight” and go to the next door and say “just listed, goodnight”.

J: That’s not quite as compelling is it?

D: Because people think that that’s a normal thought Julie.  Normally people think well, you got to have – people don’t read.  You got to have just short punchy language and when you think about the reality of that, if you were sending somebody out to  visit with the neighbours around that house would you limit them to just a couple of words in your slogan?  You wouldn’t do it at all, you wouldn’t dream of it.  But you can imagine somebody knocking on the door and having that conversation that we talked about on that card with them.  Do you know what your neighbours at 22 Greystone did last night?  No, we don’t.  Well, they’ve been thinking about it for a long time, but they’ve decided to sell their house and now they could really use your help and tell that whole story just we like we do on the card and that would be a much more productive visit, wouldn’t it?  I mean it would be a much more productive conversation – - -

J: And more personable.

D: Well absolutely, and that’s just because we’re sending a post card doesn’t mean that we can’t be conversational.  You got to kind of set the stage for how this arrives in their mail box.  I mean they have an awareness.  Imagine them coming out in the morning and they are going up to the end of the driveway to get the paper and they are wiping the sleep from their eyes and they look and there’s this for sale sign on the house across the street.  Now do you think they are going to walk in the house and say to their partner, honey the Johnson’s just listed.  That’s not really the way that normal people talk.  They might come in the say, do you know what the Johnson’s did?  I mean did you know the Johnson’s were moving?  That’s how that conversation might go.  So we’re just kind of jumping into the conversation that’s already going on in people’s minds.

J: Perfect and what would you say, I mean there are a lot of people in our industry that say post cards marketing is dead, direct mail is dead, email is the only way to go.  Social, marketing, social media is the only way to go.  What’s your response to that?

D: I think that there’s a few mistakes that people make when they are doing direct mail.  With just listed cards, particularly and so a couple of the mistakes that people make are number one, they send something that’s not compelling and doesn’t have a reason for people to respond.  So they just want to do the easiest thing and get something out in the mail without really thinking through what are we expecting or inviting people to do once they get this card.  That’s why everything that we’ve got that with Getting Listings Sold dot com, of all of the tools where we can direct people to a single property website where they can take a tour of that property and you can do all of those have all of that available for them.  It gives somebody a reason to respond to the post card.  The other thing that people do often is that they make the post card more about them than it is about the property.  You know what I mean, right?

J: I would definitely agree with that.  What about their dog?  That’s the one I like.

D: Exactly.

J: Or their phone or their car or you know.

D: Yes, or their horse or whatever, and they do it as an all about me kind of card and not about the real purpose of what it is, so they are not mailing with a purpose and the purpose should be to really help find a buyer for that house, because if you can find y our own buyer that’s even a bigger thing.  Another mistake that I see people make especially with just listed cards, is that they mail too many just listed cards.  It would be better for them to mail fewer cards around more listings than to mail a particular just listed card to a whole zip code, because it doesn’t have the same impact.  So if you’re looking at it, it’s very rare that you’re going to get a call from your friend who says, hey you know that house four streets over from me, it’s unlikely that you’re thinking, their thinking right in their immediate neighbourhood.

J: That’s right.

D: That’s going to be the most compelling.

J: The one that’s in the next state is probably not a – - -

D: Right exactly.

J: I’m not the highest propensity buyer for that, right.

D: Yes, so those are some of the big mistakes that people make.  But most important having a reason for people to respond.  That’s what the having the single property website does, it gets compels people to go and do something.

J: Yes, I think that’s what is exciting, was most exciting actually, about the Getting Listings Sold concept, is that it is so interconnected.  You have the single property website, which gives people exactly what they want.  They want to look at all the pictures, they want the information at a glance, at their fingertips, and instantly.  The QR codes come into play with that too, and boy, aren’t those creating quite a buzz in the industry and all over as a matter of fact.

D: I think finally, I think we’ve finally reached the tipping point with those with the QR codes.  Because if you look through magazines now.  I was just looking through Esquire Magazine and they had all of these – all the ads, a lot of the ads had QR codes where you could go right into the website and buy whatever.

J: Isn’t that funny?  Two months ago you never saw that, I just finished reading an article about QR codes and as I was reading it, I literally not had much contact or much experience with them in person up until that point.  I was sitting in a doctor’s office with my daughter and all of the brochures, you know in a doctor’s office where there are lots of brochures about all kinds of illnesses whatever, they all had QR codes on them.  I just thought wow, how far we’ve come right.

D: Yes, absolutely.

J: In such a short period of time.  It’s wonderful, I’m excited about the response rates and it’s just more reason for people to take a look at what they are doing and why I think, the way you said that was perfect and that you have to have a purpose what you’re mailing and why.  That probably tells a lot of the tale as far as why the long copy or the story if you will, is really winning out response rate wise over the traditional, here’s the picture of the house, here’s the property address and here’s the just listed tag.

D: I’m happy to have all that data.  That makes me excited, because I love to look at response rates, that’s the reason I do is all about.

J: Wonderful.  Thank you so much for your time today.

D: Thanks Julie.

There you go, that’s a little bit of the psychology of why these just listed cards are outperforming standard cards by such a margin.

Let’s do this…next week, I’m going to talk a little bit more about some of the opportunities that you have when you get a new listing to really find your own buyer for that listing and to tap into the momentum that’s already happening when word of a new listing is getting out into the market and into the buyers who are looking for a home just like that and how we can kind of tap into that and be the one that finds those buyers before another agent brings those buyers to your listings.

So that’s it for this week, tune in next time and we’ll continue the conversation.

>> Part 2:

Leave a comment below and let me know what you think!