Speaker 1 (00:00):
Your time and your money are obviously limited and you need to invest them into marketing, advertising and sales among other things, and you need to do it wisely. Where is your best return coming from? Where are you getting a three x return minimum by lead source, which activities and which channels are really producing for you in your team members? If you're not clear on these answers, then you're going to love this conversation with grant wise.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
This may ruffle some feathers, what a lot of people did

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Wise. He's fallen in love with direct response marketing. He has started several businesses over the years. He's worked with many top teams in top team leaders, including several who have been featured on the show. He's worked with Carrie Sholl, Justin Haver, Gary Ashton, and Deborah Beagle. He's coached with John Shelac and we go through a variety of topics. We go through email marketing remarketing, which is not the same as retargeting. We go through video a little bit. He shares specific roles, a specific policy, a specific report that you can and should be generating and how to generate that for yourself so you can get a better handle on where your performance is really happening. We're talking about performance marketing with grant wise right now.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
No matter where your business is today or where you want to take it, you'll get there faster and more profitably with an operating system. Welcome to Team Os, your guide to Starting, growing and optimizing Real Estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte

Speaker 1 (01:27):
For insights into growing and optimizing your real estate team. We're talking with Grant Wise, A couple of fun facts before we get going. He's been an entrepreneur his entire adult life and has built multiple businesses including a real estate brokerage and a software company and he serves as fractional chief growth officer for several top teams, including those of several leaders featured here on Real Estate Team os like Carrie Shoal, Gary Ashton, and De Beagle. Thank you so much for talking Team OS today. Grant,

Speaker 2 (01:54):
Thanks for having me, brother. I appreciate

Speaker 1 (01:56):
It. Yeah, this is going to be a fun one. We're going to go deep into marketing, which is something that be shockingly we're over 50 episodes in, haven't done enough of sales and marketing tactics in particular, but we're going to start Grant where we always do, which is a must have characteristic of a high performing team when I offer that. What comes to mind for you

Speaker 2 (02:16):
Right now? Grit. I think that so many people in the market over the last couple of years have experienced a lot of ups and downs and distractions, so maybe focus and grit are two things. You got to be very clear on what it is that you're trying to accomplish right now and you you've got to be willing to grit it out. A lot of stuff that's happened that's made it hard, it's made it business, hasn't been as profitable as it was. Systems have gotten chaotic. Not as many agents are as driven and focused today. It's certainly harder to perform at a high level I think, and if you don't have grit, you're really going to question whether or not you should keep doing this.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, so I mean let's speak to that real estate agent or team leader or brokerage owner who is in that zone like, ah, maybe I could think about retiring or is this the career path for me right now? I mean when you say grit, obviously Angela Duckworth's book Grit comes to mind immediately. Highly recommended read by the way, but based on your own experience as an entrepreneur, based on the folks that you're working with and the things that you're watching, listening to and reading for someone who could really benefit from getting a little bit grittier or diving deep or mustering some additional cliche is abound here, but finding that next gear or whatever tactically, what could someone do today?

Speaker 2 (03:45):
I think it's getting very clear on what's actually driving the growth in your organization because the last several years have been, or last couple of years have been tough, but that doesn't mean people haven't been having record years, record months, even record weeks, record days, and I think the people that are having a lot of success right now and the people that are not having as much success right now, they got extremely clear on what was actually happening in their business. You saw this market erupt over the last decade and I consulted companies that have as many as 50 lead sources and needed five of them. They didn't need all of those lead sources, and so when you get really clear on the top three to five things that are actually driving growth in the organization, it really oversimplifies things and then you can truly assess and say, okay, well what do we need?

Speaker 2 (04:33):
Do we need lead management policies? Have we been doing remarketing or email marketing at the level that we could and then, okay, the answer's no to some of these things so then we can skill develop, but it's focused and it's intentful. It's not going to an event and walking away as most visionaries do with a dozen ideas that their team now needs to execute tomorrow. It's saying, okay, we are really good at these three to five things and I just came back from this event and I just learned how we could do thing number two, PPC this much better, so we're going to turn the dial a little bit and we're going to get 10% better results than we're accustomed to getting. It's really getting clear on what's actually driving the growth in the organization, which shockingly a lot of people do not track and when they do that it's like, oh, I consulted this company in Canada and they didn't really understand why their production was continuing to decline because they were spending the money, they were generating the leads, they had the team and we analyzed their business and it's 57% of the production came from past clients sphere of influence and they were like, we stopped doing the thing that grew that part of our business nine months ago.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
Instantly they started doing the events again and all of a sudden their production started going back on the right track and they're one of the top five companies in Canada today, so it's really looking intently at what is it that's actually driving the growth in our organization and how can we do it better,

Speaker 1 (06:05):
Man. Okay, really, really good. You introduced several topics we're going to hit. We're going to talk about email marketing, we're going to talk about remarketing, we're going to talk about lead sources and specifically ROI and maybe use that as a proxy for this as one of the three to five things, but you reminded me one thing introducing unnecessary complexity into the business I think affects people in all zones. It reminds me of a case study from years and years ago when I was in school about McDonald's and when they would introduce these new menu items, all of a sudden this kitchen that was designed to do three to five things incredibly well and incredibly quickly and incredibly profitably, you start introducing new equipment, you start cross-training different people on stuff like unnecessary complexity, it's not going to dramatically grow the business. No one's going to McDonald's for fill in the blank, right?

Speaker 1 (06:54):
And so it creates this unnecessary friction and cost and it has so many different problems with it. Also, this idea of past clients sphere of influence, that's the whole reason we're lighting up these new and different lead sources. If we could, we would probably do a hundred percent of our business past clients sphere of influence and the idea of these three to five lead sources, let's say, is to introduce people who we can get into meaningful relationship with and then dedicate not time to finding more and new additional lead sources or tweaking little MO changes to the lead sources we have. It's investing in those people and I think if more people did that with discipline, we'd be better off. So maybe we'll also talk a little bit about email marketing in the context of past clients, fear of influence, but I want to stay high level for three to five more minutes and I would love for you to introduce or break down rather. I already introduced the language of chief growth officer talk about fractional fractional work, who benefits from fractional work and what does growth mean in this context?

Speaker 2 (07:58):
Fractional is great and I love working in a fractional capacity. You got to work with a lot of different teams instead of just being exclusively dedicated to one and it also you get a lot of the high level strategic benefits of working with somebody fractionally without a lot of the associated costs, so a chief growth officer, depending upon where you look, it's like a quarter million dollars a year position. Working fractionally allows the team leaders to radically reduce their costs but get a lot of the associated benefits of having somebody like that in the organization. And my focus coming into teams is on production and it's on recruiting, which are the two main growth levers in an organization. We certainly focus on co-marketing, which is an ancillary opportunity that a lot of teams aren't taking advantage of and right now I think is a really critical one.

Speaker 2 (08:51):
And then there's other things like monetizing your expertise through info and doing those types of things, but the main levers are production and recruiting and it's coming in and it's analyzing the business and its performance, what's happening from a production standpoint. What is the CPC report look like? It's like having a p and l for your marketing, your advertising and your sales departments. What does our cost to acquire a customer? What's our tech stack? What are our tools or do we have all that we need? Are we paying for more than we need? Where's our business come from? What's the average time does it take to close a deal? What's our ROI per source? Are we turning every deal we do from realtor.com into two more because we have really great referral systems and processes, so it's really breaking down the entire performance of a business and then it's diving into the weeds and saying, okay, well this is not optimized.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
We are converting 7.2%, but we actually should be converting like 12.5%. Let's fix this lead management policy. We haven't sent a marketing email in six months. We've only been sending out these listing alerts and these newsletters, we've got to fix this. We're not using remarketing with video content at all. We can increase our conversion rates as much as 150%. So it's just looking at the business from a performance standpoint and then going into each bucket that drives marketing, advertising and sales and making these tweaks optimizations or actually creating new systems that would help us enhance the results that we're getting from existing lead sources. And that's what a lot of fractional chief marketing officers, fractional chief growth officers are going to do is they're going to be able to come in and truly analyze a business and how it's performing and then they create predictability in its growth.

Speaker 2 (10:35):
I was on with a team yesterday and they're like, we've been spending $500 a month on PPC for years, and when you look at the performance, it's like you should currently be spending $1,149 a month based on how it performed last year, and then your average cost to convert from PPC is $499. That means if you spend 1149, you're going to convert roughly 2.1, 2.2 deals, and then if we keep investing in the sources based, it's diving into the weeds, it's understanding the data and it's really knowing what to do with it, and I think that if more companies fixated and obsessed on the data that comes from the performance of their business, they would be so much further with a lot less stuff than they really ultimately need.

Speaker 1 (11:23):
It's funny you gave me a thought of different language for how I responded to your last offering there, which is if I could tell which three or four machines I was putting a dollar in and getting a dollar 75 back out of those would be the machines I would focus on and leave the nine 2 cent machines alone. I have two more high level questions because I think as you were talking there, people are like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I need that. I want that, but I feel like I don't see or hear of chief officers or chief marketing officers inside successful brokerages or successful teams really at all. What I typically see or hear is a marketing director, which is someone to come alongside and do a lot of the work, maybe some of this at a strategic level, but a lot of it's just like the grind, the work, it's up to the visionary, and I think when I hear CMO in a real estate context, it's typically at a major brand.

Speaker 2 (12:18):
You are spot on.

Speaker 1 (12:19):
Why do you think that is? Because what you're talking about, again, everyone watching or listening is going, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I need and want that for my business.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
What a lot of, we talked about this a little bit before we got on is you've seen over the last decade this industry that just started spending a fortune on social. In 22, real estate agents and team leaders spent roughly $122 million buying leads through generative channels like PPC, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. This may ruffle some feathers. What a lot of people did, especially the visionaries that run the marketing and these teams like you said, is they got pretty good at understanding how to buy leads. They got pretty good at media acquisition and they did not want to let this go. So what happened, what I've seen in a lot of cases is they took the people that were doing really good job creating content and posting it socially and they took those people and they made them their marketing directors,

Speaker 2 (13:19):
Not necessarily the right move because if you go and you ask that now marketing director to give you an analytics report on your PPC and to be able to tell you how to improve it, many of them could not answer this question. If you went and asked them to set up a Facebook marketing campaign to both generate leads and remarket the database, a lot of them can't do it. They got really good at creating content, posting it socially, which was a huge relief for the team leader and they said, that's awesome. You should become my marketing director. No, they should stay your social media manager because it doesn't necessarily make them great at direct response marketing or marketing, which if you look at the teams, most of their production comes from their sphere of influence and past clients, but most of their money is being spent on performance-based campaigns and nobody in the organization really even understands it, and that's a huge problem, and so you don't see this a lot in teams and brokerages.

Speaker 2 (14:18):
It's a high value position to have in an organization, which is why doing it fractionally might make sense, but the people at these big brokerages do have that, right? These companies that have the spend, they want somebody analyzing these things at all times, especially if you're spending money. So if you're a team leader and you're spending 10, 20, 50, a hundred thousand dollars a month and your marketing manager is really somebody that was great at social media that you made your director of marketing, it creates a really big conflict because nobody ever is going to understand it the way that the visionary understands it, and that may be a function of control. They may like that. I don't want it, but I've been in teams where it's like the visionary's not going to let this go. We have one conversation and the visionary's like Just give it to Grant.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
I defer to Grant. He obviously understands what's going on, and then I can help them actually hire marketing director, which we're pulling people from outside of the real estate industry into it, people that are great at e-comm, people that are great at retail, people that are great at these other industries where performance base or demand gen is really, really, really valued. It's very unique what's happened, and this isn't like anybody's bad or broken or at fault. I think the industry just did the best they could with what they had and didn't really know any better.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
I want to make one observation just for clarity here, for folks who are following along but are like, okay, that does sound a little bit like me. In general, I would say there is demand generation and there is demand capture. I would also say would do you create this divide like brand content, what we look like and feel like and sound like. What we talk about is kind of this kind of brand content side and then this performance side is like what's actually delivering? How are things performing? Just CPC, cost per click, PPC, pay per-click campaigns, CPC being a precursor to the ultimate ROI of the channel. To your point, I think what you're saying is the people who are really good at this don't necessarily know anything at all about this. Is it really that simple or did I oversimplify too much?

Speaker 2 (16:28):
No, I think you're right on cue. It is that simple. It's a unique skillset and there's not a lot of people that spent an enormous amount of time studying it a hundred percent. Cool.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
You knocked out my only other high level question which what are some common challenges and problems across teams in this zone, but that's kind of it. We don't have this skill in-house. We're pretty good at it. Maybe something I've observed by hosting over 50 of these episodes so far is that there are some team leaders where this is a personal passion. They love this zone, they built their business doing pay-per-click. They're really good at it. I've also, we had Preston GE on who is just super passionate about email marketing. He's really good at it. He's leveraged it in a variety of different ways, including inside Palm's Realty, but also in other ways too. But for folks who don't have that inherent skill or passion, highly recommend bringing it in from outside, so lead gen, nurturing and conversion. Walk us through maybe a process of assessing what's in play based on some of the things that you've commonly seen. How and where are we generating our leads and how do we know where we should double down and what we could maybe pull the plug on?

Speaker 2 (17:36):
I love having teams fill out a deal tracking report, so really the easiest way to do this is go back to 2023 and look at the entire year and in a document or a sheet or an Excel, put every source you've got, how much money you spent on that source, how many leads you got from that source, how many appointments you got, how many closings you got, what your sales volume was, gross commission, net commission time to close, one of the most critical metrics that nobody tracks from the time the lead comes into the CRM to the time we close, how long did it take, look at your average return on ad spend and was it profitable? Yes or no? Just looking at that, you're going to be able to see from a percentage standpoint where most of your business comes from. A lot of teams still get 40 to 50% of their production from their sphere of influence and their past clients, but they don't invest in this almost at all.

Speaker 2 (18:40):
Some teams are great. They host events, they host client appreciation events, they host forever client events, whatever you want to call it, once a quarter I think is a great cadence. Take people to the movies, do an Easter egg hunt, rent out the aquatic center, let everybody come out, whatever it is for you, that's fine, but do something to invest in your past clients who influence because it's actually where most of your business is coming from, but really get crystal clear on what percentage of your business is coming from. What is the average cost to get a client from that source? Is it profitable? Are you getting at least a three x return? That's just on the source. We also haven't factored in the technology, the cost to manage that source, the team it costs to manage that source. This is why I like having a p and l for the marketing department. We not only see are we making money on the source, but also is it profitable when you include all of our team costs, which is true cost of acquisition, which a lot of people don't pay attention to.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
Sorry to interrupt one quick follow up there. One of the reasons I just want to be clear on this, one of the reasons you recommend three x is because there are a bunch of other costs in support of that. The spend is easy to see. The spend is easy to track. You just add up all the monthly invoices and the three x is just to create some margin against all the other costs in the business that are a little bit harder to allocate to that source.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
Absolutely. Okay,

Speaker 1 (20:11):
Cool. Sorry to interrupt.

Speaker 2 (20:13):
No, no, no. It is just the difference between looking micro and looking macro. Not everybody's also accounting for their F account, which goes towards your media acquisition or your media spend to acquire customers, so you've got to look at everything. I like three x on the source because then it creates padding where you're still going to be at either break even one x, 1.5 x on everything with all expenses considered. Yep,

Speaker 1 (20:37):
Very good.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
And that's a minimum. If you can get up to where you're at six, you're in a great position and then that also allows you to say like, okay, we're only getting a three x return from PPC and we probably should be getting actually an eight or a nine x return is our sales process. So this also then gives you indicators like, well, this source is performing here, but it actually should be up here is our sales process. What are we missing? Yes, our sales process is right, but oh, yep, we're not doing any remarketing, which could totally change the game. So then it gives you signals on what to fix. I like looking at this because then we see where the business is coming from and we see what it is that we need to focus on. I use this doctor's office example all the time.

Speaker 2 (21:21):
It's like when you walk into a doctor's office or a chiropractor and you're like, yeah, my back kind of hurts because I've been sitting down for a while and I haven't been doing as much walking. And then the chiropractor's like, well, do you cross your legs when you sit? Yeah, actually, oh, that's the worst thing in the world you can do. They crack your back, say, don't crack your, so it's like I walk into an office in three to five minutes, somebody solves my problem and I leave and people are always shocked when I'm like in three to five minutes, oh, this is a problem that's going on in your business. Now we know what to go fix. So get really clear on what's powering the growth of the organization, minimize everything else. In a market like this, I don't know what we're gaining. If we have 40 lead sources, 30 of them are breakeven or loss, and especially if we don't have good sphere of influence, referral getting systems and processes, it's like, what's the point? Yes, you had 20 million in sales but you didn't make a penny on that. What's the point in it? I don't know. Some people, we could go off on probably another conversation there, but that's why we initially, I think everybody should obsess over this information because it just tells you where to look, tells you what to work on, tells you how to improve, tells you what you can pay attention to that's going to grow the organization profitably, not where we're generating a lot of revenue, a lot of profit,

Speaker 1 (22:45):
Let's say someone does a weekend project and they go ahead and round up, let's just say they look at the back half of 2023 or the front half of 2023. They get a sense of this, I assume you would suggest to that person, okay, great. Good job. Take that and update it monthly. Is it update it quarterly? Is it updated? What would you recommend for someone that's like they don't have full-time or a fractional CMO or a chief growth officer, this is going to be on them to do what's a good cadence?

Speaker 2 (23:26):
I think updating it monthly is important. As much data as you can collect is really crucial because real estate is such a naturally long sales cycle. When you look at data, I've done case studies on top teams in their production and we analyzed a team a couple of years ago. They sell 2000 houses a year and we looked at it. What was so fascinating is the average time to close for sphere of influence past clients was roughly 343 days from the time the lead comes into the CRM to the time they close. Where it gets even more fascinating is S-E-O-P-P-C was 253 days. That's only 10 days difference, and then Facebook and other social sources, it was like 368 days. So you're talking about a three week difference amongst all of these sources, but what are the agents on the team saying, well, I want the leads that are ready to close right now.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
It's like, oh yes, I love referrals. We don't ever take a step back and realize no matter where you get your business from, this is just an industry that has a very naturally long sales cycle, so the more data that you can collect over time is going to actually give you an understanding of what's happening. This is why we obsess over time to close, because if you're going to buy leads from PPC and your average cost to close the deal is 500 bucks, how long do you have to be without that $500 before you get the money back? And a lot of people we're seeing right now it's like four or five, six months, that's great. You're getting your money back quicker, but people just don't understand it, so it creates a lot of cashflow problems. It creates a lot of irregularities in how finance is managed when it comes to the media campaign.

Speaker 2 (24:56):
So go back as far as you can go back a year at least, because I don't think you're really going to get a true sense of what's going on if you don't, and then update this every month. This is a report that you want to obsess over getting because it creates the level of predictability that people just don't have because then on the other side of it, we create reinvestment formulas so we can say we're going to reinvest 10 to 20% of our revenue from that source back into that source, and the formula is simple. Take 10% of your net commission divided by the total number of months it takes to close a deal, and that's going to give you a very good conservative understanding of how to reinvest in that source without just doing what a lot of people do is saying, well, we've been spending $2,000 a month for 12 months on this source.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
Let's spend 10. It's like, where did that logic come from? That doesn't make any sense. Why are we doing that? It's like, no. Then the cashflow dumps off the table. So it's looking at all of this data and really obsessing over it, and I think there are great platforms in the real estate space that probably provide this. What I've seen is people just don't know where to look, and that's the biggest thing. It's like you actually probably do have a lot of this data. You've got it in your QuickBooks account. If you're using one of these other data providing technologies, you probably have it in there. It's just putting the right data together to tell the whole story, so then you not only know what's happening, you know how to grow.

Speaker 1 (26:19):
What I heard you say off the top of that response in telling the story of we looked at past clients, we looked at Facebook, we looked at PPC, and they were all within a couple of weeks of each other. I also hear this because you hear it all the time, oh, these leads suck, those leads suck, et cetera, et cetera. So what I hear you say is we did a large survey across thousands and thousands and thousands of leads, probably tens of thousands of leads, and we observed that they all convert about the same, which then goes to something you already introduced, which is the sales process. So it's not the source so much as conversion is about the system more than the source. A, do you believe that B, speak to it a little bit and give a couple tips on a couple of screws that you've helped teams tighten with regard to sales systems and processes.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
It goes without saying, right? If you're in a sales-based business, your sales process is everything, and what I've found is that it isn't the lead source. There's this gaping hole in every team's business and they don't really realize it. What happens right now is lead comes in, people are using AI and automation to jump conversations, kickstart conversations, which I think is great. The ISA is grabbing the contact. They're setting an appointment for the agent. The agent has 20 different job roles, responsibilities after the conversation forgets to update the CRM and the deal's lost forever. And then when we go back and we do marketing and it's like, well, I've already bought, already sold. We get the gut punch like, oh gosh, we have insurance policies for our houses. We have 'em for our cars, we have 'em for our jewelry. A lot of people are spending 20, 30, 40, $50,000 a month on their leads.

Speaker 2 (28:00):
They got no insurance policies, and so I love, love, love. It's one of my most undervalued positions, something called a CRM manager. You think about an is SA is everything pre-appointment. A CRM manager is everything post appointment because the agent's taking the call, they're not going to buy for six months. Out of sight out of mind. The CRM manager calls the agent that day and says, how is your appointment with Susan? Oh, it's great. They're going to buy in six months. Perfect. I'll update the database. And then now all those automations and smart plans, we've got a follow up boss actually kick off the lead gets followed up with and we get that person to the closing table eventually.

Speaker 2 (28:35):
I am not going to say no team, but almost no team that I've ever worked with has what I call a lead management policy. What they're doing is they're playing telephone. I dunno if you remember that old game telephone where everybody gets in a circle, we say something to one person by the time it gets back to us, it's different. Well, an agent calls the team leader, how do I follow up with this lead? Oh, you say this, do this, et cetera. Great, got it. And then somebody then goes and asks that agent, Hey, how do we follow up with these leads? And the agents made up their own law based off what the team leader said, and by the time it gets back around, the team leader scratches their head like, that's not what we do. Where did you hear that? Well, Susan said she heard it from you.

Speaker 2 (29:10):
It's like what? Have a lead management policy. This is a 15 to 25 page document that is like the Bible for your agents in your organization to know how to follow up with leads on what cadence, what are the tags, what are the smart lists? What are the stages? What do they mean? What do they trigger? What are the scripts? Whenever somebody takes a phone call, what are the standards? What happens if we don't adhere to the standards and then enforce them. Make sure that your sales managers or if you are the sales manager, you are taking leads away from agents if they're not doing what they're supposed to do. You've got to train agents to live and die by this lead management policy. And what I find is when people roll these things out, and I've helped several teams go through rollouts of this to change the culture around follow-up.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
Everybody loves you to death for two weeks and then everybody hates your guts. Everybody loves that. You've finally given them a clear understanding of how to manage the leads, but then when it comes to actually being held accountable to the standard eight weeks, it's like, this is miserable. I don't want to do this. I don't want to follow up like this. I don't want to follow up with a lead on average five times within what happens if you stick to it and you enforce the standards? Eight weeks goes by the flip switch. Once they see that the team leaders are actually going to hold them accountable, they finally flip and there's a team in California, they did a rollout like this. They went from really struggling to convert to selling a house every day for 90 days straight, and it's just really, really leaning in and documenting what is supposed to happen with your lead management and not just knowing it but rolling it out and making sure everybody else knows it and enforcing the standards that were set in those documents.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
It is without question, one of the biggest opportunities that I see in some of the top teams. We look at Carrie Shoul and I know that I can talk about her. She always gives me permission to say what happened in her business, but they had this problem. Their database was a wreck. Fub had 140,000 contacts, but this ISA was doing this and this marketer was doing this. There were 3000 tags, there were smart list and stages, and she flew us over to follow up boss and myself to her office in Virginia, and we got out of the CRM to fix it. We went to the whiteboard, what are our tags? What are our stages? What are our smart list? What do they mean? And then we choreographed a great lead management policy and she now has, everybody can go hit, carry up for this, the F guide that she creates a 30 page document, but everybody in the team, they get a physical copy of that document when they step into the organization and you better be carrying it around if Carrie sees you and if you don't have this, you don't obsess over knowing how to manage the contacts, you're in trouble, but it's everything.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
Her appointment flow doubled in 45 days by fixing this problem and that's huge.

Speaker 1 (32:13):
I love it so much about this. First I'm going to do a quick cross promo, which I don't normally do, but the previous episode with Kobe Sway, who's the GM of the number one team in Nebraska. Wonderful operator. A few things here that you've specifically talked about. One, they've had dramatic growth through 20 22, 20 23. I don't think when anyone looks back at 2023, they're going to say, that was my favorite year in real estate. They doubled or tripled their business that year. Second, he goes deep into how to hold people accountable. We talk about the direct model, it's an acronym, D-I-R-E-C-T, and then the last thing is he said the same thing you did, which is sales operations manager, I think is what they call it. They also hired a sales coach and when we think about these things, and it's specifically to do that kind of lead sweeping and what's going on and are the right things happening and are we coaching that 20, 30 page document actively and are we reminding people of the most important things because it's not just about the release, it's about the follow up and it's not just about, it is about the accountability, but it's also about the kind of why, the motivation, the excitement, the we're actually making more money this way, but I think one of the things that slows people down is that they look at that and see like, oh man, two more headcount, like fixed staff positions with maybe some variable comp associated with.

Speaker 1 (33:27):
They say, oh my gosh, I don't think we can do that, but I'm like, this is part of why you have the three to one as the ideal as the baseline ratio, but you could also take some of that ad spend away, put it into these people that are going to multiply the business, not just be additive to it, and you're going to get more efficiency out of those lead sources. You're going to see that three to one push to four to one or five to one, which then will allow you to, as you said earlier, figure out the amount we can reinvest and get back to where we were before. These are parts of spending money on marketing, on performance marketing. This is how you get the sources and the opportunities to perform and you get the agents to perform. It's in these roles, so I really like those. Okay. I would love to hit remarketing, email marketing and video in general. I have a very specific question for you about video. When you say remarketing, A, what are you talking about? B, why is it under leveraged and C, how can someone kind of reorient their focus a little bit on remarketing and maybe what are a couple of the channels that we should look at initially for doing good remarketing?

Speaker 2 (34:33):
Yes. I think first it's understanding the difference between retargeting and remarketing. A lot of people in real estate, technically speaking, are doing retargeting, which is leveraging IDX based platforms for retargeting ads, which is somebody visits your site and then you just keep retargeting them. To create a home search experience, I think is a very smart thing to do. That's retargeting. You're retargeting the same lead over and over and over again. Remarketing, categorically is calls, texts, emails. It is advertising that you refeed to the contact, it's direct mail. It's after you have a contact. Now you're marketing to that same contact over and over and over again in a number of different ways. There's two things that I don't think people are doing enough of and that is video remarketing, which is where you create content that is specifically designed to only be seen by that lead as they come into the business.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
So if you're generating sellers, you might create content around educating them around the sales process. If you got testimonial videos, it is creating an experience that once people are in your sales funnels, now they're seeing you everywhere. They go on the internet and you're creating a very unique experience for them to have so that they're continuously moving down the sales funnel. We worked with Whistle Realty Group, I mean just in a fantastic organization a couple of years back to get their remarketing dialed in and they literally increased their appointments 65% in 45 days. By leveraging remarketing, we were hitting very specific people with very specific messages as they came into the sales process. That's fantastic. The other thing I think is highly underutilized is email marketing, and I don't mean setting somebody up on a listing alert. I don't mean sending a follow-up sales email.

Speaker 2 (36:22):
I mean, when was the last time you sent an email about the top five places to go for a hike to people that were interested in Clarksville County in your database? I am just giving you a very specific example. Nobody, not even team leaders want to talk about real estate every day. So you can imagine how the consumer feels because all they're getting is real estate content. People will buy or sell a home every seven to 10 years in their lifetime. People will refer an average of two people annually to a real estate agent. That is a statistic you should really lean into understanding. The purpose of buying leads is to own media.

Speaker 2 (37:08):
There's no reason to go buy leads if you're not going to leverage the media power. It gets you. I work with Gary Ashton in Nashville. I got over 300,000 contacts in the database that is owned media. We can talk to those people every day about anything that we want, and I don't think people are paying attention to that. Zillow's a media company, rosa.com is a media company. homes.com is a media company. They own massive amounts of media and then they're selling it back to us through different offerings. We need to be our own media company, we need to own media, and then we need to have conversations with our audience every day, which means we're talking to them about stuff that has nothing to do with real estate. We are thought as real estate professionals to be the number one expert on all things in ex local market, ex local community, so talking about the restaurants, talking about the hiking spots, the lakes, the best wine places, the best golf courses, the best cigar bars, the best brunch spots, really helping people understand how to live in and experience their communities.

Speaker 2 (38:16):
I follow the 80 20 rule, 80% of the content that you email, and I believe you should email five days a week. That means four of those emails should be just about the community. You don't have to bring up real estate at all. One of those emails could be about real estate, and we do this in Gary's business. We'll send out The beautiful part is a lot of people may even already have these resources. Gary had 500 blogs because their SEO is dialed in, and so all we did with the team is we organized the sub database geographically, so we used the smart tagging functionality to lump people into counties or what we call hot zones or hotspots, and it's like, okay, now we know geographically where people are interested in and then we're going to email content about the top five best hiking trails to people that are actually in that county or searching in that county.

Speaker 2 (39:09):
So what happens is they get an email that looks very well put together about these parks or these hiking trails, and they click and they go right to Gary's website. They can read the blog and then, oh, right, there's a little button homes for sale in this county. Oh, interesting. And then they click, I can buy a house by the hiking trail, and so every day thousands of people are being sent back to the website with valuable content that then re-triggers them to engage in a home search experience. So it's leveraging stuff that isn't about real estate. You are going to end up talking about real estate. I promise you're going to get there. People want to talk about it, they will, but if you can become extremely well known in the community outside of real estate, it will accelerate the growth of your organization in ways that you just never even understood because if you can get attention, that's one thing, but then you got to keep it and that's where this follow philosophy of just follow up.

Speaker 2 (40:07):
Just follow up, just follow up. Just follow up isn't always true because you've lost their attention and they've got somebody else that's adding value to their life and that's why they went and did business there. I'm not saying you shouldn't be following up. Follow up with your leads. Please do exactly what the smart lists or the automations are telling you to do. What I am saying is let's add value around things, especially today with what's going on with lawsuits and regulation and all of that. Let's add value beyond the real estate transaction so people are thinking about us every time something comes up.

Speaker 1 (40:42):
When we go to the organization that Gary and Deborah are leading, we're certainly talking about people that have tried a lot, learned a lot, grown a lot, et cetera. For the person who's like, now I'm kind of doubling back to, you have that marketing director who's really good at content, you could redirect that person a little bit toward let's figure out how to take some of what we're doing in these other places and put it into email. I think when a lot of people here, I know I did five emails a week, they're like, oh my gosh, what am I going to do? What I talk about all that time, much less that organizational layer. It doesn't necessarily have to be that. This is a very specific question for you, for the person that doesn't have dozens and dozens or even hundreds and hundreds of blog posts, is it okay to curate?

Speaker 1 (41:31):
Can I do some of my email where I'm curating? I put my own kind of spin in the email and then I'm going to link to this other source that I have maybe no relationship with whatsoever. So for example, three reasons in the body of the email why, I'll just stick with your hiking example. I like hiking. Here are three reasons why I love Cheyenne Mountain State Park on the southwest side of Colorado Springs. Can you believe there's a state park so close to the city? My three top trails are this one, this one and this one. Go check it out and learn more about it. What do you think about curating content versus essentially owning it and owning the platform and bringing it into your ecosystem?

Speaker 2 (42:12):
I think it's a fantastic idea. You can grow through syndication because the other person that wrote that article is going to be pumped that you shared it, so that helps you create a relationship. This is why doing business reviews of local businesses in your market is so powerful because it creates a relationship with you and the business owner who's being sold that they need to buy leads or advertise every day too. They've got radio, tv, billboard, everybody's calling them, so when you just say, Hey, I'm sending out an email about your company to my database of 5,000 people, I hope it helps. That's reciprocity. Like, oh my gosh, what can I do for you? I'm going to use another word too. Don't think about creating as much as you think about documenting because the thing is is it definitely

Speaker 1 (42:54):
Lowers the barrier and makes it more approachable.

Speaker 2 (42:56):
Oh my goodness, yes. You all are living in and experiencing the community too. I was on with a team leader last week. She's like, I have no idea what to email about, and I'm like, well, what have you done this week? She's like, well, I went to a greenhouse opening on Monday. I was like, aha, that tell people that you went to a greenhouse opening on Monday. Send them a link to check out the greenhouse and tell the business owner that you sent some people his way. You hope that it helps, and she was like, it's that simple. I'm like, it is a thousand percent that simple. You are also living in your community and you're having an experience. You don't have to think about, I'm going to create all of this stuff. I'm just going to document my life. I'm going to share with what I did today with people in the database.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
They are going to find an interesting, that's the hurdle I think people have to get over is like, well, my life's not that interesting or nobody's going to be interested in what I have to talk about. It's not true. You are thought to be the expert on the community, so share your expertise and experience with people and don't think so much about like, well, I got to wake up and I got to think about creating all this content today. Just documenting what you're doing in the community is enough to keep you in front of the people that are in your database every single day with content that is very relevant to them. They want to know how to live in an experience. The community

Speaker 1 (44:16):
Too. Yeah, really good. You also made me think, I think a lot of people are doing a lot of social several days a week, let's say. Almost all of that could be turned into an email, but it's a different channel. Give me a couple quick, whether it's tips or observations for someone that's like, okay, I guess I should think again about email, whether it's subject lines, open rates, segmentation, a couple low hanging fruit, email improvement tips.

Speaker 2 (44:47):
There's two things I'm going to say. I know what's going through people's minds right now is like he says, I got email five times a week. I'm not going to do that. It's like, why do I even need to do email? Email marketing allows you to have a conversation with thousands of people a day, so you do work for 10 minutes, you send an email, thousands of people read it. If you are a team leader that wants to reduce your reliance on agents following up with leads, email marketing is your new best friend because what so many people have done over the years is they've automated themselves out of relationship with the marketplace and what email marketing allows you to do is it allows you to reactivate, it allows you to redevelop that relationship with your community one to many. It's like sitting down to make a cold call to 2000 people at one time, and I think a lot of people don't recognize they're so reliant on other people following up with their leads because they don't have a relationship with the marketplace, and that's what email marketing really allows you to do.

Speaker 2 (45:45):
Tactically speaking, always remember this, every step in a sales funnel is designed to sell the next, so your email subject line is designed to sell people on opening the email and then your email is designed to sell people on clicking a link to go look at something and then whatever's on your site, every step is designed to sell the next. Your email subject lines are really important and if you don't do a very good job with them, nobody's going to open your emails. You want to keep them five to eight words max and they need to be compelling and convincing so that people will actually click and open and you can use AI to teach yourself how to do this, right? You can write a headline and then you can go to something like chat gt and say, can you please take what I've written and give me 10 examples that are more compelling, so somebody would want to open an email.

Speaker 2 (46:40):
That's an example of a prompt that you could give AI and you could use AI to teach you how to get better at doing stuff like this, but just remember that too many people forget like, okay, I need listing appointments, email to get listing appointments. They're sending out sales emails to people because they want appointments, and I think it's just realizing your job with email marketing, not sales emails. Your job with email marketing as a whole is to help you build a relationship with the database, so I ask myself, what could I send to somebody that would help me develop a better relationship with them, and that's typically like, okay, I could add value to their life. What's valuable to my customer? I don't know, grant, great. Call your best past clients and say, what are the top five things in our community you're the most interested in right now, and you're going to get a few themes. It's like, great. I know that I need to talk about aquatic centers for the next week, what people are fascinated by, and so I think we just overcomplicate this. We think about what we need. We don't necessarily think about adding value to the marketplace, and when you shift the conversation, you shift the perception of what you're putting out there. It really makes it a lot easier to perform with any one of these channels.

Speaker 1 (47:45):
Okay. A ton of really, really helpful stuff in there and a really good reminder overall. A couple adds to it. One, this idea of you spend 10 minutes making this thing and now you're kind of in a one-way conversation with thousands and thousands of people. This is actually a super compelling reason. Just to tie this to the idea that your social posts could very often be emails adjusted for the channel. Video belongs in both of those because who you are is fundamental to the service that you provide. I could do two hours on that topic, like right now, I love it so much, but this adds to that layer. You can put videos in these emails just like you put video in social and you probably should. The other observation I would make is if you get some consistent email cadence, you're also giving people an opportunity to say, I am interested in you, your voice, your perspective.

Speaker 1 (48:34):
I do view you and accept you as an authority because every open, every click, every video play gets added on to the story that someone is telling you about how they think and feel about you and whether or not you're their kind of person and they're your kind of person. One last very specific question here before we get to my three fun closers synthetic video. This is very corner case, but you mentioned some AI follow-up on volumes of leads and things, synthetic video where we are making ourselves say things that we didn't actually say. Thoughts on synthetic video at a high level, I know you're passionate about video. I mean, you mentioned it a couple of times already, but what do you think about this? Pros, cons, dangers?

Speaker 2 (49:18):
I personally think that the place for it right now is internally, not externally, so using synthetic video to create systems and processes. Love the idea because most of visionaries that I know aren't pumped about creating systems and processes for CRM Follow-up as an example, so if you can use your likeness, but everybody knows it like, Hey, this is the AI version of grant wise and today I'm here to teach you, and so I think using it as a tool to teach your internal teams makes an enormous amount of sense. We're living through an age in real estate where relationships are everything they've always been, but if you don't lock down your relationships today, it's going to have really damaging impacts to your business because of what's changing in the industry with commission, with by representation, with all of this stuff, and so if you are the grant wise team, you the face of the company, meaning that your job every day is to wake up and have a relationship with the marketplace, which means writing contracts goes to somebody else.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
It means doing some of these other things. The operations go to somebody else. That's not your job. Your job is to have a relationship every day with the marketplace. I believe you need to be out there in the community. You need to be on the billboards, you need to be in the videos, you need to be writing the emails. You need to be constantly injecting your voice into the marketplace so that your brand grows. You having a relationship with a marketplace, so many people are dependent on agents to follow up with leads and upset because they haven't done a good job of building a relationship with the marketplace. It's not blame, it's just responsibility. Okay, great. I haven't done a good job of building a relationship with the marketplace. I can change today and I can start, and that's great. That's the right mindset to have.

Speaker 2 (51:09):
Just start creating the videos, start writing the emails, start having that relationship. I don't think right now in an age where you've got to lock down your relationships or you all will lose them, it's a smart idea to do anything synthetic. I don't think it's a good idea to use ai. I don't think it's a good idea to do it with email, with video, with social posts, unless you've trained it on your voice and it's perfect. You read it and you're like, yep, that's exactly how I would talk, but the synthetic videos, I would use those for internal training purposes. I would not today use them to have a relationship with the marketplace.

Speaker 1 (51:43):
Really great advice. This idea of the language you use that sticks out to me is injecting your voice into the marketplace. You have multiple channels, you have multiple opportunities. You don't have to do them all. You should focus on the ones that work. This has been awesome, grant. I really, really enjoyed it. And before I let you go, I've got three pairs of questions. The first is, what is your very favorite team to root for, or what's the best team you've ever been a member of?

Speaker 2 (52:07):
I am pumped that I get to live in the age of Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs, so I'm loving the run over the last several years. It's certainly been a genuine pleasure of mine to get to cheer on the Chiefs. Awesome.

Speaker 1 (52:20):
As we record this, the NFL draft is not too distant to memory yet, and I've read a very favorable review of their draft class. So this situation with the chiefs could persist. What is one of your most frivolous purchases or what is a cheapskate habit that you hold onto even though you probably don't need to?

Speaker 2 (52:39):
This is really hard. It used to be coffee. I would go to Starbucks every single day and stopped doing that. I started drinking coffee at home. We should get my wife in here to answer this question. She probably answer it way better than I do. My cheap scape thing is probably anything that she asked me to do, unfortunately, and that's like basic cleaning supplies for the house. I'm like, well, how much does that cost? Do we really need it? Should we, so I don't know. I've been working with John Shelac for years, so my life has gone from buying coffee to waking up, working, going to the gym and coming home. So I don't really do much else outside that. That's

Speaker 1 (53:18):
Funny. The cleaning thing makes you like vinegar does a lot of things. It just smells bad is all. I can clean a lot of things. My

Speaker 2 (53:23):
Wife's like, we need this, and I'm like, but do we have anything else in the house that could do what that thing is going to do? So yeah, my wife would definitely be the one to answer that question. That's

Speaker 1 (53:30):
Funny. What does it look like for you to invest your time in learning, growing and developing, or what does it look like for you to invest your time in resting, relaxing and recharging?

Speaker 2 (53:40):
I'm the guy you have to beg to stop, so I'm not very good actually at the resting, relaxing, recharging thing. My aura ring has helped me a little bit because I'm more intentional about sleep as I've been able to see the data and how it's improved my health. But I love learning direct response marketing. There's 12 different categories inside of it. It's marketing, advertising, sales. It's human psychology, it's behavior. I mean, it's so fun to learn how to consistently improve at doing these things. I love listening to YouTube videos. I love listening to, I just got a masterclass subscription recently, which I thought that was amazing. I'll listen to podcasts or books if I have specific things that I'm trying to learn, but those are some of my mediums. I'll plug 'em in while I'm walking or while I'm at the gym and I'll give those things a listen. Masterclass. Actually, I've started watching because it's kind of like Netflix. I didn't realize that. But instead of laying in bed and watching something like Netflix, I'll watch Mark Cuban or Chris Voss or some of these guys teach their skillset. I love the Martha Stewart one on masterclass because she's built a billion dollar empire. So those would probably be some of my favorite mediums.

Speaker 1 (54:47):
Awesome. I will link that up down below, including the Aura Ring. I'm also an Ora Ring wearer. This has been an absolute pleasure Grant. I appreciate you. This was super fun. We could have gone probably two, three hours easy,

Speaker 2 (54:59):
But

Speaker 1 (54:59):
For the sake of the audience, we'll call it a session. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day.

Speaker 2 (55:04):
Thanks brother, appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (55:06):
Thanks for checking out this episode of Team Os. Get quick insights all the time by checking out real estate team Os on Instagram and on TikTok.