Strategies to Land $5M+ Clients in Luxury Home Building

All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business, this is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so, and you get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you want to learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. Hope you enjoy the episode.

So, Adam, we'll have you come on first with your question and we'll spend 10 minutes on the question and then we'll get to the next one so that we can get to as many to give value to the whole group.

Good deal. All right. So I'm excited. I'll try to be concise, but it's pretty meaty. So I work with a luxury homebuilder in the greater Boston area. And his biggest challenge has been being beholden to architects and designers for all his leads. And so he's sick of schmoozing and having to go to like country clubs or taking— take people out to dinners or go to events and get architects to want to work with him because he's a builder. And so they do a great job. They build like amazing green homes. They want to build like $5 million plus homes. They do multimillion-dollar renovations. They stay within 1% of budget. So they do a lot of things especially well. They want to own the lead as opposed to being beholden to the architects and so on and so forth. And we've tried a few different things like Google paid search just because it's high intent and people are typing in like luxury home builder Boston and we're getting leads. We're even getting leads for people that are like, I want to build a $1 million house. But this guy's like, I want $2 and $3 million plus. Homes like none of these other people. They're not whales. We want like this guy that wants to build a $5 million house. Like that's who he really wants. And it's been hard and it's like there's this whole suite of things I could do. I could do direct mail, I can do programmatic, I could do a VSL, maybe we could do LinkedIn. And it's like, I really don't know where to start to find this needle in a haystack. There's been some success. And there's really good momentum. We redid his website, but like, I want to be able to like find that whale and close it. I don't know if anybody has any, any thoughts.

Real world thoughts over here, of course. So, and it might be outside of your area, but what I would do is I would get a plot of land near the highway that everyone can see. 100,000 people go driving on the highway and usually the plots of land near the highway nobody wants. Unless it's like a retail area, build a $5 million home, have it open 24/7, but 5 days a week. And then they can show this. So it's like this house is going to be their billboard that everyone sees driving by and it's going to say, stop by anytime. That's what I would do coming from like the real world guy.

That's a big budget idea, but it's an amazing idea. I mean, that's what Yeah, the D.R. Hortons and everybody, like, that's what they should do for sure. I mean, I'll bring that up to the guy and he'll probably think it's a good idea, but I don't think he'll do it.

I've got a couple ideas. Yeah, I mean, I think you got to shoot for the moon and land amongst the stars a little bit. You got to be real different than what everybody else is doing. And, you know, a lot of these homebuilders are Trying new stuff, trying, you know, Facebook ads, you know, hit them where people— like, if you're searching on the marketplace, Facebook Marketplace, it's going to be a lower kind of income, you know, type looking people, budget saving, budget things. You got to do the equivalent in where those people dream big, you know, what kind of magazines are they looking at, where are they, Pinterest boards, things like that, where they're kind of you know, dreaming about what their house is gonna look like, etc. The practical side is you wanna maybe look at intent-based lists that they're like, we subscribe to a list that it's kind of like predict, not predicting the future, but gives you current. They have over, I think, 20 billion records a day based on intent-based what people are searching for on the internet. And then you can search based on, for example, purchasing a home, you know, or purchasing a vacation home, selling a home. Maybe someone who's selling a home that's worth a lot of money was going to buy one that's even more money, for example. So it's not always directly related. You have to kind of look where the data is. So like I can search for people that are, you know, selling their home or looking at home equity. You know, things like that are doing intense searches like that. I can share this offline with you too. We can kind of meet and I'll show you what I, you know, how we do it. But you can also look at people looking for mortgages that are—

Yeah. What tool are you using for this?

It's a brand new tool. So I'm under a nondisclosure right now. We're beta testing it. We've been using it a while as it's kind of a spreadsheet and then we put— we can pull the categories and ask for the data. And now it's a Do it yourself kind of face, and we're beta testing it. But I'm happy to show it to you and introduce you to them. And then when when I can talk, I'm happy to share it with everybody here. What we're doing there, I can present some time on. You know, I can bring the guys that are doing it to present. But it's pretty impressive stuff. It's almost like like we just did a campaign for a I have a dental glove supplier that's a client. So they sell dentist gloves. Boring, you know, kind of. You can buy those anywhere. But I can see people who are searching for nitrile gloves. And so I can every week for the last 5 days, I pull a list of about 20,000 people who are actually searching for that. We buy Facebook ads that they don't know, but we're advertising to them and on Google Ads. So it where they go, they kind of retargeting or, you know, display ads. And then we have their emails and stuff, so we start hitting them with emails. And, um, it's— we're testing that out right now, but it's way better than anything they've ever had lead gen-wise. And they're very old school, call people on the phone and stuff. So I don't want to take up the whole meeting, but yeah, I'm happy to.

I do want to check, like, how do I get in touch with you? Um, what's—

Is my email. And then Ezra, get through any— anytime we need to get a hold of each other, guys, let's go through Ezra and Ezra will connect us.

Okay, that sounds good.

I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Ollie, and he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need. And the group responds, great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency.

If I still have some time, I'd like to ask about if anybody thinks cold email would be a good consideration for this because there's only a few different cities that this guy wants to build in and he wants rich people, right?

So Adam, I have a couple questions. So this is not my area other than I used to be in construction many years ago and I used to work on big homes and stuff. But So first off, I may have missed this, but you said he's looking for homes in the $1 to $5 million range or $5 million and above?

So if $5 million and above is where he really wants to be, but he will build a $2 or $3 million home and he'll do a $1 million renovation at the low end.

Yeah.

Okay. So in my experience, Like this, the ideas that Kevin's talking about, like, I think these are great ideas for like that $1 to $5 million range, right? But when you get into the $5 million plus, that's like another class of customer, right? And I would say then you should be looking— Kevin mentioned this too. I think one of the first ideas he had is like magazines, right? Like, what are the sort of luxury magazines that these folks read where you might—

He's done it. He did it and he's like, we never got anything from it. But he doesn't know he spent like $30,000 on New England Home. And he's like, and he gets an ad and he's like, what the hell is this crap?

Like, yeah. But, you know, you're like $5 million plus some of these homes, like you don't find these homes on Zillow, right? These aren't like, you know what I mean? It's another class of market, you know, where it's a lot of word of mouth. It's a lot of, you know. Yeah. So it's like, I want to use that builder because they use that builder. You know what I mean? It's that type of thing.

Is this the North Shore of Boston? Is that where it's all— that's where the expensive homes are in Massachusetts. North Shore?

Yeah.

I'm saying Boston, right? So here's just another thing, and it kind of ties into what I've heard Neil say actually on the podcast is, you know, he talks about going to conferences and speaking and getting the email list of everybody who's at the conference. But in their case, I would go— North Shore has events like higher-end events, wine festivals, and higher-end events. Whiskey tastings, partner, sponsor that. Tell that provider that you want to be in the promotional materials, but you also want to be able to email everybody or whatever it is, because that's the audience. So you can take the real world and then bring it to the digital. That's what I would— a good play.

Yep.

Yeah, we— I need to find where they are, like wine tasting. And if I could get a list of people at country clubs, I can geofence people in country clubs and send them ads. So there is some funky stuff like that I can do, but I don't have— but those intent signals are really important too.

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Has anybody got any thoughts on cold email to rich people?

My experience is it's the mid-level is going to be your best bet with cold email. Their assistants check their emails. They don't read their emails. If they're smart, if they're really successful, they don't even look at emails. You know, they have somebody doing all that for them. So what you want is to reach, if you're going to do that, target assistants that will, you know, knows what their boss is looking for and go, hey, I, you know, I found something that you might want to, you know, be interested. But, you know, I like, I know some very high-end builders in Vancouver, British Columbia that we kind of helped them get new clients. And it was really more about bragging. You know, we showed off their work. We really kind of did a portfolio. We had a landing page with just these high-end homes where people could come almost like a little Pinterest board. And then we had some software that we put on the site that would identify people and enrich the data. So if we knew their mobile ID, we would know their name, email, phone number, address, things like that if they hit our site, first-party cookies, if you will. But enriched.

Yep.

Yep. You know, so if we could drive them to the site, then we could kind of see, we'd see their net worth, all that kind of stuff, and then we would start to reach out to them that way. But you just need to drive a lot of traffic. They got to spend money on ads and usually it's not cheap. But yeah, that's what we've done.

Software we're using for that, there's one that I can't think of what it's called. It's not Apollo.

What do you— Well, there's a few. Most of them suck, to be honest. A lot of them changed, but The one software I was telling you about that has that aspect of it.

That has that too.

Yeah. Yeah.

So yeah, like I said, I'm happy. I wish I could just throw it out there, but I'm happy to show you one-on-one, you know, kind of, or anybody else who wants to look at it. I just didn't want to consume the meeting kind of throwing out names because they're not really open, uh, taking on their clients yet, you know. So, but we're using it and testing it with clients and everything. It's working great.

That's neat, really neat.

Maybe the other idea could also be very small scale though, but you could look into, let's say, Crunchbase and databases like that. Anybody who made exits recently from their companies, so they've got extra money, those guys tend to go and build and buy real estate. So canvassing and mailing, whatever, you know, whatever you need to do to reach them, that would be an approach. You're trying to find people with money, so you got to go where they are.

And that's a good moment. That's a nice idea, Scott. Thanks a lot, everybody.