A real estate agent can build lasting referrals by mapping the customer journey and spending transaction revenue on memorable moments: moving boxes at contract, celebratory notes when loans close, practical quarterly gifts. The goal is creating a favorite-restaurant experience, not self-promotion.
I'm in trouble if that's what people are saying, because anyone can do that, you know? So I would have to think that in order for my business to be defensible, that inside of a 5-mile radius, that no one else can check those boxes.
And nice is not a degree of separation. He wrote an offer that got accepted. It's not a degree of separation.
So that was actually kind of eye-opening to me because I was thinking, how am I going to be in business 10, 20 years from now? And I'm looking at these reviews. And so I started to kind of dissect and break apart the whole process. What does a customer journey look like in real estate? It's so vastly different than most industries where we've got 30, 60, 90 days to make an impression on someone, whereas like someone underwriting an insurance policy has got nothing. We started looking at— I started looking at what are the peaks, what are the pits, what happens in a customer journey, how much money do I make on a transaction, and how much would I reinvest to stoke this person out forever?
Yeah.
And kind of emulate that same experience of going to your favorite restaurant or favorite hotel. Yes. And start getting like diehard Passionate referrals. Okay, well, when something goes under contract, send them moving boxes. Like, moving boxes suck to have to go buy. Get them for them, you know, take care of their forwarding address, their transfer of utilities. Maybe their loan gets approved and you send them a celebratory something like, hey, the hard part's over. And I implemented so many of these processes along the way for the customer journey. And then post-transaction, I didn't stop. Every quarter they're getting something, whether it's an umbrella or like a barbecue brush or something that just says like, hey, 'Your barbecue brush is probably thrashed from last season. Here's a new one. Enjoy your summer.' That's it. Not like, 'From the number one agent in your town.' Like, none of that crap, right? And what do you know? People responded really well to that.
But why? So most people want to tout number one or this or put their name on it.
So I actually talk about this all the time with the difference between a consumer mindset and a business owner mindset.
