Social Proof Marketing | Turn Every Client Into 2-3 More Clients

Welcome to Real Estate Business Builders. I'm your host, Lars Hedenborg, the founder of Real Estate B School. Bottom line, the real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to financial freedom. Traditional brokerages and coaching are designed to keep you running on the transaction treadmill with no exit strategy. While I didn't have any sales, marketing or business building experience when I got into real estate, I was willing to bet on myself and figure it out because my family was depending. Having served over 5,000 families with their real estate needs, I've made every mistake you could possibly make in this business. Through Real Estate B School, I've helped hundreds of agents and team leaders realize their goal of true time and money, freedom and living a life without regrets. If you know there's another level of growth inside of you and you want to learn how to build a highly lucrative lifestyle business, then you're in the right place. You won't find any fluff or hype here on this show. Just real world tools, systems and strategies that work. Let's grow together.

Welcome back to Real Estate Business Builders. This is Lars Hedinburg, founder of Real Estate B School Today. This is actually part one of a two part series. The first part I'm going to talk about Social Proof as a lead gen leverage and then we're going to talk about how to upgrade your referral marketing systems. So in today's episode I want to chat about, you know, this concept of having a client that you're working with, a buyer or seller and how do you what if you could only get new business based on how you served that one client? So what if your whole business relied on you giving such awesome service that you could turn that one client into three more clients, then turn those three clients into nine clients and then nine clients into 27 clients. So every client brought you three new clients. That's the mindset that I want you to have as we enter this part one. And then next week I'll get a little bit more tactical on just sort of database marketing and how to really tactically go about, you know, the people that know you, like you and trust you and how to serve them in a way post transaction or your sphere of influence to, to garner or make yourself referral worthy. So the question I have for you today as we contemplate this is how am I thinking about my business in terms of my ability to scale through social proof exclusively? And so if you aren't in our free Facebook group yet, these, some of these podcast episodes, I actually do live trainings And I have giveaways. I gave away my complete social proof lead generation playbook. So, so you can go into real estate, Business Builders, the free Facebook group, and you can get a copy of that playbook over there. So let's get into it. And why does this matter? I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna. I'm going to tee up this conversation with a quick story. So this was back probably six or seven years ago, and I was actually at my dentist office and I was checking out. And this was the kind of business where you could tell it was run different people were on their game. They all had, as I call it, batteries included. Like, all of the staff were friendly and you can tell they, they knew what they were doing. And this was the first time I was in the office. And they gave me a tour of the office. They showed me the different departments. And this is like a dentist office. Normally there's. Dentists aren't really like playing the game of business at a very high level, but. So I got my teeth cleaned, no cavities, luckily. And I was checking out and the person that was checking me out grabbed her phone and she said, hey, have you Left us a 5 star review yet? And she gestures her phone and I kind of grabbed my phone. I'm like, I haven't done that yet. And she said, well, did you have a five star experience today? And I said, I did have a five star experience. She said, well, open up a browser, click in Valentine dentistry and click that button there. And she's like showing me how to do it. And she said, click the five stars, you know, say a few kind words and then hit submit. And I said, that was awesome. She didn't know that I had started on radio at the same times that the owners of this office had started on radio. And I asked her, I said, why do you think the owners are having you do that? And she said, the owners have told me that or told everyone in the company that paid lead sources or radio, you know, driving paid traffic is not working as good as it used to work. And that word of mouth marketing or social proof is working a whole lot better. She said, all of our new clients are coming into the office based on the reviews that they see online. That is social proof and it beats everything else in marketing. So armed with this experience, I go right back to the real estate office and I pull our closing coordinator and our director of operations and I say, guys, we have got to implement this right away. Normally this is not good advice for a team leader, but I did it and we implemented that system. We were under 60 Google reviews at the time and I know now I've since exited this business, but we are at like 1660 Google reviews and now we get business consistently just from social proof online. So doesn't cost anything. It takes a little bit of an awareness of how you treat your clients. But let's get into some of the reasons why you must take this approach in business. I think we are in the ultimate shift storm in business. Not just in real estate, but just in business in general. And as it relates to real estate, though, generally speaking, our service is not great. Right. We're not highly regarded as an industry. And so as you think about social proof as a lead gen lever, you have to recognize that most buyers and sellers don't think the world of us. They haven't had good experiences with other real estate agents. So you owe it to the industry to sort of break the mold as far as what they can expect working with a real estate agent. And another point is that in terms of this shift storm that we're in is that we don't have any friends, the Zillows, the ideal agents, the, you know, whoever's getting in between you and the ultimate prospect, the buyer and seller that's, you know, looking for a home or looking to sell their home, they're looking to extort as much of our commission check as pro as possible. Right. So this concept of social proof as a lead gen lever, it makes absolute financial sense. And so as, as we think about our businesses, really good book. I don't agree with everything Gary Vaynerchuk talks about, but he wrote a book called thank youk Economy and it's this concept of going back in time. And this is a quote from the book and the reason I don't, you know, listen to everything he says, he's very much a hashtag rising grind, taking a business appointment at Friday at midnight, getting ahead of the guy that isn't working as hard as I, I'm working. So I don't, I don't believe that. I don't subscribe to that. But this book is really good and it did shift my mind as it relates to, to this concept of going back in time and how we are to treat our clients if we're going to be relevant in the future. So this is a quote from the book. We're living in what I like to call the thank you economy because only the companies that can figure out how to Mind their manners in a very old fashioned way and do it authentically are going to have a prayer of competing. So let's go into a handful of things that I want to kind of impart upon you. And this isn't a sermon. I said that. And it sounds like a little preachy. I have failed in all these things I've learned the hard way. So I don't want that for you. The first thing I want you to know is that you need, we need as an industry to stop playing their game. I mentioned that the Zillows and the, you know, ideal agents, the home lights and anyone that's looking to get in between to sell you a lead or to sell you a client or to take a referral fee, they are, you're playing their game if you do that. So our job is to, even if you only have one client, is to do such a good job for that client that they're going to sing your praises. And that singing of your praises in the form of a testimonial is, is going to be. Or direct referrals. That's going to be the thing that gets you the two to three additional clients. So you have to realize that we have to stop playing their game. That's number one. Number two is that you have to rethink your end game and realize that the game you're playing relies on you. And I don't really care how you get business today, but there's a very specific. And if you see me do these live trainings in real estate Business Builders, the free Facebook group that I run, you've seen this funnel that I'm talking about. There's lead sources that come in top of funnel and then you have different points of contact you and there are five points of contact. Number one is the contact meaningful conversations. Number two is appointments set. Number three is appointments met. Number four is new clients signed. And number five is clients closed. So throughout that whole process and then you have the clients for life if you do all of that whole process right from lead generated all the way through the closing table, if you do that process right with this concept of social proof as a lead gen lever in mind your business, the future of your business, your ability to generate new business will take care of itself. And that's the game that we're playing. And so the third point here is that in order to succeed in business, any local business, you have to deliver a level of service that is world class, that's legendary. And this is where for sure it takes a little bit More work, but it's not very expensive. And I think this is where business gets fun because you can model other industries, other businesses locally or you know, online experiences that you go through. I mean you really can say, man, I really love the way my dry cleaner treats me when I walk in the door or when I go to the gym, I go to Lifetime Fitness and that experience or you know, when I go to the driving range, I go to topgolf versus, you know, a normal driving range. Right. There's all these experiences that you have that you can pull from to design an experience that your clients couldn't imagine being any better. And so that's the third point and the fourth point. I mentioned it a little bit earlier, but social proof beats everything else in marketing. There's actually a, an article, I think if you probably Google that Social proof beats everything else in marketing. There's an article with that title that when you really understand the power of social proof, you, you will ultimately be able to scale your business based on that one lead gen lever, but you'll be able to cut everything out of your business, everything else out of your business. So powerful. And then the last concept that I want to go through, it's going to take a lot of work to shift your business to this concept of doing right by your clients so that they do right by you in the end. So that you are not only referral worthy, but they're going to like run to the top of the hills to sing your praises. And there's a quote by Zig Ziglar that kind of encompasses what success in really anything in life, success is like pumping an old well handle. So like a water well, you have to pump a very long time before you get water. But don't give up or you'll have to start all over again. So if you sort of envision like pumping an old well handle to get water, no water is coming out right when you start and it's going to take a lot of work. But once you get that water to come up, you can ease off and you just have to keep it going. That is exactly what implementing social proof as a lead gen lever is all about. And it's a systems approach, guys. So the thing about it is if you're not viewing your business as a systems of a system of systems, you're not in the game. And that's one thing I really want to impress upon you guys. You've heard me talk about the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. This is the ultimate quote and I go Back to it. Personally, in everything I do, if I'm struggling to build something sustainable and achieve my goals, you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. So everything you work on in terms of implementing this part one Social proof as a lead gen lever we'll talk about the database marketing upgrade on the next episode. It all starts with you and this mindset shift of to stop playing their game, knowing it's not going to bring you where you want to go, but also just to acknowledge where you are and the reality of your current situation. If you're in a burn and churn sort of mentality and you're paying for leads and you know, you're just, you're kind of burning through those leads and you're really not paying attention to doing a good job for your clients, just acknowledge that and move on from it. And I do think like in everything, if you guys haven't heard, I think it was like in the 1800s or something, this British mathematician Carl Pearson has this quote, that which is measured improves that which is measured and reported improves exponentially. So if your goal is to go from 10 Google reviews to, you know, 200 Google reviews in the next six months, I would state that goal publicly with your peers on Facebook and get people to, and keep them updated, right? And keep reporting every week. All right, everybody. It's my goal to get from 10 to 200, you know, or whatever that looks like for you, right? You want to measure it and you want to report it if it's going to happen and have fun with it. You know, we would do these Google review contests where we would reach out to past clients, reach out to folks in our database and just make it fun and have this point structure where you know, if you're, if you can go online and say some kind things about us based on your experience, give us a five star review. We'll enter you into a raffle for, you know, a yeti, whatever or like a three day weekend at the Valentine resort or whatever, right? So really make make this process fun. And that's all I have for today. Stay tuned for next week. Like I said, jump into real estate business builders. And also if you know you're at the point in your journey where you want to have a conversation about your business to see if we can help you. Our specialty is to put the foundational systems in place in your business no matter where you are today. I don't care if you're at a hundred thousand GCI or less. We're at five hundred thousand gci or a million or two million. We've had clients come in at five million top line gci and all of the wheels were off the bus. Nothing was running right. There was no profit to be had. So it's not about the size of your business, it's about the intention, where you want to be in the future. So if that's you and you want to have a conversation about it, go to rebsgrowthassessment.com that's R E B S growth assessment.com and we'll see you on the next episode. Be good.

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