The Lead Generation Challenge

Going to dive deep into what you can do right now to generate business. There are agents. I think it's like 74% of agents or something crazy haven't sold a home this year or sold like one or less homes last year. Only 1% of real estate agents sold 25 homes or more in the last 12 months. So it is a weird market. I have dedicated the last 12 years now to helping agents not only just sell more homes in a way where it's sustainable, where you can live an awesome life lifestyle and still sell a ton of real estate, serve your clients at a high level but not lose your life in the process. My name is Lars Heddenborg, the founder of Real Estate B School and the creator of the Million Dollar Agent Method. I want to do everything I can to give you very tactical stuff you can go out there and do right now in your real estate business. There are a lot of things that are coming at you all the time that claim to work or the person that is touting them, maybe they have an ulterior motive. So let's dive into it. There are six tips tactics I'm going to go through today. I'll get into some things you can actually go out and do right now. The overarching theme is that you can't do these all. You only need to do two or three things really well in your business to hit the small percentage of agents that sell two to three homes per month. That is really my intention. If I can get Every agent to 2 to 3 sales per month or some of you that are doing a good bit of business, if I can help you add two to three sales per month. That is the mission of of the work I do here on this weekly training. But also in Million Dollar Agent Method, within three to six months, I want you all to add an additional two to three closings per month. And like I said, you can't do all of these things because each one of our lead gen levers and Million Dollar Agent method, and this is the mindset I want you to have in your business, is that each Legion lever that you work on, you have to really believe in your heart that if you build out the system properly and you work it properly and if you choose the right Legion leverage and we'll go through those today that you will generate multiple transactions per month from each Legion lever you install in your business. There are six that I'll go through today. You can't do them all. Pick wisely because these are things that are going to be in your business for many, many years to come. So the first broad category of a lead gen lever is what we call our database touch blueprint. So this is people that know you, like you and trust you. And this is oftentimes agents struggle to not only structure their database properly, but continue to build it out and add value in a way where the natural byproduct of people that know you, like you and trust you is that without you having to beg for it, business comes to you. I was in a coaching, a one day coaching event where There were probably 40 of us in a room and they gave us 20 minutes. And this is a lesson around your database. They gave us 20 minutes and all we could use is our cell phone. So people that were in our cell phone already, so they already knew us. The challenge was how many referrals we could generate. Legitimate referrals could we generate if all we had was 20 minutes in our cell phone. So we each broke into our corners of the room and within 20 minutes I had two and a half referrals. So two legit referrals of people locally that were looking to buy or sell. And one was, I referred out to another agent and the people I called. The first person I called was my wife and I said, julie, we're doing this thing. Who do you know that might be looking to buy or sell a home? And she had someone at work that was talking about real estate. I'm like, how come you didn't tell me before? She's like, you didn't ask. And so that was a great reminder that there are people you know that are either looking to transact themselves or they may know somebody and unless you call them. Obviously my wife loves me and she wants me to succeed, but it wasn't top of mind for her. So just know that there are people that you already know that if you did something to stay in touch with them regularly add value and be of service, you would be top of mind and they would reach out to you when they heard someone was looking to buy or sell. So the overarching concept here is that there's a group of people, if you organize it correctly, there's a group of people that know like and trust you. And the goal here is to organize list of people. So this is your database. Typically it's, it's in a CRM. We have a community member that doesn't even use a CRM though. So I don't want to overemphasize the use of technology. Your database isn't equal to your CRM the database, your inner circle database are people that know, like and trust you. So Jessica's a community member of ours and she came in and shared her story. She has a database she keeps on a spreadsheet. 250 people in her database. Her goal. There are three prongs to her approach with her database. Every week of those list of 250 people, she's going to have lunch with one of them, coffee with one of them, and six times a year she's going to invite them to, to a community event, not that she's going to host. She's going to basically invite them and say, hey, listen, I've got a free ice cream cone voucher available if you meet me at the entrance of this event and I'll be there from six to seven. And so she gets credit for inviting them to a community event that she's not even paying for. That strategy generated 42 closings from a list of 250 people. So oftentimes we think we have to overcomplicate. There's like tech and AI. I can't figure out the CRM or I change CRMs. And this database, this is your ready source of business. If you treat it the right way. If you've gone years and you've not tended to a database or you've not organized it or added value regularly, it may be a little bit of a tougher climb. But I promise you, if you were to sit down as if your life depended on it and think of who are 10 people I could reach out to today that I know they know like and trust me. And they're, they have some influence in the community or maybe they're in a position at work where they have a good network. Oftentimes we just get too busy and we're focusing on different things. And this is the foundational work we do in Million Dollar Agent method. We could generate 10 to 15% closed transactions off of our database with a 60 touch system that we install for our members. So the best time to have put this all together would have been five years ago when you got into real estate or whenever you got into real estate. The next best time is to start today. Start to communicate with your database every day. You should have a goal to have at least five conversations with contacts that are in your database offering something of value. And it could be a Facebook messenger reach out or an audio text or something where you're reaching out and say, hey, listen, the market's really been a little bit sideways with interest rates. But as a Result of that, there's not been as much inventory as we've needed and prices have gone up. If you've considered selling even in the next six to 12 months, you might want to have a fresh look at the value of your home. Is that something you're interested in? If you did that to five contacts a day or even two contacts a day, you'd be surprised. In four, five, six weeks, you'd probably generate three or four listings. Right? But it's not glamorous, it's not sexy. It's not like some AI driven Facebook ad funnel system that we're all attracted to, myself included. So that's the first big category here, is that there are people that know you, like you and trust you, that would be willing to send you business if you added value on the regular or if you just kept in touch with them. So that's number one. The second part here is what we call Brand Authority Builder. Generally speaking, this is social media, social proof, your digital footprint. If you haven't spent time establishing or even expanding your digital footprint, this is where the future of any local service business, the most wide and deep moat you can build around your business, first off is your database, of course, but then the second part is expanding your digital footprint. What we call the agent Brand Authority Builder. And I have a few examples here of community members that have absolutely crushed social media and their brand authority. And to generate business without having to beg for it, just DM people constantly begging for business. We had a community member, Amanda, who committed to going live on Facebook. No technology and just going into Facebook and going live. A different topic every day. Sometimes she was talking to business owners, sometimes she was just ranting about something challenging in her personal life, sometimes she was talking about a transaction that she had navigated. But every day she committed to going live on Facebook. She generated 30 listings in a 90 day commitment of going live. She didn't know exactly how this was going to go. She just made the commitment to do it. Even though she was nervous, even though she fumbled through some days, even though some days she wasn't inspired. She committed to doing that one activity and it yielded 30 listings as a result. So that's just one example of Brand Authority Builder. Next example is one of our community members, Bell. And this I advise everyone do this. It's to choose your platform depending on how you have Facebook and Instagram set up. They're both owned by Meta, so depending on how you have them set up, you can post on one and it feeds to the other. The Overarching concept here is to document your day. Nobody wants to see the just listed, just sold open house posts that you're doing on your social accounts. You're going to want to integrate commenting about your business into what's going on in your everyday life. So Good book by Gary Vaynerchuk. He is on point when it comes to marketing and specifically social media. One of his books was called Jab Jab Jab Right Hook. The the jab, jab, jab are just things not related to business. And the longer you can hold out for the right hook, the better off ultimately that right hook is. So the jabs could be documenting your morning, what went sideways and you barely got the kids out to school. A motivational YouTube short that you saw that was inspirational and that's another jab. And then another jab might be a new restaurant opening up in town in a new retail center that has some residential attached to it maybe. And right hook could be the market has gone crazy in the last 12 months and most sellers have no idea what their equity looks like in their property. And if you even considered selling, I could give you a way more accurate snapshot than like a Zillow estimate. That's a right hook. So as you consider your digital footprint, follow that four jabs to every right hook. The four jabs are topics that you're interested in. It could be fitness, it could be your faith, talking about finances, your future, your fitness, your faith, whatever topics really interest you. And then one of those topics is real estate. One of our community members did giveaways. So he would have lender sponsored giveaways. And essentially this was the way that he became the digital mayor of his market is that all the time he was promoting a giveaway. So it could be like a fire pit giveaway, a fire pit with two Adirondack chairs. And like you and your lender, a video of the two of you just kind of shooting breeze and talking about real estate. But interrupt the video and say, hey, listen, this isn't just the two of us here chatting. We're actually giving this fire pick. June 24th. We're going to have a number that you can call in and give us your contact or visit this website. There's a form there and we're going to raffle style off this giveaway that works really well. And he did like a hundred transactions, a quarter of his transactions. He did like 400 transactions a year or something crazy. And a hundred of those transactions were from this one tactic. Three third, here are open Houses. We've got a community member. She does over 250,000 GCI per year from open houses. If you threw me back into production right now, knowing what I know, having no listings whatsoever, I would hold two open houses per week with the intention to generate a closed transaction per open house that I held. But I would build a system where I would do two per week and I would do it with the intention to generate listings. I would have the week planned out where I would hold an open house. Every Saturday, probably Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, two different homes. I would probably start the marketing. Get those open houses listed on Zillow and in your MLS advertising that's happening without you having to do it there. Call around those neighborhoods, inviting sellers, neighbors essentially to come in and preview the home before the public gets to see it, because they can help picking their neighbor, essentially. Hey, come pick your neighbor. The open house is open to the public 12 to 2 on Saturday, but I'll be there 11 to 2 just to preview the home with neighbors. You may know someone that's looking to move into the neighborhood. We can get you a sneak peek before the public gets access to it. So I would call around the neighborhood and then that morning, or actually the day before Saturday, open house Friday afternoon, I would door knock 100 homes. I don't promote door knocking. I don't promote cold calling. But for the purposes of an open house, if my life depended on selling a hundred homes in the next 52 weeks, I would do it almost exclusively via open houses. I would do a Facebook live while I was there, Facebook live the day before, teasing it. I would get so good and I would figure out what works and what doesn't work. If I failed at the two closings per week, I would settle on one closing per week just from open houses. Most agents do one open house and it doesn't get the results they want and then they're like, onto the next thing. But for the amount of money we get paid to put effort into making open houses your thing. Once you get some leverage around this, you can bring someone, a junior agent, into your world to run all of the lower level activities, the open house. And you can pick up the sellers and that junior agent can pick up the buyers. So just a little bit tidbit there. All right, that's number three. Number four, we have a direct mail system for experience expireds and for sale by owners. So number four is expired direct mail. We send out mail, but also provide value. So we have an expired guide to help an expired listing navigate the reasons why their home might not have sold. We don't always call behind, but if we send that value piece, we'll call behind. We also have a very simple three line letter that we send that gets massive response. There was a year and this was all inbound that we did 750,000 GCI from expires and FSBOs alone. Just with the two systems, direct mail systems that we, that we use a million dollar agent method. It's not so much working the now expired listings, the one or two or three that hit the market now it is going back and pulling expireds from 6, 12 and 24 months ago and getting creative on what you send them in the mail. We've got a mailer that basically teases out the fact that their home might not be worth what they thought it was. The market has changed dramatically over the last 6 12, 24 months and they'd be surprised at what their home might go for. In today' market, there's no obligation. You put a QR code on there or a website and also a number to call and it's just a different conversation. When they're coming in to you looking for a home evaluation or they're calling you on that three line letter that we send out that gets crazy, crazy response rates. And it's a simple letter, it's been around forever and you just sign it and it's a handwritten envelope, a first class postage stamp, 100% open rate and then you get a really decent response rate and it's basically worst case, it is a 20 to 1 return. We've had agents do a lot better than a 20 to 1 return. But you have to make it a system, you have to commit to it and do it regularly. Expired direct mail is number four, number five. I'm going to get to Fizbos in a second. Number five is when you sell a home, you're just sold letter can go out to the neighborhood if there's a high enough turnover. 6 to 8% is sort of a sweet spot in my market. But there are communities that sell 3,4% annual turnover. So if there's a thousand homes, there's only 30 or 40 selling. That's on the low end. But you can pick areas where 70 to 80 out of a thousand sell. You're going to send out basically a case study, the Zillow estimate. We've got an awesome letter for that, a slant on circle prospecting. And you send out that letter and you call behind the letter, not in a cold call type of setup. But say, hey, listen, I mailed out a recent your neighbor had sold their home and I mailed out a letter. I was wondering if you had a chance to read that letter and your thoughts on it, would you be open to an updated home evaluation? And then you kind of get into the conversations, their motivations, and we've got scripts that you can follow for that conversation. But that's a bonus. Number five are just sold letter system. But it's wildly different. You never want to say, I just sold this home in two days. Multiple offers. Anyone that gets that postcard or that letter thinks that you didn't earn your commission. Number six is for sale by owner. We have a very different strategy here. This is not knock down their front door, the aggressive old school approach to for sale by owners or lying to them about having a buyer and previewing their home. This is just adding value. So we have a series of mailers that we send out specifically designed for for sale by owners that we are just calling behind them and basically saying, hey, did you get the for sale by owner guide that I sent over? Any questions you had about that or did you get the blank property disclosure that I sent out? Or you're just following up every week, FSBO Fridays, we call them, and one of our community members did 25 to 30 FSBOs per year like clockwork using this system. You're basically just calling every Friday. Hey, Mark, this is the guy that created this system. Hey Mark, it's Lars with Exp Realty. It's Friday, my FSBO Fridays. I'm calling all my for sale by owners just to check in. Did you have any showings, any questions, anything that's kind of gone sideways. If you ever interview agents, I just want to be part of that group of agents that compete for the job of marketing your property and getting it sold for top dollar. Very different approach. You're adding value and you're going to be invited in. When they're. I think it's like 85% of for sale by owners end up listing with an agent. So that's a very viable pool of prospects. Our bonus was number five, which was the just sold letter system. Number six was for sale by owner. Number seven, which is the client care compound effect. There is a system and we have the system, but you can build it out on your own where if you treated your clients, your active buyers, your active sellers, from the time they commit to being your client, they sign an agency agreement to the time they either their home is on the market or they're looking for homes, they go under contract, they close. If you design that process in a way with different small gifts and different videos that you send out and you just designed it in such a way, the only byproduct of working with you is that the service that you provided was so over the top world class that they would stop someone in a restaurant if they heard the word real estate. There's this awkward time at closing where you're going to be asking for referrals. Our process, our Client Care Compound effect starts in the beginning when you sign them as a new client and the promise you make to them and the thread throughout working with them is that they're getting a level of care that they've never seen not only with a real estate agent but with any service provider they've ever been to. And they're going to go to bat for you when they know someone is looking to buy or sell. So that's a bonus. Database Touch Blueprint, Know like and trust. How could you treat those people in such a way where business is coming to you consistently and involves a system and a 60 touch system and again milliondollaragentmethod.com if you want us to help you with that Brand Authority Build Builder, you're expanding and building out your digital footprint. Open houses, expired direct mail. The bonus was the just sold letter and calling around the neighbors for sale by owner with a twist add value and then our Client Care Compound effect. Now again you can't implement all of these. It would take you probably a full year to implement all of these. In our six month journey with Million Dollar Agent method, the goal is to get you an additional two to three closings per month. We will implement Database Touch Blueprint, the Brand Authority Builder, expanding your digital footprint and at least one or two other lead gen levers right now for sale by owners and expireds and probably Client Care Compound effect. Those are probably the five that most of our new members are building out. And it takes a full. We get two 90 day cycles that we work together. So it's a six month program and we also have all the marketing and tech that you will need to run your business and the program costs less than the tech itself would cost you to go out and get. So the value in our journey with Million Dollar Agent method is obscene. The level of value especially since we're committing to getting you on average a $10,000 commission check by the end of the six months you'll have an additional 20 to $30,000 of income coming in, and it's a fraction, 5% of what it would cost to generate that level of cash flow coming in. The program will cost you. And so go to milliondollaragentmethod.com if you're struggling your business, and we'll see you there. Be good.