The Not So Sexy Side of Real Estate - Part 2

Welcome back to the Business Freedom Podcast. This is part two of the not so Sexy side of Real Estate. Dave Friedman, who came into our world when he was doing about 60 to 65 transactions. It was about five years ago. This year he'll probably do 400 transactions. He's been straight up business owner, passenger seat in his business for two to three years now. He's 10x his income, he cut his hours in half. Just an amazing growth journey. Just a really cool dude. I love this topic. Well, here's the thing. If you missed part one, if you're coming into the podcast, make sure you go back and listen to not so Sexy Part 1. The approach that Dave takes is the stuff that it's not really like the glamorous stuff. And it is every bit of what makes a business truly a business, you know, so if you just own the place that you go to work every day and you've got to grind it out and you're just doing technical work all day, it's not a real business. And so he kind of lays out what has to happen for you to go from, you know, agent or agent with, you know, a bunch of overhead and people around you, but you're still doing production because you didn't set the thing up the right way to true owner in the business and what has to happen. So stay tuned for part two. The only thing I asked, because this is inner circle member only material content, is that you share it everywhere. If you love the podcast, share it. Or if you're watching the video, share it. Make sure you subscribe, but also make sure you leave us a five star review on the podcast. That helps this podcast get out to more folks. So enjoy part two of the not so Sexy side of Real Estate.

The next thing that we do is, as it relates to fanatical prospecting, is prospecting in general is going for no. We just perceive the word no differently than other people. People hate rejection. You know, that's the toughest thing about being on the phone, is the rejection that you get. For us, we look at, we look at a no as just one more like incremental step to getting to a yes. So when I prospect, I need eight no's to get to a yes. I need eight no's to get to and appointment set. So every time I get a no, I'm like, great. I'm one more closer to where I'm trying to go. So I celebrate those. I think people beat themselves up, you know, people if they don't set an appointment in an Entire day, they feel like it's a failure. And the thing with that is that they're not looking at the small incremental victories throughout the day that they need to focus on. And so there might be like a small advancement that you made with somebody that you've been following up with and you gained a few yards with them. You know, that's a celebration. So just because you didn't get to an appointment and a yes, it doesn't mean that it was a failure. It just meant that you were that much closer. Just recently, I was trying to recruit somebody to our team and he called me, said, hey, I need to cancel this final interview. I said, why? And he's like, well, I was talking to my boss. We had a good heart to heart, and things are going to change at our current business, so I'm going to stay there. I was like, mark, I can appreciate that. I know we're supposed to meet on Friday, and no to me means just not right now. And I have a feeling you're gonna go back and there's a chance that things might change and they get better, and I hope they do. And there's a chance that they might not. So why don't we just get together on Friday anyway and just talk about what it looks like to work in our organization just in case things don't work out for you. And he said, sure, let's do it. So that no, to me, it meant not right now. And I think everybody needs to look at it like that and not feel like the customer is shutting down the sale. And in sales, the customer never stops the sale. It's the salesperson. It's the salesperson that creates a limiting belief. They can't advance the sale any longer. So they stop it. Opposed to looking at the no and saying, okay, just said not right now. In prospecting, it takes a lot of courage. You know, courage is acting in the face of fear and being afraid of something that you're just going to go ahead and do anyway. So I think it's really important for people that are building a team to get their minds wrapped around that and believe in it themselves and actually do it and learn that craft so you could share it with other people and help them be successful. And so, yes, it's the destination of where we're trying to go and know is how you get there. So another question I'd like to ask everybody is, do I have the proper lead conversion management in place to ensure that my team is getting the most out of every single Lead. And this goes back to what Dan was talking about in squeezing the lemon as hard as you possibly can. So who in the room feels like you do have the right policy and procedures in place to completely maximize? Okay, so last year we did just about 270deals, and this year we didn't spend any additional money on marketing to generate leads, and we'll do close to 400. So this is all about. It's not the sexiest thing out there, but it's all about maximizing what you already have. So squeezing the limit as hard as you can, focusing on tracking and training to increase pipeline conversions, and then measuring your conversions for ROI on each lead and watching it like a hawk to know whether it's serving your business or not. So we have something on our team called 21 Days of Gain. And in this, when we receive a lead, we have this procedure that we follow, and a lot of it is put through with technology. So the text messages, emails, and voicemail drops are all put together through technology. So every time a lead comes in, whether I'm sleeping or not, I can consistently say that I know that every lead received five text messages, five emails, and five voicemail drops from me. In addition to that, our goal is to have a five minute response time. And for every new lead that comes in, we call them twice in the morning, once in the middle of the day, and then twice in the afternoon. So 2, 1, 2 for 5 calls the first day. Then we call that lead every other day for the next 20 days. So we're calling them 15 times in 21 days. At that point, if we didn't get in touch with them, then we'll move them over to a different account where when we have some newer people, we might have them prospect at that time. But if you want to make sure that you're getting everything that you possibly could out of every lead, you have to have some kind of process. This might not be what everyone wants their business to look like, and that's fine, but you just have to figure out what you want it to look like. We have something called our prospecting scorecard. This helps us look at every single lead source from a new basis. Meaning we called them five times in the first day and qualify. Meaning we called them 21 times in the first. I'm sorry, 15 times in the first 21 days. So you can see on here as an example, for the week of August 27th, for all of our new seller leads, we called 51% of them five times the first day. I know that doesn't hit what our standard is, but I know we tried really hard. And then for qualify, we called 44% of our seller leads that week, 15 times in the first 21 days. So I know that our team comes in and they work really hard and they prospect every morning. And so I can't fault them for not getting these all up to 100% as long as they're actually doing the work. But what this does tell us is it gives us clarity on whether we need more leads or more agents. So when we're at 90% on this, we know that we need more leads because our agents are about to hit their capacity and how many leads, I'm sorry, the team's gonna hit, their capacity, and how many leads we're offering to each agent. So this solves the age old question about do we need more leads or do we need more agents? When we wanted to grow by 50% from last year to this year, I think most people would have considered how much more money they needed to spend in lead sources. And we decided to not spend any because we're measuring it. We also measure our pickup rate. You can see at the very bottom there what percentage of the calls that we pick up. That just helps us with coaching and understanding how we can impact that number. You know, we literally have tried like every variation of trying to get that number up. The one that seems to work is just to have more people on that incoming phone call increases your odds of it picking up. So we also measure this per lead source. So this is a summary, like a funnel up version of the tab where it measures it per lead source. We have our set MET signed scorecard where you can see the percentage of people that were signing and how many were signing per week versus Met and how many met versus set. And so we can look at this on the agent level in addition to the team level. So if we have somebody in our one on ones that's struggling with, with meeting clients, we can just dig into that and figure out if they built enough value on the phone with them. Did they build a big enough relationship on the phone, did they ask all the right qualifying questions? And that way we can help them move the needle in one metric in their business so they're operating a lot more efficiently to get to where they want to go. So the next part is our daily lead audit. This is something that we produce every single day. And our virtual assistants go in and look at every single lead that came in and they ensure that home alerts are active for every single lead that the appropriate hashtag of ABC was entered onto each one, whether there was a follow up call scheduled, if it became a nurture, and if a call attempt was made and recorded. And so this is critical because you don't know if you're getting everything out of every single lead that you have coming in the door unless you have somebody measuring and tracking this for you. The next part is, if y' all have seen cte, this is just a small snapshot of it, but you know, funneling up to a written contracts, written volume, close goal, just for team tracking. And it's very useful for our sales meetings. But this stuff seems very complicated to get running in your business, but it's really not. We have virtual assistants that track every single component in our business, which means that nobody in our team that's in operations or sales has to, they have to get a little bit of data from us, but they generate all these reports for us on a daily basis. So we know how to lead and manage people on our team to help them get to their goals. Also tracking roi, you know, knowing what your rate of return per lead source is, the cost of it for you to sign a buyer, the cost of you to meet with the buyer, a cost of setting an appointment with the seller. So this shows us that with Zillow, it costs US$591 for every Zillow buyer agency that we get. And you can see how valuable that is where, you know, if you had a different lead source that you converted at a high level and you're able to get buyer agencies at $10 each, you know, you would take all your money out of that Zillow lead source and just 10x the money that you put into the one where you're getting agencies for a fraction of the cost. So the next, next part that we're going to go through here are our professional and personal standards that we have within our team and with myself personally, does anyone in here have a list of personal and professional standards that they're very clear on for themselves? So if there's anything that you could take away, it's, I'd say from this entire. This is probably the most boring part of it. But if there's anything you could take away, it is creating what those standards look like for you personally and your team and having constant reminders of what this looks like. So we have a culture of our team of creating standards and accountability. And I get excited because a lot of people on our team talk about how they're on our team. For the accountability. And we have people on our team that I don't even know that they need to be there for the leads and for the. For the leadership and things like that. But I know that they're definitely there for the accountability to keep them on track with where they want to go. And everybody needs that in their life. So when somebody commits to getting on your team and getting into business with you, your commitment is to hold them accountable to what their goals are, for you to learn what they are and for you to meet on them on a regular basis. Accountability, to us, it equals love, because we're pouring into people to where they need it the most and recognizing where they need that nudge or that reminder about what their goal and what their why looks like. And then we'll talk about personal and professional standards also. So. So some tips for standards over time. I've listened to a lot of people speak about standards and why they're important, and here's some things that I've taken away over time. But wise leaders set standards that are above and beyond what other people expect. If you want to elevate people, you have to set standards for yourself that's higher than the people that are around you. And standards, they lift you up and make you better. Without them, you're going to sink to a level that's uncharted and somebody was bringing it up. Tracking personal growth and it's very easy to not know where you are if you don't know where the bar is. And so setting the bar for yourself is critical. And what you say matters and what you do matters. People say that they'll have a standard and then they just don't show up to it. So it's two different things. Committing to the standard and saying this is what I'm going to do, and then actually showing up to it and following through. There's nothing more that irritates me. When somebody preaches the standards that they have and where they want to go, but then they don't show up. It's really easy to see through how committed people are to the goals that they have when you ask them what their standards are and then actually see what they do and observe them. I love to ask people on our group interviews what their professional and personal standards are. Some people know what they are and they don't realize how important they are. But I just like people that know, like they're clear on who they are as a person, personally and professionally. And I don't hold it against people that don't know what they are for themselves because they haven't thought about that and we'll help them get there. And never sacrifice your standards. I think a lot of teams will have a one off individual that just doesn't really fit with the organization and they're afraid of losing them. So then the team sacrifices the standard for one person and what you're doing is you're lowering the bar for everybody else because of one person. Leadership is having people set their own standards professionally and personally, and they're a part of your legacy that you're going to leave. So when you help people develop what their standards look like professionally and personally and you hold them accountable to that, you're creating better people in the world. And those people are going to pass on that same gift to other people because they're going to appreciate the impact that it had on them. When I say that's going to be part of the legacy that you leave is because every single person you have an impact on, whether you realize it or not, they, they will then carry on that one thing that you shared with them, with other people. So it's very important to hold them accountable to those standards so they can live the life that they want and then be able to share that with other people. You know, I was, does anyone know who Mo Anderson is? So I was listening to Mo talk about standards one day and she was talking to a guy named Mark. And I don't know who Mark was, but I think he was a team leader at a KW office. But I heard her say to Mark, she said, mark, you haven't produced any appointments this week and we either are going to have reasons or results and I'm not going to continue to let you cheat your family. And that's accountability is like knowing what's important to somebody, you know, and tying it back to their why, whether it's their family, whether it's their faith, whether it's their health. And Mo is, she's got to be like 80 years old and she's just like the sweetest looking lady in the world. And she also talks about the sandwich method. I think she calls it the velvet hammer where when you're delivering accountability around standards, you share love with the person. And then as she says, you stick the knife in the meat dagger and then you share love with them again. And so you're tying it back to their why, but making sure they understand like the pain of what they're doing with their time and how it's not getting them closer to their goal. So here's an example of standards that we have on our team. So these have been around for a long time and we've recently recreated the document just so everyone has a clear expectation on our team what that looks like. And so for us on our team, it's 12 hours of lead generation per where you are in the career track. We're also very serious on tracking on our team. So so they have to follow the new buyer appointment and new listing appointment process, which includes our yellow sheet, green sheet, putting things in the calendar, tracking it in Trello. The third part is our L10 meeting. So we have our agent scorecard that we'll go through. Then after that it's our quarterly requirement which is 6 buyer closed or 11 listings closed. So that's the standard to be on our team. And then we have our team meeting and our departmental L10 meeting quarterly review and also our annual goal setting strategy. So all the work is really in 1, 2 and 3. And so there's not much that we require for people to do on our team to be successful. And we really tried to like eliminate as much as we could for expectations of what we have to be on our team. Except for the few most critical things that will make them successful in real estate. And outside of that, they can do whatever they want. But if they can't show up to our business and do these things, then we're okay and not being in business with them because we understand that if they're going to cheat on these things, other people in the office are going to see that happen and it's going to deflate them and lower the level of talent that we currently have in our office. I think I've already heard two or three people say it today that if you have a room full of as and you introduce some Cs into the room or allow an aid to sink to a C, it's going to drag down the entire organization.

Thanks for listening to the Business Freedom Podcast. If you're getting value from the podcast, would you please leave us a five star review and share it with others who might benefit from the content I'm sharing. And if you're ready to scale your real estate business sustainably and profitably, there are a couple options for you. If you're doing under 500,000 in annual GCI, our business foundations program is for you. Head over to getbusinessfoundations.com that's getbusinessfoundations.com and learn how you can make the shift from overwhelmed real estate agent to true business owner. If you're doing more than 500,000 in annual Team GCI. There's our graduate program designed for top producers and team leaders who want to grow their team and scale their business. If that's you, go to realestatebschool.com and apply for a free Business Growth Strategy session. No matter where you are in your business growth journey, we have the tools, systems, strategies, training and coaching to get you where you want to be. Remember, only you can create your future, so take action now.