The Power of Social Proof: How to Generate New Business Without Paying for Leads

Welcome back to Real Estate Team Builders podcast. My name is Lars Hedenborg, the founder of Real Estate B School. Today we're going to talk about the power of social proof and how to stop playing the game that the industry wants you to play. Meaning giving money to the Zillows and the realtor.com and the billboards and the radio stations and TV and all this stuff, the pay per click leads, all of it. I'm going to teach you a way to get off of that rat race of paid leads and shift over into getting your, your clients to sing your praises in a way that generates new business systematically. And the show Real Estate Team Builders is predicated on the fact that most real estate teams are not built the right way. Most real estate teams, when you strip out the production of the team owner, there's very little profit. The businesses aren't set up as a system of systems and the team members typically are not empowered. And it's a sort of a loose collection of people with not a lot of standards, not a lot of accountability. And we are the sworn enemy of all of that in a way where we encourage people to come along our journey and we can show you how to do it possibly a little differently, build the business in a way where, where you have freedom and you're providing a value to your agents that is unparalleled in your market. So that's why we're here. So let's get to the power of social proof and what this looks like. A quick story to explain how this, this all evolved. So this was probably three or four years ago. I went into my dentist and it was probably my third or fourth trip into my dentist. And when I started going to this dentist, it was the type of business where could tell it was, it was different. Right. So as a new patient, I was given a tour of the office. I could tell people knew what they were doing and they knew what they were saying. Like I knew they were scripted. And as a business guy, I'm always looking for businesses that are going above and beyond and doing things different than the typical competitor. And I just believe that the way to win in business in the future is especially the service business, is to provide a service that is above and beyond in terms of just an emotional full of just wow experiences. And we can model after some of these business that we come into contact with. And so I was checking out and I think I had a cleaning and the woman who I was checking out, I actually forget her name. She said, you know, how was your experience Today with Ballantine Dentistry. I said, it was, it was great. And she said, have you given us a five star review yet? I said, no, I haven't. A five star Google review? I said, no, I haven't. She said, well, would you mind, you know, grab your phone? And she's, she's like, I grabbed my phone. She's like, all right, pull up a browser. I pulled up a browser. She said, okay, type in Valentine. I'm going to do it. Valentine Dentistry. I said, okay, great. She said, click on. So she got me to this screen. If you're watching the YouTube video, their Google listing. And she said, click on reviews. She said, did you have a five star experience? I said, yes, I did. And they have 1036. And I think they're all five star. And so she's like, well, if you had a five star experience, go ahead and click that five star. Would you like to say some kind words? Like, she took me through it. It took her maybe 30 seconds, maybe 45 at the most. And when I was done, I hit submit and I asked her, I said, man, I've got two questions. Number one, do you get paid anything extra to do that? And she's like, yeah, they give me a little bonus for each review I get while I'm on shift. I said, number two, I said, why do you think the owners are doing that? Because I actually, I didn't get his home sold, but I listed his home and I failed to sell it. So I got to know one of the owners of this dentistry practice and they started on radio, mass media, the same time that I did. And so when I asked her this question, why do you think the owners have you do that? She said, they told us that what had been working in the past is not working anymore. She said, in particular, they said that paid, paid online traffic and mass media, meaning radio, and I think they may even have done some TV that's not pulling like it used to. And their best source of new business is word of mouth and the digital footprint that they have, the social proof that they have online. And she may not have used all those technical words. So I'm embellishing a little bit to put it in context for what we're going to talk about today. That was the gist of it. And I was blown away by. To the, to the point where I did exactly what you don't do as a team owner. You go right back to your team. I go right to the closing coordinator, the person on our team that attends closings. And I Said, hey, Marianne, are you, are you doing this? Like, are we doing this? And she's like, no. You know, I leave it to the agents to ask for Zillow reviews if they want. And we were already out of Zillow at this point. So we've been out of the paid lead game, you know, for three, four years at this point. And so we've already been working on some of these things, but we were still pumping, you know, pumping up our Zillow profile. Even though we only had a Zillow Premier profile, we never really got too crazy on unpaid leads with Zillow or even pay per click for that matter. We've since exited radio because we're tracking just the numbers go down, down, down and down. The only people succeeding on radio and it's not profitable are spending six figures a month on radio real estate teams in my market and I would not want to know what their financials look like. And so I'm talking to Marianne, I'm like, okay, we have got to start. You have got to start doing what this, this person did. And I literally showed her. And we were at about 50 reviews or so on Google. And I'm like, man, if there's any place to have reviews, the Google search engine is like the most powerful search engine. I think like 94% of searches are with Google as the search engine. So we implement this plan to include it in closings. And we also did a Google review contest where essentially we just got everyone on the team to commit to get at least 10 in a three week period. I think it was 10 Google reviews and I think there was 18 of us on the team between our administrators and our salespeople and our showing agents and our, you know, we had buyer agents and some lead agents, listing agents. And so we're like, man, so we can at least go from 60 to 180 if everyone commits to get 10. And I think we went from 60 to 367 in like a three week period. I'm like, that is awesome. And so we've since, and I've been out of that business since November 2020. But the spark of just implementing that system and adding in, we've since added in, I think it's called Google Local Service ads. We have 1300 five star reviews on Google. And I say we, I'm not in that business anymore. But it makes me proud though that we have stuck with that. Our goal was to exceed our Zillow reviews and not rely on Zillow. So if you Google best real Estate agent in Charlotte, North Carolina. My team, my former team is the best real estate agent in Charlotte, North Carolina. Right. Google doesn't lie. If you go past the people paying to be placed on Google and you go into that map view, you will see high performance real estate advisors. Charlotte, North Carolina. Like 1300 reviews is up there. So the reason I'm telling you this story is that the game of business is not going to be won in the future by paying. Like if you look at a funnel where you have paid leads and then you need to have meaningful conversations, you need to set appointments, you need to meet with buyers and sellers, you need to convince them to do business with you. So become clients. Then you get them under contract and close and then they become, you know, clients for life. And if you do a good job in that whole process, you get people coming out the, the, the far side of the funnel like hopefully raving fan lunatics of your business and they're going to say great things about you and you put those great things online and then you, you get the new business coming in either through organic search or through referrals, because that's built into the process as well. Asking for referrals, we have, we track how many referrals or percentage of closings. We have a referral in hand before we leave the closing table. So that's one of the metrics that I think you should track as well. And so just the commitment to focusing on one thing, we're not focusing on everything. I made the mistake years ago of focusing on Facebook, Zillow, Yelp and Google. We used to ask people to leave us four reviews and they wouldn't leave us any because it was too much of a choice. So focusing on one platform, all you need to do is set up your Google business account and you could just Google how to set up a Google business account. Go through. They have to verify that you're legit and all that stuff. And then just start asking people that know you, like you and trust you, your past clients, your friends, your family, your, your church members, everybody to leave a five star review and say some kind words about you. And just by doing that, you will become the best agent in any town, usa. And so the reason you want to do it is that the, there's these, these providers are not our friends. Right. I suppose there's nothing wrong with, you know, Zillow and realtor.com and you know, paying other people to be better marketers or paying a radio station, you know, the returns and it's not in every market. But the returns more and more are marginal. Meaning that when I first started on radio, I think the first month I was on a new stock station, this was back in, I don't know, like 10 years ago. I think I got 35 calls the first month I started on radio. Now we're lucky if we get 35 calls in a year from radio. So we went from 35 in a month ten years later to maybe two or three in a month. And so the returns just aren't there anymore. And so my encouragement is for you to look at your business and ask yourself the question, could you scale your business based solely on the service you provide and the kind words? That is social proof. That is the evidence of social proof that's online about you. So if you were to look at your digital footprint, is there enough good things said about you and how you transact and how you show up as a real estate agent or real estate team to fill your pipeline with people that would want to do business with you? And it doesn't mean you're going to stop doing other things, but you're going to. Two things are going to happen. You are going to. Now the pressure is on for you to create an experience for your clients that is legendary. It's a whole nother podcast episode. I may have someone on the podcast that can talk to what that looks like. One of our members, real estate B school members. That's a worthy investment. That's a multi year investment to build out a client experience that is legendary. I mean a level of care in the actual real estate transaction, but then a level of care for the person above and beyond that. And so that's the goal. That's number one. You have to create a legendary experience and a legendary level of service that is referral worthy. Not just if you ask and you push them, but these folks are going to be raving fan lunatics of your service. That's the goal. And number two is once you start working on that, putting a system in place that allows you to capture the social proof. And it's a combination of two things. It's every quarter running a review contest where you're simply pointing everyone you know that you've transacted with or people that know you and they know the kind of work you provide your clients to give you five star reviews. And you could do a contest around it. You could do a raffle. When they submit their review, they have one ticket in the raffle and you give away a yeti cooler. We've done that before or a trip to, to Asheville. We're in North Carolina. We've done that before. And so that's one part of it and then the other part of it is just as a regular part of just when they close. Exactly. Like the person in the dentist did to look up, you know, did you have a great experience? Great. Open your phones real quick. There's a husband and a wife and a child and the child has a phone. All three of them are opening up their phone and they're all leaving you a review. Right. So get the whole family involved. So that is my message today. And it's coming from a place of I do believe. And Gary Vee has a really good. I don't agree with everything Gary Vee talks about, but he has a really good book called thank youk Economy and something to the effect. This quote from the book says, you know, we're at the early stages of going back in time in terms of how businesses are going to be successful. And, and it's, it's essentially relationships, genuine care and the things that are said about you. Word of mouth. Those three things are going, those are the three main ingredients, only ingredients to be a successful service provider and successful business in the future. It's not buying more Zillow leads. It's not figuring out how to attach an AI thing to a lead source or how to outsource inside sales or how to crack the code on online seller lead gen or any of that stuff, none of that has to do with the future success of your business. It's a level of care that is above and beyond anyone in your market. It is really a genuine interest in the person and then ultimately the word of mouth that comes as a result of those first two things. So that is my challenge for you. And if you are at the point in your journey where you know you're maybe you've achieved traditional success and you're like the top dog and it's not what you thought it was. It's not leading you to a life of freedom where maybe you don't even have a lot to show financially for your efforts in the game of real estate. Or you might be already in it where you're like 500 or a million or 2 million in G side. Like you have a full fledged real estate team and it's not running the way that you want it to or you're spending money on leads and you don't have the systems in place to truly monetize those leads. If that's you and you want to have a conversation about it, just go to realestate b school dot com. There's a place where you can just hit a button. I think it's either apply now or book a call. It's orange. I know the buttons Orange. And then we'll just have a conversation about your business, where you are today, where you want to be in the future, and what's holding you back. So that's the only thing I can offer you, just a conversation, a coaching call about your business that will challenge you, push you to really be honest with yourself about where you are and then also to get excited about what the future could look like. And, you know, there are obstacles. There are things that we're good at, things that we're bad at that might be holding back us back from really doing the things to realize the vision we want for our business. So, my friends, that's all I've got. Go out there and build a business that gives you more than just a bigger bank account. Build a business that really builds a legacy and allows you. It allows you to have the impact in the world that you want to. So much love. We'll talk to you guys in the next episode.