The Referral Marketing Upgrade | Grow Your Business by Upgrading Your Referral Marketing System

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, the founder of Real Estate B School. Today is part two of a two part series. Last episode we talked about the power of social proof and we really how to scale your real estate business on the kind words that your clients, buyer and seller clients say about you in the transaction, after the transaction, you know, you wanna structure your business in a way where the natural byproduct of being in your world is not helping yourself in terms of just talking about how awesome you are as a real estate agent and busting into people's private conversation. When you hear, you know, real est or anything about real estate, you're saying, you're saying like hey listen, sorry to interrupt but you've got to talk to my guy or to my girl. So that was last episode. Today we're going to talk about the referral marketing upgrade. And as I always mentioned, if you're not in the Real estate Business Builders Facebook group, jump in there. I actually gave away my 29 page step by step guide to reset your database. This is chock full of all the tools, all the systems, all the scripts, everything you will need to reset your database and get your database marketing efforts going in the right way. So the guiding question here, what if you had to scale your business solely on the service you provided to the client right in front of you? I talked about if you only had one client and you had to turn that one client into three clients and then serve those three Clients in a way where they multiplied out by a factor of three. So it went from three to nine, nine to 27. So today we're going to talk about building a database and how do you serve that database in a way where the natural byproduct is giving you business? So the question is, how am I thinking about my business in terms of my ability to scale solely based on the service I provide and the people I know? So a little bit picking up on the social proof, parasocial proof, but we'll get into some of the database marketing sides of it. Some of the factors that we talk about are the same from the last episode to this episode. The fact that as an industry we're not highly regarded, we don't have a lot of friends, right? The Zillows and the, the ideal agents and the paid referral sources, they're not really our friends. One thing I will say is that at some point you're gonna have to make the mental shift. That is enough is enough. You're not gonna play their game. Technology is advancing in a way where it is something that we need to be aware of. That's one of the points I wanted to talk about today. I just started playing around with ChatGPT and Mind Blown. I generally ignore technology advancements, right? My natural personality is to do that. But generally I'm not that guy. In the area of producing content, ChatGPT won't put you out of business directly, but I will say that real estate agents that are using CHAT GPT might put you out of business because their ability to accelerate their content development as it relates to serving their database will be a multiplier or exponentially easier for them than it might be for you. So that's all I'm going to say about technology. I'll be testing some of the AI things that I'm working on and I'll probably do a podcast episode or two about it. And then the one other thing I want, I want to talk about is the reason why you want to pay attention to your database and, and consider this opportunity, you know, to, as the episode is titled, the Referral Marketing Upgrade is that we are riding a wave, right? So we, we are in a seasonal business and a cyclical business. And the reason you don't want to play their game and buy the leads and do all of that stuff is that you want to be in control, as much control as possible as you can. Your business and referral and database marketing is the way to do it. And I think you just have a decision to make. The industry is constantly bombarded with paid lead sources here by this but focusing on your database, on your referral marketing efforts as if it were a multiple seven figure income pillar.

I'm going to talk a little bit.

About Kirby and Christina later. They do about 7 to 8 million of top line GCI and more than half of it comes from referral marketing. And I got the pleasure to work with them back in the day and they're just an amazing testimony to, you know, keeping things simple and putting a system in place and running that system forever. So I think it's just a decision. So there's a few things I want to go through. I think only really 3, 3 points here in terms of referral marketing. And the first point that I want to talk about is that you need to focus on telling their story. So there's a really good book by Donald Miller called Brand or Building a Story. Brand is the name of the book and your goal and this fits in with last week. But your goal should be to do such a good job for your buyer and seller clients that the byproduct is not only referrals but kind words to the point where you're just telling their story, right? They're telling the market how awesome you are. It's not like I'm the number one agent or I'm the neighborhood expert or. That has nothing to do with it. Janice and Roger Smith are talking about how awesome you are and you'd be crazy if you don't use you as their real estate agent, right? So check out that resource. It's a very simple framework. It starts with the character and it's actually the same, same structure as like a movie. So it starts with a character, you know, who has a problem, who meets a guide. The character is the buyer and the seller. We like to think that we are the main, you know, point of the story. That's the shift in your referral marketing efforts is that you need to put the buyer and seller client first as the character. They have the problem, right? They have to move because of schools or they have to sell because of a corporate reload or they expired. And their problem is this, right? They meet a guide, you are the guide who gives them a plan. You have the plan, right? If you missed the episodes on buyer consultation framework and Seller listing consultation Framework, that's the plan, right? We have seven point plans for buyers and sellers and that's what you take them through. It calls them to action. That results in massive success. If they use you as their agent. And if they don't, not so good, right? They leave a lot to chance if they don't use you as their real estate agent. So that's that. They call it, Donald Miller calls it the story brand messaging filter. But here's the test for you. If look at some of your marketing or even your social media posts related to your real estate business, how much of it focuses on how on your clients and them being the center of the story. And just rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 5. Like 5. My last 5 posts or all of my marketing pieces revolve around winning for my clients to one. You only talk about yourself, right? So if you're a 1, 2 or even a 3, you want to make sure you focus on telling them, telling their story and making them the hero. The second part, and you'll hear me talk about this forever in terms of implementing referral marketing or upgrading your referral marketing efforts, is that you need to build this out as a system. I actually did a training. I forget what it was called. I don't know that I can find it real quickly here. Let me see if I can find it real quickly. Not maximum, not lead conversion challenge, not annual plan. The training idea, it might have been in, I don't know if it's putting your life first or might have been the marketing dashboards. Yeah, it might have been the marketing dashboard. So I did a training called the preloaded year and you can go into the real estate business builders Facebook group, but it was called put your marketing on autopilot for 2023. And I gave away all of my real estate marketing dashboards, my marketing ROI multiplier, my weekly marketing scorecard, my marketing and social calendar templates, which, you know, it's social content and also just your clients for life program. So I gave away all of those dashboards and trackers. And so when I talk about building the system, it really is your Clients for life program. You know, we did roughly 60 touches a year, but it's, you know, email newsletter, couple client giveaways, you know, some postcards throughout the year, two videos a month, high quality videos a month. Those, you know, market monthly market updates, those sorts of things, a hard copy newsletter, those sorts of things. That's the Clients for Life program. Super low investment relative to the return, typically 20 to 30 times the money you spend on the Clients for Life program. That system will turn into like you spend $10,000 a year on it, it will turn into $200,000 to $300,000. It's that powerful once you have it in place. And then you also have to have a social media marketing system, right? We would roughly have, you know, 120 to 140 planned social media posts. And it was. This was just like clockwork, right? So it wasn't like we guessed on, you know, which week what we were doing. We had it all baked into a social media content calendar. And it was, it was clockwork. And we had a documented plan for our referral and marketing strategy, right? So you need a written plan for all of this stuff. You need easy ways to receive referrals, you know, systems in place to reward referrals, those sorts of things. We talked last week, the third point, we talked last week about legendary service that is the prerequisite for being able to ask for and receive referrals. So it goes without saying, but the thing I didn't mention last week was that there is a process around this. So in real estate B school, we teach this concept of making a promise to your clients. I first heard this concept by Jay Abraham was interviewing. I forget it was. It was on, I think it was on Audible, but It was like 93, 93 referral marketing systems. And he just recorded his clients at an event giving away all of their referral marketing systems. And one of them were, One of them was. One of them were. One of them was essentially getting your clients to promise to give you a referral if you exceeded their expectations. So you make the promise and in return they give you referrals. So we've got a documented system, scripts for client care, sales, all of that stuff. And that's the focus on being able to build and upgrade your referral marketing systems. You have to be able to deliver that level of service. Couple things to consider as I kind of exit this episode that you don't want to be just another real estate agent. So ask yourself, you know, are you doing things any differently than the typical agent out there? You know, that's really the question. And that goes for how you position yourself online as well. So a big part of referral marketing is making sure all of everyone in your database, so your entire sphere of influence, anyone that you know, all of your friends and all of your past clients are in your world online. And you know, your business page and your personal page, you're friends with them and they're following your business page and having systems in place to make sure they're following, following you. So when you do your monthly Facebook Live market updates, they're going to follow you when you're you know, issuing blog posts when you're doing your couple videos a month, whether those are local business interviews or you know, you're sharing information on your listings or you are sharing testimonials from clients, the real heroes, the happy clients that you're working with or you're doing contests, you know, we would do Valentine's contests or you know, review contests, those sorts of things. If you have new team members coming on your team or other news that you want to get out there or just educational content, we use a service called Keeping Current Matters that gives us a blog and it's, it's super powerful, very inexpensive. But how you position yourself online and the consistency with which you post and, and the system by which you, you, you post and you follow that system is all part of it. I mentioned that I was going to talk about Kirby and Christina. I pretty much told their story. Started working with them when it was just the two of them in a licensed, I think just a licensed showing agent. And they, they were doing a lot of deals but they were like eyeballs deep in production. I think they just had their first child. They have four children now and Christina was pregnant. I remember they had massive success in our world and then they scaled Quite quickly to 2021 I think they did to 7.7 million GCI 777 transactions. I'm a man of faith and number seven is completion. So I joked with them, I had them on the podcast and I joked with them that you guys should just put it down. You should literally give it up with all those sevens in there. God is talking to you guys. But they didn't 2022, they did 7 million top line. So still a 7. But they run a massive business and they put these systems in place. So when I talk about referral, marketing, upgrade, they have a, I don't even think it's 60 Touch clients for life program. They probably do 120 to 140 social media posts, but it's all systemized. There's no guesswork. They run the same systems, maybe with a little different flavor to their giveaways or to their educational content or whatever they post. But it's the same process year after year after year after year and over half their business is generated from their database via referrals or past clients. Right? So they treated this like a multi seven figure pillar because to them it actually turned into it. So my friends, will you do the work? Will you commit to the mindset shift to stop playing their game? That is my wish for you. So if you want a copy of the Database Marketing workbook, get into Real Estate Business Builders Facebook Group. You can just search it up in there and you can find it. If you want to jump on a call, you want to talk about your business, it's not a sales call. We will dig into exactly where you are in your business, where you want to go, what's holding you back. If there's a chance where we can help you achieve and crush your goals, we'll talk about it. But it's not a high pressure situation. It's mostly to serve you in your journey, where you are right now. So go to rebs growthassessment.com and we'll see you over there. Be good.

Thanks for listening. Would you please take a minute to share the show with other agents who may be struggling? And if you love the podcast, please leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. And make sure you visit ScaleOrDiebook.com to get a free copy of my book. It's a nuts and bolts guide to building a real estate business that gives you true time and money freedom so that you can live your life without regrets. Thanks again and see you on the next episode.

Sam.