10 ways to grow your hospitality business

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and welcome everybody to the Boostly Podcast, the number one podcast in the short term rentals and hospitality industry when it comes to marketing. And today we've got a very special live recording of the Boostly Podcast where we're going to talk about and we're going to explain to you how to grow from zero to 500 properties in just five years. We've got a future best selling offer on the call with us, it's welcome to the Boosted Podcast Experience. Let's get started. All right, welcome, welcome, welcome, Rog, thank you so much for being on the call with us on the Boostly Podcast Experience with us live. So what we're going to do today in this live podcast recording, we're going to dig into a couple of things, we're going to go through some awesome things and we're going to talk about your new book that is going to be readily available to everybody. And it's one that I do recommend everybody checking out. Let's go get this to the top of the Amazon bestsellers because it's going to be very popular. We're chatting off air and we're talking about Vintnery's sort of exposure in the UK and Europe. And this is so exciting to me. You're like, this is something that we need to grow, we need to get more of. So before we go any further, for everybody that's tuning in forever, you're watching live and if you are watching live, leave a hashtag live in the comments. And if you're watching live, leave a hashtag replay in the comments as well. Please. Can you tell me a little bit more about yourself, about Vintory? Give a little very quick promo and plug to the book and then we're going to dig into 10 simple steps to go from 0 to 500 in just 5 years. Over to you, buddy.

Let's do it. Well, Mark, thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here. Yeah. So, quick little background about me. I've been in the vacation rental space for about 14 years. Started a little company called Vantage Resort Realty in Ocean City, Maryland, which is about three hours east of Washington, D.C. and grew that company pretty quickly, grew that company from 0 to 500 properties in 5 years. Exited back in 2013 and just have led some other companies in the vacation rental space. But most of my career in the vacation space has been focused exclusively on growing inventory. That has been what I really enjoy and it's something that I've been blessed to be pretty good at. And about three years ago launched Ventory. And the idea of Ventory is to help kind of level the playing field to help professional vacation rental managers grow their inventory. So we don't do anything with guests, we don't do anything with OTAs, we're not doing anything with operations. We focus exclusively on the supply side. Right? We help professional vacation rental managers add more properties into the rental program and that's it. And in the last three years, we've helped over 300 companies with their inventory acquisition and growth plan. And I would say we're the best on the planet of doing that. And about a year ago I started, I realized I had so much content because by the way, if you go to our website, we have so many resources, so many webinars, so many videos, so many blogs, so many infographics dedicated to helping vacation managers grow their inventory. And I said, you know what, I've got all this content. Wouldn't it be nice to kind of build it and put it into a book? So about a year ago, went through that process of writing a book and pulling together all that information and it just launched, you can hear it here first. It actually just launched over the weekend and it is available on Amazon. So please go to Amazon, download a copy on Kindle and please leave a review. And by the way, 100% of the proceeds go to charity. So this is not a profit center for me. This is to help, you know, kind of just tell the world of how to, you know, grow their inventory and again, level that playing field. And that's, that's where we are today. I'm super excited to be here today. This is the first podcast since I launched the book, so I feel honored. Thanks.

Thank you very much for coming on and telling everybody about it. So the title, can you just give us the quick title so everybody can go search it while they're listening or watching to this?

Yeah, yeah, Exactly. So from zero to 500 properties in five years, a playbook on how to grow your short term vacation rental inventory.

I think every good book needs to have the word playbook in it. So I feel I can totally bounce on top of that, which is awesome. So what we wanted to do today, again, if you're watching live, please do leave a hashtag live and let us know that you're tuning in live. What we wanted to do is we wanted to dig into the 10 simple steps. So there's going to be a core feature that runs throughout the book. I've had a quick skim and I can see it. And I, and I'm excited to dig into it further, but this is 10, like, sort of simple steps, and we had a quick chat to it beforehand, and there's definitely 10 things that we can do. And we don't want to give the full game away because we want everybody to go and get the book, which is obvious. But what we're going to do is we're going to dig into 10. Um, we're going to start with messaging, and we're going to end with Target realtors and influencers, which is an awesome one. What I love about yourself and I have done a bit of research. I've watched a couple of videos, a couple of podcasts that you've been on, and there is a lot which, which is awesome. But you. You come at this from speaking my language, which is marketing. And some of the things that you really delve into, they, they, they mirror and they lap over so nicely with what's in the. Which is in the book Direct Playbook and everything that we talk about here. And all of this isn't specifically talking about appealing to guests. This is about talking to landlords and management companies. There's so many things that you can listen to, what, what Brook's going to talk to us about, and you can just repackage it up and go, okay, I can do this for guests. So it's so cool. And, and this is why it's really exciting. So the floor is yours. We're going to go into number one. So number one of number ten of simple steps to grow your vacation rental inventory is messaging. So can you just please focus on this? Expand on this? And how is this one of the first steps of ten?

Yeah, well, we're gonna have to go fast, so let's, let's do it. First up comes down to messaging, right? And the first thing we do whenever we sign up a new partner comes on our rental or comes into our program is we build out the key messaging blocks, right? And this is, you know, there's seven key messaging blocks. And if anybody emails me BrooknTory.com Brooke with an E, I will send you. We actually have an infographic on this, and I'm happy to share it with you too, Mark. And you can make it in your show notes, but it starts out with unique selling proposition, right? What is it that sets your company apart? What is the one thing. What is that one thing that sets you apart? If it was shoes like Tom's has a great one, right? Buy one, give one up. Next comes out to features and benefits. What are those features and benefits within your company that make you unique and make you different? Right. Highlight those. It could be revenue management, it could be whatever it happens to be. Let's highlight those different features and benefits. Up next is trust icons. So trust icons would be if you're an Airbnb super host, if you're a VRBO premier partner in the United States, you know they have the Better Business Bureau. If you're an A on the Better Business Bureau, you might want to highlight that. What are some things, it's a form of social proof that reduces friction. Right. It just, it's establishing trust and credibility with your company that you're a real company and they're going to trust their, you know, one of their largest assets with you. Up next is social proof. So these are testimonials and references and quotes from owners, other owners in your rental program. You typically want to do this and make it seem very similar to them. So if you do start doing some hyper marketing, hyper targeted marketing, let's say specific buildings or areas, you want the quotes and references and testimonials to be from people that look like them, sound like them, maybe in the same community, same building. Up next is a compelling offer, right? I always have my acid test for compelling offers are you're standing over a trash can. Envision a prospective owner standing over a trash can reading his or her mail and they're looking, flipping through and they see your postcard. Is there something in there that's going to have them kind of stop and pause and put that postcard aside and, and want to call you back later and not throw it in the recycling bin or the trash can. Examples of compelling offers is free smart home package. Or Maybe it's a 0% commission for the first six months. Something to catch their attention. And one of the last ones here is risk reversals. So Vacasa has a pretty decent risk reversal. They say that they are going to. Well, risk reversals reduce the friction in the buying process. So Vacasa's is we will beat your current manager's numbers rental income by $5,000 or we'll refund you the difference. And there's a lot of fine print in there. Volv has even a really, really good one. It's a six month guarantee where they say you can cancel at any given point or that you can cancel and they will give you a refund of 100% of their management fees. Now, if you read the fine print, it's only between months, six in month, seven but it just sounds so great if you can imagine, you know, you're reading that postcard or you're going through a presentation with them and they say, look, what do you have to lose? You can cancel and we'll give you a refund of your management fees. So that's a great example of a risk reversal. And this is the one, the last one is call to action cta, right? You know all about this, Mark. Like what are you driving them to do? Is it to, you know, fill out the form? Is it to call? Is it to text? Give them a call to action, make it easy, don't make them have to hunt for what they're you want them to do. And we like to give them multiple options. We like to give them QR code, we like to give them a phone number, we even encourage them to text. You know, some of the younger, you know, targets might be more willing to text than actually make a phone call. So you want to give them as many options as possible on that, that cta, again, those are the key messaging building blocks. And if you email me, I'll give you a template that any company, anybody can use for their company. And what I like about this is this is going to be the baseline of all your marketing efforts, right? This is going to be the baseline for your landing page. This is going to be the baseline for your postcards. This is going to be a baseline for your, your marketing brochures you build so you don't have to, you know, reinvent it every single time you have those key messaging blocks there available for you and you just start rattling it off anytime you need it.

This is what I love about this, is that again, this is the prime example, number one, of how you can have this. So where it is speaking to a landlord or a property owner that you want to put your business in front of. But also as well, you can reverse engineer everything that's just been said and you can have that as a key benefit of attracting, attracting guests. Unique selling proposition features and benefits, trust icon, social proof, compelling offer, risk reversal and tons of click to actions, which is so cool. So this is how you can speak and this is how you can get in front of more people to grow your portfolio. What I want to very quickly do is just pause the break before we go into number two. And for anybody that's here, and they may be on one property or they may be on two properties or maybe at five and they want to get, to get more and there may be somebody that is sat here right now and going, you know what, I'm in my comfort zone three and four. I may want to stop right here. What would be the argument that you would give to them to say, listen, add on a couple of these because this is going to be the true worth. This is why you need to grow. This is why you want to get more. What, what would be something that you would say to somebody to say this is why you need to grow. And, and this is the benefits from it?

Well, I mean, you're building. The best way to build value in your business is to grow that business. We have something that's so special here with building businesses. This is the way that you can build net worth and hopefully eventually becomes your legacy or it ends up becoming your way of funding your retirement. I mean, I love entrepreneurship and I love building businesses. This is the fourth business I've started and I just love that, that you know that building value. And if you think about the value of inventory and what these properties are worth, the, the true value of a management company. Mark, are these management contracts. I hate to say it, it's. It's not your, it's not your fancy wrapped trucks or your cars, it's not your beautiful office, it's not your guest database, although there is some value there. But the true value of the management company when you get purchased are these management contracts. In fact, Vacasa. I don't know if you read it, but Vacasa's investor deck right before they went public. And I love when these companies go public because they have to release a lot of information and make it public, but they published that their average contract that they paid for when they bought through their corporate development team was $21,000 per contract. So to me that gives a very good baseline of what these contracts are worth. But here's the great part. Vacasa still had a 25% IRR internal rate of return post paying $21,000 a contract. So they're still making a ton of money even after paying $21,000 a contract. And if you look at some of the other purchases that have been made, I mean when they purchased Turnkey, they paid $103,000 per contract. We've been involved in some M and A transactions ourselves and we see some of these management contracts, these values per contract are 70 to $90,000 a contract. So that is the true worth of your company and that is the greatest way you can build wealth.

So it brings me on to nicely, which is number two, because the number two of number 10 you've got down as hiring a full time BD rep, which I assume is business development. So this is somebody right now who's going, oh, hiring somebody really? Like, I don't really have the money to do that. I've been doing all of this myself. You know, me and a partner have been doing this. I like to do this. But I'm also checking in the guests. I'm also doing X, Y and Z. I'm building out the Ikea furniture. Like, what is your argument when you say to somebody, listen, you need to hire a full time business development rep to do this.

Yeah. And I don't want to give so many different numbers, but if you hire the right person, it is worth it. Right. But the key is you have to hire the right person. We'll talk about that in a second. How do you identify who that right person is? But it's some very basic math. If you have a property that's doing $36,000 in gross booking revenue, the average margins, that falls to the bottom line. And I've seen this, I've asked this over 200 times, it's 10% of your gross booking revenue. So if you're doing 36k times 10%, that's $3,600 in margins or net profit per year. But the property doesn't stay in a program for one year. Right. It actually stays in a rental program for 10 years on average. That's what we've seen. Again, asking over 200 different companies. The average tenure is 10 years. So you think about that. One Property is doing $36,000 in gross booking revenue, has a lifetime value in net profits of 36,000. So it's the exact same. So assuming you fall in line with the averages, 10% margins and 10% churn, which gives you a 10 year lifetime, the gross booking revenue equals your lifetime value. That's the quick summary hack, if you will. Right. Whatever. Your gross booking revenue equals your revenue. So if you hire a business development person and let's say you're paying her $80,000 a year and if she brings on just two properties per month that you wouldn't have had before now, the key here is that you wouldn't have had before, that's 24 homes in the first year. So if you go through that same math, $3,600 in profit margins in year one times 24 homes, that comes out to 80 over $86,000. But you've paid her 80,000, so you're almost about break even in year one. But again, remember, those properties are going to stay in the rental program for probably 10 years. And when you go to sell it, you're going to get, you know, using the Costa's numbers, you're going to get another $20,000 per contract when you go to exit. So the math pencils out. But again, the key, though is if you hire the right person. So how do you identify who is the right person? I mean, there's many different ways, but one of the it's kind of like Moneyball for hiring. It's psychometric personality assessments. And there's two different companies out there that I know of that do this, and I've been using this for close to a decade. And I wouldn't hire a babysitter without using these tools. So there's Predictive Index and Culture Index. And these are psychometric personality assessments that identify the core traits of what you're looking for. And the traits and the profiles that we've seen that make the greatest BD reps, business development reps, you're looking for captains on Predictive Index. Persuader is what they're called in both Predictive Index and Culture Index. Trailblazer is what they're called in Culture Index. And then Maverick is a great profile in Predictive Index, and a Rainmaker is a great profile in Culture Index. So again, you want to identify one of those and use one of those five profiles to make sure that you have the right person. Now, there's lots of different things. It depends if it's inbound leads versus more of a hunter, somebody that's more outbound. But those are the profiles that we see that consistently have the most successful when they're generating them. Now, if you hire somebody that doesn't necessarily have one of those profiles, they may be good, but you're rolling the dice. And I like to stack the cards in our favor. And that's why we use these psychometric personality assessments, because we know time and time again they work.

I will make sure that I've written the comments in the links, in the show notes in the blog. Whatever we do, we'll make sure that there is a link to the Predictive Index and the Culture Index because it's really important. This is something me personally that I'm starting to dig into with Boost Lee and hiring and just my own personal traits and whatnot. So it's really interesting to see two new ones to add to the list, which will definitely be ones I'll be checking out, but I'll definitely make sure that we linked up so number three and number four. So obviously number three is we're talking about landing pages and data. I think number three and number four pretty much speak for themselves. Number three, as you will agree, you need to have a proper landing page, something that is optimized to speak to the owner. Take into account everything that we talked about in number one with data. Obviously in the States and in Canada it's a lot easier to get hold of this. Maybe in the UK and Europe it's a little bit tricky. But for just three and four, if you could just give a super quick bounce through very quickly on what 3 and 4 is to you and why you included it in the book.

Yeah. So the lowest hanging fruit that we see time and time again, again doing this over 300 different companies is they don't have an optimized landing page specific specifically for owner acquisition. They spent all this time on the guest side. Right. They hire these great marketing companies to go out there and help them optimize their website for conversions and then it's an afterthought on the owner side. But again if you go through that math of how valuable these contracts are, you start to realize how important it is. So the first thing I would recommend is just put a different color link on the homepage in the upper right hand corner to get that attention and then optimize it, make it really easy. So often they make it very difficult and very challenging to find out where to even go to inquire more information. So again you want to use those seven key messaging building blocks on that landing page and there's so many different things you can do. I mean I could do an entire episode just on tips and tricks and hacks for building out a landing page but I know we don't have enough time. We're going wide on this presentation.

Well, I'm going to give you an even bigger shortcut. Boostly actually do websites for management companies and we have all that ready. If you want to find out more, come to come and send me a message. I'll hook you up. You can literally have it. It'll be ready in 24 hours and again it'll knock all that that you need to do one thing. I will quickly touch on that. So many people don't do this, but if anybody has ever read Story Brand by Donald Miller, he talks about this and marketing made simple and business made simple. What I would personally be doing is I'd have, I would have a domain just for your guest booking website and I would have a separate domain for your management company, keep it super simple. You don't want to confuse anybody. You don't want to confuse a potential property owner or landlord by sending them to a guest booking site because they'll take one look at it, they'll get confused and they'll bounce. So again, it's super easy to do. You don't have to have one website that does everything. It's not a Swiss army knife. Have two separate ones, your life is so much easier. So let's jump very quickly into number four before we then get into some of that I'm really looking forward to. Which is number five.

Yeah. So data is fantastic. We're very lucky in the US to be able to get data. So there's a couple different sources you can go. The first is tax records and it's often affiliated with MLS services. That's the first place to go because it's going to be free most of the time and it's going to be the most up to date. If you can't get that, go to list brokers. There's a million different list brokers out there. You just have to pay for the data. But it's pretty, pretty inexpensive. Up next, and again, in the United States there's something called the Freedom of Information act where if a city or township requires a permit then they have to release that information. Some cities like Nashville, they make it super easy. You literally just go online and download it. As simple as that. You can actually see the data straight on their website. Others are going to make it a little challenging. You got to go down the courthouse, you got to give them a check. I've actually had them give it to us on a CD ROM before. I mean, I don't even know who has a CD ROM anymore to download it. But you can get those vacation rental permit lists, which is great data. And then the last is you can scrape data. So you can scrape the OTAs, you can scrape your competitors, you can scrape large venture backed conglomerates and then the key is to pull all that data together. It's challenging. It's a whole bunch of steps and honestly I don't even know how to do it. That's why we hire a bunch of data scientists that do this and you can find them a great website freelancing website called upwork. In fact, everybody on our data science team was originally hired as a contractor on upwork. Now they work for us full time.

Amazing. Amazing. Well, you've got Upwork, you've got Fiverr onlinejobs. Ph, there's so many cool places that you can go and find amazing people that can do that, which is awesome. Right now we're gonna really get into the nuts and bolts. So we've talked about the benefits of so the benefits of having your very structured messaging which is obviously how you go into appeal to the right person. We've talked about the benefits of hiring a full time business development rep because of the actual value of each contract is going to be worth to you. We've talked very quickly about landing pages and about how you're going to go to boostly to get one. Very quickly about data. But now this is where I feel like I could talk to you forever about which is the actual marketing. It's actually getting the boots on the ground, getting into the eyeballs, into the ear holes of the people that you want to be speaking to. Your landlord, your property owners, etc. We're going to go in number five, this is the omnichannel marketing. So can you just very quickly we'll have to bounce through each individual one. If you want more depth, you're going to have to go get the book. Zero to 500 properties in five years, obviously on Amazon. Go get it now. But just for like a very quick overview of it and just give some very quick little bouncy ones. What is number five all about with executive omnichannel marketing?

Yes. So the old days of sending out one postcard per year are dead, right? Today's most proactive vacation managers are executing an omnichannel marketing approach. And what that means is you're encompassing your icp, your ideal customer profile. You're hitting them in all different channels and it has a boost effect, right? It's a definition of synergy. One plus one equals three. So we start off with direct mail. So direct mail still works. It's one of the vacation industry is one of the few industries where direct mail still works. But the key with direct mail is consistency. I'll say it again, the key with direct mail is consistency. I'd much rather send a thousand postcards six times throughout the course of a year than just dumping 6,000 postcards once and being done. There's a whole bunch of different things we can get into direct mail. Obviously you want to have those key messaging building blocks in there. Up next is email. Email works too. This is one of the ones that really surprised me. First campaign we did for one of our partners in Hawaii, he got two deals. Average gross booking revenue was over $100,000 per property. And remember what those margins are worth and what those contracts are worth. That was super valuable and that was a great ROI from just doing cold email outreach. I will say you have to use a cold email outreach tool specific for this and some of the ones we recommend are Mailshake and Lemlist to run that cold email outreach. Up next is PPC Paid ads, right? The problem with paid ads is, well, the beauty of paid ads is it has high intent, right? The person that is searching for it is looking for something very specific. So it's a great lead. Right. But the problem is there's just so little search volume for this. So you need to cast as wide a net as possible. We actually, at Ventori, our digital marketing team, we actually have 70 keywords that we use to be able to cast that really, really wide net. We found those though. I'll give you the tip what our team uses, we're using Ahrefs and SEM Rush to deploy that and really understand what those keywords are. So again, use ahrefs, use SEM Rush and make sure you're casting a really, really wide net. Up next is list based retargeting. So this is through Facebook, Instagram and even LinkedIn, you can do this. This is where you get your list of your targets. If you have emails and phones, you can now start to serve up target ads directly to your target, your icp, your ideal customer profile. And what we usually do is we do that maybe a week or two in advance of direct mail. We start serving up those display ads on their social feed, which is a great way to kind of prime the pump and warm them up a little bit. And then we hit them with a direct mail. Another one that's. This one's probably more in the US but it's called IP targeting. So I always joke that if the CIA were to get into marketing, this is probably how they would do it. This is where they're able to actually get the IP address of your targets. And you can serve up ads directly as they surf the web. So millions of websites, websites like CNN or the news stations or weather channel or even local news sites, you can serve up ads directly to them. And again, we'd like to combine this in advance of those direct mail pieces that we're sending. And then one of the last ones here, Mark, is retargeting. So we know even the best performing landing pages out there, 80 to 95% of the traffic doesn't convert. So you want to make sure that you have retargeting on your website on your landing Page specific for owners though. And what we recommend is just using Google Tag Manager, they can manage all your tags in one spot, make it really easy to do it. And I'm going to give you a little bonus hack here with this. So we've been experimenting recently with what's called direct mail retargeting and this is so cool. So our postcards that we're sending out and most of the marketing that we're sending out actually has a QR code and the QR code sends them directly to a pearl. If you don't know what a pearl is, it's a personalized URL specific for that person. But here's the beauty of that. They go to that landing page. Even if they don't fill out a form, we know that they went to that landing page. Our CRM actually gets notification of that. We know that who went to that page. Now we can have all those workflows in our CRM and our marketing automation software that we can start doing follow up marketing directly to them. So, so we can send out another letter to them. We can send some gifts, some swag as they call it. We can send out a text message. If we have their phone number, we can send out another email. We can do all different things that are triggers based on them using that pearl. Even if they don't fill out the form, we know they at least went to it, at least kind of checked it out. So that's a little bonus hack there for you.

Love it. So you talk about we and whatnot. So Vintary is the tool. So could you just very obviously, whatever, just go and get the book. But this is something that I know there's going to be people tuning in and I can see some amazing names in the lives like Mike over in Arizona, we've got Garden and Megan, we're in the States and Canada and whatnot. And we've got people tuning in from the UK but thinking all of this sounds cool, but what you've just said there is just a little bit too far out of my scope. So how does Venturi help with this problem where they're thinking this all sounds cool but I can't do this. So how does Bintou come in to help?

Yeah, and so first off, you know this is not meant to be a plug for us, but I'm happy to help. And one of our missions from the beginning is to help every single vacation rental manager grow their inventory. But I know how challenging it is. So if you don't have the bandwidth, you don't have the time to do this, we're happy to do it for you. This is all we do, right? So Vintori is a sales and marketing platform that does one thing and one thing only, and that's helping professional vacation rental managers grow their inventory. So we have a team of 58 growth experts focused on exclusively this. Right. We also have a CRM and marketing automation platform that we've built specifically for the vacation industry. Not only specifically for the vacation industry, but specifically for owner acquisition. So I like to give the keys to the safe out, right? I like to pass out and show everybody how they can do this on their own. I give you all the tips and tricks and tools and everything so you can do this on your own. But I also understand it's really hard. Being a vacation rental manager is challenging. You're wearing 18 different hats. If you don't have the time to do this, we're happy to help you out there. We have plans that start as low as $300 a month, and we have some that go up to $2,500 a month where we do everything for you. So really, we have built a solution that fits every company out there.

Amazing. Amazing. So go check it out. V-I-N-T-O-R-Y.com it's literally behind Brooke's head there, so it's on his hat. So you can go check it out. If you don't how to spell it. So we've got number five. We've got five more to go and we will rattle through because obviously we want to get everybody to go get check out the book. But number six, and then this is what I think is, is key. And it's becoming even more key with every form of marketing. So what we're going to do is we're going to give you a bit of actual advice on when a management company wants to, well, sorry, a property owner or a landlord wants to get in touch. But for those of you that aren't looking to sort of grow your inventory and want to do something similar, you can apply this and put it to if a guest is going in contact. So you can use this for both sides. I know there's people in the comments that are saying, we had Lisa who go, hey, I accidentally became a host five years ago and I've got five. 500 blows my mind. So even if you're watching this and you're going, well, I don't want to get to 500. I don't want to get more and more and more but you want to have a little tactic and tip and take a takeaway from this on how to get in front of a guest. This next step is key. So can you please. I've given you the big build up. What is number six, please?

Yeah, well, it just talks about speed and responsiveness really matters, right? And we, very often we will generate leads for our partners. We will generate these calls, but if you don't respond quickly, you are. You're playing down. Right? So Mark Roberge, he was employee number three at HubSpot. He, he was their chief marketing officer. He's now a professor at Harvard University. He teaches sales for Harvard. He says if you call back a lead, all the data he has from HubSpot, if you call back a lead within two minutes, you are 10 times more likely to close it than waiting an hour. Think about that. And if you wait a day, you're 10,000 times more likely to close it versus waiting that one day. So speed and response to this really, really matters. So we actually have a woman on our team, Jade Wolf, who's awesome. She secret shopped 100 vacation rental management companies, went to their owner landing page, filled out a form, or she got the phone number for the owner acquisition. She called. Do you know, Mark, 34% of the time did they actually answer the phone. So two thirds of the time they'd never even picked up the phone. And then when she left a message, 57, only 57% of the time, they actually called us back. So that means the majority of all the leads that are coming in are being missed. And it reminds me of that old. There's a quote from Woody Allen. It says 80% of success is just showing up. So if you just pick up the phone, if you just answer your call, or if you just call them back, you're gonna be beating your competition out. And we see this time and time again because every one of our calls for all of our partners, we use very specific call tracking and we see it all the time. We coach them on this, and they still don't pick up the phone. And so if you pick up the phone and you have a system in place to do it, you're going to win. But here's the, here's the part that, you know, just drives me a little bit crazy. When we secret shop the big boys, the Vacas and the turnkeys, guess What? They had 100% connectivity rate. They're not better. They just answer the damn phone.

And again, this ties back really nicely to number two. And for those of you people are thinking, well, how can I afford to, to hire a full time business development rep? I think the thing that we should be throwing back to you is how can you afford not to? Because with this, if you've got somebody literally on the phone doing this full time and that call comes in or that lead comes in, they're going to be on the phone where yourself, like you say, 16, 18 hats, all the things, all the things you've got going on. Plus as well you want to be able to grow the business where you're not always picking up the phone and doing all the things. You want to be able to hire people. So again, think about number two and if you've missed the, the first part of this conversation, if you've jumped in at a random time, whether you're live on the replay and you're thinking what was number two? Do rewind, do go back and check that out because it ties in all of this really nicely. So talking about tying it nicely, number seven is getting a CRM with marketing automation. So can you just please expand on that a little bit?

Yeah, I mean again, if you. Almost every single management company I know has a CRM for guests, right? Like that's a no brainer. Everyone does. It's like yeah, it's a given. But when you ask the average vacation manager if they have a CRM for owners, 90% of the time they say no. So I would say get one. Obviously Vintory has a CRM with marketing automation built in. But it doesn't have to be us, right? It can be Salesforce, it can be HubSpot, it can be Zoho. Just get something. It could even be a Google spreadsheet. Just track your leads somewhere. These leads are so, so valuable. We found, and again tying it back to kind of the marketing automation, we found that tracking this with our partners, up to 50% of many of our partners deals come from leads that were put into what's called a long term nurturing sequence. So let's say they inquired, they talked to them, they weren't ready to sign up, right? Then you drag and drop them into a long term sequencing, long term nurturing sequence and you're just delivering little drips throughout the time. It's usually more informational, it's less salesy and it works. So again, track these leads. Again we've established how valuable they are and make sure you're staying in touch with them.

So we're nearly at number 10, but let's do eight and nine together. So leverage your Effects and inbound marketing. How could you sort of just tie in why they're important.

Yeah. So leverage effects. What that means, Mark, is like, what are some tools out there that you can leverage to make your. To make you more successful in closing more deals? So a couple different ones that we recommend. Well, first off, the Ventory system has almost all the tools we just talked about. Ventory system has it built into it automatically. Right. But if you decide not do this on your own, that's fine. CallRail is a great one for call tracking. Right. Every single marketing campaign you have should have a unique phone number on it so you can track the response of it, you can track the conversions and the response rates. But it also is a great tool to have and track these calls in the future so you can go back and listen to them. So CallRail we highly recommend. Again, the Vidtori system has it built in chat features. So there's this fundamental shift moving where people like to communicate via chat versus email and filling out forms. So there's many different ones out there. Drift, I think is one that you can use. And again, Ventory system has chat built directly into it automatically plugs the leads right into the CRM video recording. So Loom is one that we use a lot. So let's just say you have a trouble, you know, getting a hold of a contact. You can do a quick little recording. The loom, it's. I think it's 10 bucks a month. Send that little presentation over to them. It's amazing how much more impactful that is than just sending an email. For 10 bucks, it's well worth it. Plus you can, you can show, if you have a rental projection or Performa, you can kind of show that and highlight that directly on there. Meeting schedulers are, I mean, I think almost everybody's using those right now. But a couple things, you know, put them on your landing page, you know, don't just have a form to fill out. Actually put your meeting link directly on there. Or another hack that we always recommend with all of our partners is as soon as they do fill out the form, have on like the thank you page, the confirmation page, have a link in there that they can schedule some time just to like save that back and forth. Look, if they're interested enough to fill out a form, give them the opportunity to schedule time so you don't kind of go back and forth. Time kills all deals. And then again, Ventory, obviously our entire CRM and marketing automation platform was built from the ground up specifically to help vacation Managers grow their inventory. All these features that we just highlighted are built into our platform natively. So we highly recommend you check that out. And then the last one here or not the last one, but number nine is inbound marketing. So I'm going to contradict myself a little bit, right. I talked about how all this outbound approach is so helpful to kind of get leads and get deals. And it is. And you need to have it as part of your arsenal. I mean, even HubSpot, which is known for their inbound machine, does outbound marketing. But inbound marketing, there's this fundamental shift where people like to, they like to do all the research in advance and then they like to fill out forms and then they like to sign up. They don't like to just being shouted out, so to speak. But it's really hard. It takes a lot of time. Mark, you do a fantastic job of this, but it's exhausting, right? It takes a lot of time and effort to do it. So I always say the crack version, the quick hit version of inbound marketing is to build out interactive content. So one of the best examples of interactive content I've seen is my buddy Dave van gotti on smokymountains.com he built a fall foliage map. It's an interactive map on his website that you can see how the leaves, what the colors of the leaves will be in every part of the country based on certain days. And this thing gets so much traffic, it gets so many references from huge national like newscasts, USA newspaper and New York Times and Wall Street Journal and all these different publications. And that's a great form. But if specifically for vacation rental industry, the ones I would recommend would be, let's see, we have the interactive calculators. That's a great source to do this. You can actually build out interactive calculators on. There's a great little widget called Calconic. It's a calculator. If you can envision a calculator, you can build an interactive calculator around it. You just embed the code right into your website. And it's a great way to kind of capture traffic. And there's a whole bunch of different ways you can do interactive content to get that inbound marketing, get those leads.

Lovely. Now what I love about this and everything that you're stating is with someone like Calconic, it keeps your website sticky. And the longer you can keep someone on your site, the longer you can drag that attention. It's going to work in so many levels. And as you were talking Then the one book that I was coming back to was get different by Mike Michalowicz. It's all about different marketing strategies. So what you're going to do, you're going to go to Amazon, go and get from 0 to 500 properties in 5 years. Add to the basket. Mr. Mike McCallow. It's get different podcast guest a couple of weeks back. And again, between those two, you're going to figure out everything that you need to do to stand out to be noticed and then be able to turn those lookers into inquiries and potentially new contracts, which we've already stated at the start why it is so important as you are growing this business, talking about doing something different, talking about being different with your marketing. What I love about number 10 is something that is so simple, it's so effective, it's literally relationship building at its best and its finest. But I guarantee 99% of people aren't doing it. Can you just touch upon as we finish up, as we draw this to a close, what is number 10 and why is it so important?

Yeah, it's, and it's really to go after those realtors and go after those influencers just like you would go after your owners. So you know, build out that omnichannel marketing approach to those influencers. You know, the direct mail email, ppc, you know, list based retargeting, IP targeting and retargeting, build out specific landing pages specifically for those Realtors and, and those influencers that make it easy and you want to hit them with the same marketing messages they've done before. Because you think about it, these realtors and these influencers, you're not just getting one deal, you're getting multiple deals. I mean I had a couple Realtors in Ocean City in my old company that would send us every single month. They were consistently sending us business, residual business. And what happens when you get a referral? It's much easier sale, you know, it's not as challenging versus the one person that you're trying to go after cold when every time I always got a referral, we always shut them down, we always closed them because it was a referral from somebody that they trusted. So again, you want to try to build those relationships up with those realtors and those influencers and do the same marketing that you're doing to your owners.

And I think as well, if we're just throwing a little 10.5, the power of four little words. Do you know anyone? And you can go to anybody that is currently on like you're working with at the moment. So it could be a landlord, a property owner, anybody that you're currently with and just saying, hey, I've been working with you. You know, paying the rent or doing a grand, fantastic service. Your bookings and your revenue and all that stuff is looking lovely. I've been doing all this work. Do you know anyone who would benefit from my service? And those four little words are so powerful. So I think what you've got now, even if you don't do all 10, even if you just pick one, I guarantee that your business and with what you're doing is going to be in a better state and a better position than before you watched or listened to this podcast. So again, if you want to say thank you for Brooke for this amazing hour that he's given up of his time to do this, all you need to do, head to Amazon. 0 to 500 properties in 5 years. Go type that in in the search. The page will come up, the link will be there. Go and download it, go and read it, make sure you leave a review. Because we need to get this to the bestseller. We need to get more and more people aware of this because this is going to help so, so many people. And What?

I'm only five bucks on Kindle. Come on. And 100% of the proceeds go to charity. Come on.

Amazing. I know so many people that are going to watch this from my world, like the BO that will have maybe never have heard of you or Vintnery beforehand, who literally right now their brains are in overdrive. I can see it in the comments with Chris and Gordon and Mike and a few others that I know that are going to be watching this on the replay, which is really exciting to me to be able to check in with them in say five or six months and go, okay, what was the big impact in your business this year? And it was this podcast. So, Brooke, for me, thank you so much for doing this. I want everybody to go check out the book, go check out Vintnery, go check out Brooke. There's tons and tons and tons of content behind the scenes. All I ask is don't get overwhelmed with everything that was thrown at you. Just pick one, implement it and then go on to the next one. Because even if you're just going to do one thing, which is like estate agents, realtors, influencers, or even if you're going to just think about very differently about the person you're going to hire about, well, hang on a second. I could make this work with a full time business development If I can just get somebody on the phone and doing all of the things, just go do that. I think we've given everybody the links, but is there anywhere else you'd like people to chat to? If I want to reach out, ask any questions, is Anything there is LinkedIn. Your jam is Instagram, is Facebook. Where do you want people to go?

Yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best place. We're always pushing out content on LinkedIn and every webinar we've ever. And also if you go to our website, every webinar I've ever done, every conference I've ever presented at, that information is there. It's a resource you can go back and watch. Dozens and dozens of presentations that we've done. But yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best place to reach us.

Amazing. And I'm going to throw the podcast and the question now over to everybody that is tuning in. Number one, the question that I want for you to answer in the comments is, what out of the 10 tips could you put into practice tomorrow? So what out of the 10 things that we focused on today could you put into practice tomorrow? And also as well, what are you already doing and what has been a success? Having a blast.

Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast.

Bruce Lee, Like Bruce Lee.

Cause it's so hard and the T.

Is loose leaf making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.