018 Hands-On Lead Generation and Conversion with Preston Guyton

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For insights into starting, growing and optimizing your real estate team, we're talking with Preston Guyton. A few fun facts before we get started. He's got a background in computer science and built his first custom website nearly 20 years ago. He's held multiple licenses found for multiple professions in multiple states and he's a founder in multiple companies including CRG companies, Easy Home Search, Palms Realty, and the reside platform. Thanks for talking Timo s today, Preston.

Yeah, man, thank you for having me.

Yeah, overdue. I intended to have you earlier, but here we are. Glad we're doing it now. And I'm gonna ask you the opener that I've asked literally everyone now, dozens of people who've been on the show with what is a must have characteristic of a high performing team.

You know, really, it's hard to, it's hard to pick one, but for, for me it's, you know, they got to be committed, they got to be consistent. And really, you know, commitment and consistency are really the two big things that if you look at the teams and you and they got to hold each other accountable, you know, accountability, you look at, you look at those three items and if they do a good job of that, you'll have a good team. What happens is a lot of teams come up with ideas, you know, things they're going to do, and all of a sudden they let people get away from. So if you stick to your principles, you hold people accountable and stay consistent. Those are the teams that, you know, that you've seen for years and years that continue to evolve and continue to do well because they hold people, they hold their agents accountable and they stay consistent.

Yeah, I really like that trio very much. I want to dive into commitment a little bit. I feel like it's easy for people to say, yeah, I'm all in, but, but I think it fall down in two ways. One of them, accountability helps solve. And it's like, you know, I, I'm committed in spirit, but I'm not committed in action and accountability can close that gap. I think the other thing too is that sometimes people don't know what commitment and practice looks like. That seems like maybe what a training issue.

Yeah, I mean, training issue. And it's also really understanding that, you know, commitment is boring. It really is. Like, if you. I mean, I hate to say, but it is like, if you look, and I tell people this all the time, they're like, what does your schedule look like? I'm like, it's pretty bo. Like, every day I wake up, do the same thing. You know, there might be variations in the morning, but a lot of times it's like you're doing the exact same thing at the exact same time. You feel like it's Groundhog's Day because you did it yesterday and the day before and the day before, you know, so that's. It's really just sticking to that. I think a lot of people struggle with sticking to a schedule and building a schedule and staying consistent and staying committed to that schedule and not letting other things get in the way. I mean, a lot of people get sidetracked. And, you know, the big thing, you hear it all the time. You got to learn to say no. Like, you got to learn to say no. You can't always say yes to everything because you say yes to everything. You could never keep a consistent schedule and never stay committed to what you're doing.

Yeah, it can feel a little bit boring also, too, that, like, progress is so hard to see on a day by day basis. It's easy to look back a month or definitely a year later after, like, consistent, disciplined behavior and say, like, oh, look how far I've come. But, like, day to day, week to week, it's a lot harder to see that progress. That progress is probably what motivates most people. People.

Yeah. I mean, it's definitely. It's, you know, you got to document it, is what I tell people. Document it. You know, keep notes. Just like, if you're, you know, on a. On a new workout plan, you need to take photos. I mean, photos can. A lot of times you don't feel like anything's changing. The scale is exactly the same. But if you took a photo of day one and you look at a photo on day 60, you're like, oh, wow. The scale doesn't tell me anything, but, you know, the photos do.

Yeah. I am converting that fat into muscle, even though muscle waves more. That's good. Okay. So I mentioned it, kind of teased it a little bit off the top, but I mean, you've been involved in. In real estate, as an agent, as a broker, owner, you've been in mortgage, you've been a general contractor. Is leadership across these different verticals? Like, are the fundamentals the same? It seems like they are, but, like, is there any nuance There, there's really.

Not, I mean really, you know what I tell people is one of the things early on I focused on in 2004 was I learned, you know the first website I developed for people that have been around a while was Z57 was a template based site. And then the first site I developed custom was with Morgan Carey which was SEO guy back then wasn't real estate webmasters yet. So this is a long time ago. But you know in doing that like getting into real estate, it's leadership is going to be pretty much the same, you know what you're doing in those companies. What I did in those, obviously it's different but a lot of like the success in a construction company or a general contractor, a custom builder, a lot of those things are pretty much that they're, they're really a lot of the, A lot of the structure and the companies and everything else are pretty much the same as far as real estate and Legion and all those things are, you know, if you get good at one, if you get good at running one company, it's pretty easy to transition. You know, especially with a business where marketing is so important. Right. Like marketing is important. Super important. Obviously, you know, the best marketers are usually the best real estate companies, the best realtors. Same thing in construction, like construction. The big reason I got into that was 08 happened and you know, so I was like oh God, what I'm going to do. You know. So I still sold real estate but we started you know, real estate construction and design company and then you know we did that through 2010 through 2020 when I sold out.

Super. I kind of wanted to run through that a little bit before we get into like lead gen, lead conversion. A lot of other things you have a deep expertise and passion in. Give us a little bit of an overview of. I mean you already did a little bit but give us an overview of. For context for people watching and listening. Kind of your career arc. I think it's interesting, I think it's unique. I'm already curious to ask some follow up around like leadership in one context to the next but give us that rundown. So how did you get involved in real estate back in 04? Ish.

Yeah 04. So I grew up in Myrtle beach and I was in restaurant industry for a long time. Realized I did not like. I, you know, worked. First job was Sun News going and getting, going to houses, getting people to sign up for the newspaper. So I did that when I was 13. My first job was Pizza Hut. I Think I was maybe 13, 14. Then I started Blessing Tables when I was 15. Grew up in Myrtle beach, you know, very tourist, you know, a lot of tourism in the summer. So I grew up in the restaurant industry, went to school and really I was always interested in architecture. Like I've, I grew up in art and doing a lot of drawing different things. I was always fascinated by architecture. So that's how I got into real estate. And you know, it's one of those things like too. I was young, I was in my early 20s, I was like, hey, a buddy of mine got in real estate, he's making a lot of money. I was like, I like houses and I like making money. So that sounds like a great idea. So that's the path I took and then, you know, getting into real estate. Myrtle beach is a place where a lot of people even back then were buying and moving to. So I was like, okay, how can I get in front of them? And I stumbled upon different real estate forums, website forums, and developed the first website and then did a lot of SEO in 2003, 4, 5, and was showing up for a lot of the keywords for real estate back then. So I was generating hundreds of organic leads back then where people put in their name, phone number, email address, and the answer rate was over 50% on calling people because nobody really did that, you know, that much back then. So that's, that's kind of how it started. And then from there I 2006, I got my residential contractor's license, started building spec houses and investing all the money I was making into real estate. And then the financial crisis happened and all that money went away. So I got on the other side and you know, got married, had our first child, Sophie, and then started the real estate construction and design company out of a need. I saw a lot of people in the custom construction world weren't really up with the times and the technology that was going on and you know, a lot of, just a lot of things for a lot of different reason. I started that and over the 10 years of the construction company design we had, we, we did general brokerage as well. We sold about over a billion dollars in residential construction, real estate sales and design over that 10 year span and really, really missed the real. We had a real estate, you know, we had, that was part of it, but I just kind of, I was involved in all of it, you know, the design, the construction. I would actually hand draw plans back then when I first started and I just really missed the real estate side and the More and more I got into leadership and, you know, the marketing aspect, continuing to do that. I just. In 2020, it was just time. The construction industry had changed so much to where, you know, the codes, a lot of code changes, a lot of different changes. You know, the big thing for me was I. I received a letter and this happens if you're in construction. That. But we, we had a. A letter came in. I was getting sued from somebody. I built a House for 10 years before and it was. Had a very good relationship with them during the construction, after construction, and they just didn't reach out to me. There's a letter comes from returning, hey, they're suing you because something leaked or a window was leaking or whatever it was. I was like, you know what? This is not something I want to do anymore. So I sold out of CRG in 2020. We. We built probably over 100 oceanfront homes. A lot of. We were doing a development at the time when I sold out as well and then got start Easy home search in 2019. We. I was in the mortgage industry for about a year and a half. We brought Revolution Mortgage to the Myrtle beach market with some partners. We're the number one branch in the nation in 2021. And I decided I wasn't a big fan of the real estate or the mortgage industry. So open up Palms Realty in 2021. And we have 100. We had our quarterly meeting this morning. We did over 280 million in sales last year, about 810 closings.

So that's awesome. Congratulations on that. How like, what is the theme through these. Is it. Is it partners? Like, because I'm sure a lot of people listening are like, well, I mean, that's a lot of different businesses. Obviously you're entrepreneurial in spirit. Like, it's obviously just part of who you are. We didn't even get to reside yet. But you're a co founder in that as well. Is it. Is it partnerships? Is it opportunity? I mean, I definitely heard, you know, I had a young family and so, you know, needed to figure out how to. To get through this financial crisis. Let's serve some market needs here. Certainly Myrtle beach was probably a great market to be building. Yeah. You know, 15 years ago, probably still is today.

Oh, yeah, yeah. So great market for sure.

Yeah. But like, like, like in, in, in, in crg. I think we heard that pretty clearly. But like, you know, Revolution Palms, like, what's the spark there is like, I have a couple of good people and this is a good idea. Like how, like, what's the motivation?

Yeah, for sure. You know, the, the. And we also have. I'm partnered with John Cheplak and Chep, like digital as well. They, they all are, they all go together, you know what I mean? Like, what I do in check, like digital helps reside, you know, what I do with Easy home search helps Palms Realty helps some of the reside teams as well. So for me, like, what I'm passionate about is the marketing side, the legion side, the conversion side. But really, anytime you form a partnership, you got to. I think I'm really good at choosing people who end up doing a really good job in whatever career, giving people the opportunity. I think a lot of times in business, people never let their ego out of the way and never allow themselves to hire the right people or to put the person in the right position. I know what I'm good at and that's what I'm going to do and that's what I enjoy doing. I'm fine letting somebody. I'm fine being behind the curtain, not in the spotlight, you know, like, that's, I'm totally okay with that. And really, I think in business you have to align yourself with the, with the right people and understand to give them the opportunities to find success. And if you look back at crg, I had great employees, great leadership, brought on great business partners, allowed leaders to do what they're supposed to be doing and allow them to do the things they want to do with. With revolution. Same thing. I had good partners and the lenders that were there, you know, I focused on the marketing side, the things I was good at, generating leads with easy home search to help the mortgage grow, that side of it grow. Same thing with Palms Realty. I align myself with great business partners that, you know, I do what I do to grow the business and they, you know, they're becoming really good leaders and, you know, we're building a really good team. So no matter what business you're in, you just gotta, you gotta hire the right people, but you also gotta allow them to do what you hired them to do. And that's what a lot of times I think companies struggle with is they bring people on in these positions and they never allow them to actually do what they're supposed to be doing.

Yeah, a couple of consistent themes that I've heard in these conversations on the show. One of them is like the right answer. If you're looking for a person or a skill set or whatever, the right answer might already be right next to you and you're just not thinking of them that way. Like you haven't opened the door or explored it or whatever with them. And then the other one is, you know, I'm a super, this is a common team founder story. I'm a super successful real estate agent in one way or another. I've got all these opportunities so I need to bring people alongside me so I can continue to take advantage of those opportunities. And I struggle to turn things over to other people because they're not as good, they're not as fast, they're not as diligent, they don't do it my way. Even though I maybe did a half baked job of documenting, you know, what a successful process looks like. So I really appreciate so much of what you shared there. In terms of approaching leadership, Palms Realty, what do you think are a couple of keys to success, you know, the past couple of years? What like if you were to highlight, you know, why was this team successful? What are a couple key things at top of mind?

Yeah, I mean for me a lot of the things I did before we opened we, I had built before we open and a lot of teams or companies build those after they open. Like we had a marketing platform that agents could use. It was ready when we opened the doors. You know, we, we hired in a way we've, I've been CRG reran EOS so I've been studying EOS since 2016. 17. We ran that. We, we. When we started Palms Realty we were under a kind of an EOS structure where we have the weekly meetings and all those things. L10 meetings, you know, the rocks, all those. So we, we built it in a way that from the very early on we had the structure. Like what a lot of companies do and teams do is they don't have any of the structure, they don't have any of the systems, the processes. So they're like, hey, let's grow first and let's add all that stuff later. Well, adding all that stuff later a lot of times means you lose half the people you have. So with Palms, it was important to me because the two partners I had when we initially launched, we're new to. There was the first business. So like, okay, I want to set all these systems and processes in place. I want to look at the brokerage. It's a, it's not a team, it's a brokerage. But we have a lot of systems in place that are probably more in line with a team because it's hard to be profitable as a general brokerage. So we had to build, we had to build processes systems. We had to build certain, you know, certain Legion company Legion and different aspects of the company where we could be more profitable, where the company could keep more of the total gross commission income. You know, so that's, that was really a big reason we had all those things in place. I already had the lead gen in place when we opened the door so that we use that as a consistent way to recruit. You know, we, early on we said for X amount of agent, for every agent that comes on, we're going to generate X amount of leads. And that's never changed. Like for me it's, that's the. I tell people that's the easy part. For me, like lead gen is, you know, if you want 100 leads, 500 leads or whatever, I could build the systems and processes where you get those leads, where people fall down is what happens after you get the lead. So we build a lot of those systems. But it's also any company, your leadership is going to evolve. Like we, we had partners, we had our head of operations we hired within three months. We had a head of agent training and development which was hired in three months. We hired our recruiter after eight months. I mean that's, I'm not saying that's the way to go, but that's the way we went. And, but now our head of operations is actually a real estate agent on the team. So understand, you could write out your perfect business structure on paper, but it's never going to be that way. You got to be able to change and adapt. And you know, we didn't replace the head of operations. We are, my business partners are now have enough understanding where they've kind of stepped into that role and shared it. You know, we have two other business partners now within Palms Realty that are helping in the broker in charge role. And then they. Our head of agent training and development who runs our AEP program, he is a business partner as well.

At some level it's a luxury, but it's also, I think, something that people, more people have the opportunity to leverage, but they don't. And most folks probably watching or listening are in this zone of, you know, I'm fixing the plane while I'm flying it, or I'm fixing the engine while I'm driving it, or you know, whatever some of these metaphors are for trying to implement the systems that were absent, you know, because this all just kind of happened. We had, you know, good lead gen and so we brought people around it and now we need to like figure out who's going to do what. So this idea of essentially winning by design is, is something that I'd love to see more people pursue. Talk about the idea of brokerage versus Team Ridge. I mean obviously that was, you know, if you had opportunity to make some decisions in advance of opening the doors, how, you know, how did you all think about it? And you know, for someone who's thinking about, you know, maybe they've got the early stages of a team, they've got, you know, maybe a full time or part time assistant, they're doing some kind of a, maybe a lead share referral type program with a couple other people, they're thinking about forming it together and this is going to be a decision they face at some point down the line. Or it could be a franchisee who's thinking about going independent. Like when you, when you all were thinking about this for Palms, how did you think about that opportunity one way or the other? Independent vs franchise and brokerage vs team or team Ridge.

Yeah, with. So I've always, I've never, and not saying any to discount, obviously there's a lot of great franchises, there's a lot of different, you know, teams and everything you'd be a part of. But I've always been an independent company like, you know, so we just went that route and it was something that Josh and Nick wanted to build as well. Wanted to build their own brand and build something that, you know, we have a company that there's an asset there tied to the company, tied to the brand. So we went that route and we knew we wanted to be a big, you know, we wanted to be 100 agents plus. And we wanted to give the agents the ability to, when they sell something, it goes under their name, not under a team name. So that aspect, aspect of it. So we never really sought out the team side. But I knew understanding business and the, the margins in a general brokerage and what we're competing against. We had to build systems around training like a lot of the agents we bring on. Like I talk about aep, which is our agent excellence program, we already had that outline when we opened and we knew we had to hire for it. And Tripp, who runs that, who's now a business partner, he was with me at crg and we knew he would be the right person for it. So he came on and ran that and we, you know, told, talked through the structure and everything. We run one of those classes each quarter roughly. We bring on about 10 agents per quarter that go through that. So I think there's about 60, roughly about 60 agents on our team that went through the AEP program. You know, so for us, it was important to build these, these type of teaching and training and all that where we can bring on the newer agents or the agents that, you know, have been in business for maybe 12 months, 18 months, started with a company and they're not finding success. And then they come over to us and they're, they go through this program, they go through this training and they're successful. I tell, you know, I love new agents and I love training new agents, but sometimes you're the all star to the one that didn't have success for the first company to come to you. And they're like, oh, wow, I'm doing all these things and there's all these opportunities. So a lot of the people that go through that AEP were actually agents at other companies. And, you know, in the market we're in now, where you need to have the training, the education, you know, the. All the skills, a lot of them, a lot of them are coming into the AEP because they realized they got into real estate in 2021, you know, they could. Everybody was buying, right? So everybody was an all star. Whether it was a real estate agent, whether it was a, you know, a Legion company or whatever. Everybody looked like they were doing all the right things and that's what market that the market did. So, you know, for Palms, it's, it's been important for us to have those trainings and everything out and to build programs where the company, you know, retains more of the gross commission income.

I imagine that your best recruiting is those stories of people who, you know, took a couple swings in another opportunity or another, you know, brokerage didn't really work out for them. And this kind of training in the systems and the support that you're providing was the difference maker. That sounds like. That sounds like all the foundation for a good recruiting program.

Yeah, I mean, really, we've, you know, we've had a lot of those stories, right? Not only, you know, whether it's agents. You know, we had one agent, he did his first full year, went through AEP. I think he did like 6 or 7 million. We had one agent, she, she did about 6 million last year and she, I think she did a million the year before. And, you know, obviously when Myrtle beach, we're still in, you know, the market that the numbers I think are down about 10 to 15% previous year. But the only thing that saved us a new construction because we have a ton of new construction, so our resales were in the 30% down, but the new construction kind of, kind of helped everything.

Yeah, it's helpful. I mean, if you don't have inventory to sell, thank goodness someone's building it. See what your contacts are doing on Zillow Monday, December 8 Join Follow up Boss for a sneak peek webinar where you'll be among the first to see how to get Zillow searching, browsing and saving insights for the contacts in your database directly inside Follow Up Boss so when a past client of yours gets that late night and extra bedroom would be really great right now, kind of feeling, you'll know before anyone else who's showing high intent to buy or sell insights about what's happening right now so you can deliver a personalized touch at scale. See what your contacts are doing on Zillow. Monday, December 8th at 1pm Eastern 10am Pacific. Learn more and sign up through the link in the description below. You're in your podcast app. Check out the description of this episode right down below. It's the first line and the first link. Now back to the conversation. Okay, I want to go to like this zone that you've built your career in or through, and I want to do it through a couple of like, like the two ends of the spectrum kind of, and then have you kind of like walk into your philosophy because you obviously bias one way rather than the other. So, you know, when I, when I heard you say, you know, our goal out of the gate was to get to 100 agents, right? So it made me think of folks who've been on the show before and how they got there. And it really is through lead Gen, of course, is one of the primary drivers of a successful team model. I mean, it's a necessary ingredient. So on episode seven, we had Justin Haver, who like you was early in SEO in his local market, was generating all of these leads and like had to essentially form a team in order to capitalize on these opportunities because he couldn't deal with it all himself. On the far other end of the spectrum, you have Lauren Bowen at Robert Slack, who, you know, her growth path with the organization was from four agents to about 800 and for several years they were the number one spender on realtor.com leads. They since diversified to 16 different lead sources. But a lot of those are also, you know, partners and like folks like Zillow. And then you have some like, I'm sure Justin is in this camp too, but you know Gary Ashton started by dominating local SEO and then immediately started reinvesting his money into a variety of different lead sources. And so, you know, for you, I feel like you're definitely way on the far end of let's grow our own, let's make our own, let's generate our own, etc. Like, how do you think about kind of those two ends? Like, do we want to partner and buy someone else's produce or do we want to essentially grow our own produce?

So I've been, you know, it's funny, Justin, Gary, all those guys, we, we all go way back. You know, they're real estate webmaster clients. You know, one of the questions towards the end you ask, it's one of them. So for me, it's just something I'm really good at, you know, so not every team has that luxury, not every company has that luxury. Like I could go build out AdWords accounts, understand SEO, understand how to write, understand, you know, what needs to be done there. So for me, it just made sense. Like what people pay somebody to do, I could do myself. So generating for us, early on we said, you know, for every agent we bring on, we're going to generate 20 to 30 leads a month. And that's kind of the number we've stuck to. I think we generated about 35,000 leads last year that I handled all that legion for. So for me, it's easy to say that where somebody else is not, you know, so most of them need somebody. Right? But you could still do it in a way, like with AdWords. If you do Google AdWords pay per click, you can still own the account. Like that's the beauty of it is owning the account. Because as you optimize an account, the account gets better with time and you can convert at a higher level. I think it's so good to have, I mean, we, we don't buy Zillow, Lee's, realtor.com or any other national portals with within Palms, but we do have agents that do. So it can be successful, but it just falls on to that what happens after the lead comes in, that's really what matters. You know, there's a very good book I talk about, often oversubscribed, that kind of is written in 2015, but it really talks about that journey. Like Google did this study and it was 1174. So for somebody to become a buyer and I kind of take that same philosophy when we build out Google AdWord campaigns and all that, you need 11 interactions over different areas, seven hours of consumption. So content and then four hour or four different locations, meaning it could be face to face, could be on the phone, could be reading your emails. So for me, with what, what accelerates lead gen and pay per click and AdWords, if you have all those things, you could utilize those things in your advertising because Google found that if you do all those things, you could then move somebody into your network of potentially being able to sell to, you know, so that's what I look at for as, as far as the lead gen aspect of it. But yeah, I think either, I mean, you see it, right? You talk about Robert Slack, super successful, you know, you talk about Gary Ashton, had a mix of all of it. Justin who there's no Zillow in Canada. So if you want to see what you can do from a standpoint of pay per click, of SEO, just look at what Justin's been able to do. I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. I think the wrong answer is when you do all these things and you get the leads and you have no systems and processes and you don't hold people accountable, then you ultimately fail. That's really, you know, where the struggle comes in.

That's one of the reasons I love hosting this show, is that there's no one right way to do it. Essentially what I heard is, you know, this was just my strength and interest area. It was something that I could do. And it just reminds me of the common theme that we have here, which is leverage. You know, when you look at what you need to do, how you're spending your time, what are you good at, what do you hate, what are you bad at or what are you really good at? And you enjoy, but it'd be so much less expensive for someone else to do it. And so this was one of those. It's like it's a specialty, it's not inexpensive, it is expensive to generate leads one way or another and it just happened to be something you're really good at. So it's a kind of an activity that you hold on to because as you do a basic leverage analysis or a time analysis. Yeah, you should hold on to that, keep doing it because it's a great high value use of your time. Especially when you start throwing numbers like 35,000 around.

Yeah. You know, and I think too many people do that. Like they, you know, in the, in the realm of VAs for everything. I think what a lot of people do is they take, take the things they are good at and they allow somebody else to do whether it's your writing. Like I still write all of my own content, like everything, emails, I don't, I just write it myself, you know, and I enjoy writing and I'll always hold on to that because that's what, that's part of what I am and who I am. So, you know, those are the things that I think too, too often is a lot of times people will give up the things that they're good at, have somebody else doing it and all of a sudden they, you know, they start, they start failing. I mean their business starts failing. So, you know, that's something I'm, is near and dear to my heart and is, is a, is a part of who I am and, and you know, how I've built successful companies and something I'll always do. I'll have, you know, I have people around me to help, but it's still something that I'm digging into leads, I'm looking at Google Analytics, I'm checking out AdWords campaigns we're running, you know, in so many different markets with you know, check like digital, easy, home search, all those things I pay attention to Semrush. I still, part of my day is getting up in the morning looking at Semrush to see where we at as far as rankings and everything else.

Okay, so for folks who aren't Familiar, SEMrush is SEM Search engine marketing rush. Semrush is a tool that you use if you want to know what website traffic is doing. And I really appreciate this. Like I have a feeling that, you know, you get five team leaders in a room and they, and three of them say, yeah, I, you know, I leverage this to a va and so the person thinks, oh well I should do that too. But they haven't done this kind of self awareness piece maybe that you obviously have have because you're very clear in who you are, what you're about, what's important to you, what you're really good at, what you want to be expert at or what you already are, et cetera. And I think every growth story is unique. And again, that's why we talk to lots of different people on this show is that, is that there's no one right way to do it. Even if you're, you know, in partnership or friendship or mentorship with other people, what they're telling you is not what you should be doing, it's the way that they did it and how you might think about it too. It's to provoke you to reflect and figure out the right thing. For yourself. There's no playbook to do this or else everyone would be doing it.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, there's definitely, there's definitely no playbook. Step by step. There's not, you know, there's. And that's a big part of why we started to reside was, you know, to, to give a lot of the teams and the companies those systems and processes that they struggle with because we saw a need for it. Like exactly what I talk about, you know, a lot of the things that are super easy to me, so many teams struggle with and they really never learn. Like, you know, I posted about the email authentication that has to be done by February and like all these teams and companies don't realize it and you know, think it's the email provider, but depending on who, who manages your website, some website providers manage the DNS. So you got to send all the information to them to actually get all this done. So that's a lot of what I'm doing this week is helping this afternoon is helping people understand what they need to send to their website provider or email provider to get that stuff done. It's just a lot to keep up with. Right. Like, it's like, hey, you know, there's all these things and that's where a lot of people get bogged down on. And a lot of times it doesn't make sense for them to be doing it.

Yeah, I want to go into, you know, essentially what you said is something that I've heard from several other people in these conversations, which is, you know, it's not, it's not just the lead source. I mean, you have to figure out which ones are profitable for you or which ones, you know, are have the potential to be made profitable if they're not immediately. And it's all in the follow up. You know, essentially there's really no such thing as a bad lead. It's, it's how we handle it. You need different approaches for different types of leads. So start maybe high level. What are the main buckets? You know, as you're working with different teams and helping them do their kind of communication, follow up or even the lead gen itself, like what are the main buckets of leads in terms of how people need to be followed up with differently? Like I think, and I'll give you one more thing and then I'll actually let you answer the question I asked. And that's like, you know, I think people say, oh, these leads suck. And it's because they think that, you know, two phone calls, both of which Resulted in voicemails and one automated text or email should produce a listing, right? And nothing's that easy. So like I think they're like mismanaged expectations. So like what are the key categories in terms of types of follow up? Like what types of leads have a. Generally have a longer Runway and what does that longer Runway look like and which ones have the higher intent and you have to do less maybe to engage or is there. Or is that even way too over simplistic?

No, it's not. I mean the one thing I want to quickly talk about is a lot of people are lazy around this. Like they'll grab an action plan that a hundred different people used, they won't change it and they'll send it out and attach it to a lead. People want to read stuff, they want to engage with you, they want to get to know you. And if an action plan copy that somebody else. Like you're not going to read that. Like sometimes you just need to take a step back and be like, would I even read this? Like what I'm sending is it adding value? And there's a lot of companies out there that could help you with this stuff to add value into the content you create. But for me, especially as like texting and phone calls are getting so much harder, I've always leaned heavy. I've probably been sending a weekly newsletter out for every company I was a part of for probably 15 years. It's just, you know, and I, I'm always tweaking subject lines and always doing things that, you know, I tweaked a subject line on E alerts that I send out and I tested it for a day and had an 85% open rate. You know, so there's those things that I do. But I think what a lot of people do is they just kind of blanket put everybody in one lump and that's how they follow up with them. You know, Follow up Boss has so many great ways with stages to segment the audience based on your cadence, your follow up and everything. El, you know, but what, what you said is a lot of people just, they'll go two or three calls and, and that's it, two or three messages and that it, that's it. A lot of them don't even set up E alerts. You know, there's all these things that you could do and it really, if you think of that, you know, 7, 11, 4, like that aspect of it and think like, do I have 7 hours of content that they could actually consume? And that's why? You see YouTube channels do so well with people that do a good job with them because by the time they actually reach out and make, you know, call you, they've consumed 20 hours of your content and they feel like you're a movie star. They feel like you're your best friend or whatever it is. And you know, those are the things that you really need to think about. Like it's not just legion, but you also got to think about after. But really look at your content. Like the big differentiator in a lot of these companies is the content that they produce. And the amount of content they do on social media and consuming doesn't mean video. Like it could be reading emails, it could be a phone call with you, it could be a zoom call, it could be a newsletter, it could be your social media. You know, all of those different things. And you know, if you, if you do a really good job of that part, you'll see your conversion become better. You know, a lot of, if you engage with your database, you're going to have more phone calls, your agent is going to have more phone calls. So doing those things, you'll definitely see a better as far as follow up cadence. I mean, you know, if you, if you're, if somebody's buying in a certain amount of, you know, say within two months, you're probably speaking to them at least once a week. Right. If somebody's buying in 30 days, you might be talking to them every single day. But where I think a lot of agents, companies fall down is like, what are we doing those nurture leads? And they'll just put an action plan on it that doesn't provide any value and they end up, you know, a phone call three months later, oh, we bought with somebody else.

Okay. And several areas I want to go. So I guess the one that I'll go next is newsletters. I think I, I've been an email person for not really by design. I just kind of fell into it and realized the power of the channel. Even though it's not sexy, it's not really that cool. People, you know, people will say things like it's dead. They've been saying that the entire decade or dozen years that I've been spending time in email. But I think one of the things, and I see this like in all the Facebook groups that I'm in, for example, I have a database of 120,000 people and I need to find the best way to send this email newsletter to them. Like, well, for starters, chop that 120,000 people into minimum, sorry, maximum, like swaths of like 10 to 20,000. Talk a little bit about how. And so what I'm teasing up there is segmenting. Like that's one way to make your newsletters more successful. But just in general for anyone thinking about like, okay, yeah, that is a good idea. This is something I've struggled with over the years. What are some basic tips for folks that are like, I need, I need a newsletter to keep my database engaged in addition to any kind of like segmented, smart list oriented stuff based on what they're actually doing and what I actually know about them. If someone's going to take on a. I want to be in front of a large chunk of my database on a consistent basis. A newsletter is certainly one of the ways to do it. But there are also a lot of ways to, you know, get unsubscribed and blocked.

Yeah, for sure. I mean you definitely, like you said, the first thing, the last thing you want to do is take a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand person database and mass send a newsletter. You know, there you got to warm up the audience. If you break it into segmentation, you're not sending a hundred thousand emails at one time. We have our main newsletter, it goes out weekly that has a lot of what we write on our blog is newsworthy stuff. So we put a snippet of that and then link back to it. We also use it for home values and different things. And there's a way that people read like people typically when they read a newsletter, they start at the top, they jump right to the bottom, then they go to the middle and then a lot of times they'll go back and actually read it. So when you think about that like your call to actions, you know, we always place call to actions in the middle and the bottom. You know, our home valuation call to action is always at the bottom. Every single week we get about 20 or 30 new home valuation leads. We use fellow. There's a call to action at the bottom because I know people typically they read, you know, 1, 3, 2 and then they might skim through the whole thing. So you know, there's that side of it. But when you look at like segmentation and the way we do it is different because easy home searches covers eight different states. So we're segmenting based on IP address, where they live, the state they live in. So we're sending certain information to that and then we're sending, you know, to that state and then we're sending stuff based on where they're searching. But if you look at segmentation based on, you know, the, maybe the ones you're sending to the hot leads are different than your emails to the warm leads, to the nurture leads. You know, maybe the newsletter is set up in a way where, hey, this group is looking for condos. Like if for me in Myrtle Beach, I would say, okay, I'm gonna have a newsletter for condos. These people are looking for condos. These people look for single family homes. So I'm gonna have, you know, that's different segmentation you could have. And it doesn't have to be a newsletter, it could be an email. But when you send it, like when you think of unsubscribes, especially the way it's headed now with everything, you just want to make sure that you're sending something of value that, you know, spam is not spam. It's not based on frequency. It's based on what you're actually sending. So I could send you something of value every day and it's not spam because you're reading it. But if I'm sending you trash every day, then most likely day two or even day one, you're going to unsubscribe or, you know, submit it as spam. And the new guidelines on Gmail, I think it's. Or Google, I think it's.003% if you. That's the threshold. So if you think about that number, if you send 1000 emails and 5 people submitted as spam, you're over that threshold. So it's, you know, email is very powerful. But it's going to be the ones that, what I see happening, the ones that are doing a really good job of it are going to do even better. The ones that are like, okay, yeah, I kind of do email. I want to do it. They're going to go in and blast it out and those are going to be the ones that never make it to an inbox.

Yeah, you're burning your opportunities today. If you're not, the three words I've always associated with it is timely, relevant, and anticipated. Anticipated is like, I have a reasonable expectation of hearing from you. I don't, I don't see your name or your email and wonder like, where the heck did this come from? So like, that's a hitch right out of the gate. So when you talked about kind of like warming up the list or warming up the relationship, like, that builds some amount of anticipation. Oh, this is someone who is. No one ever thinks this consciously, but it's like, oh, this is that person who's in my inbox every once in a while with some interesting stuff about this area I live in or about this type of home that I express some interest in or whatever. So timely, relevant, anticipated are the three words that I've always kind of associated with pretty good email. And it is, it's getting tighter and tighter, you know. Yeah, GDPR in Europe, which is essentially individual human beings own their digital aspects of their digital identity and privacy. You're seeing, I think California brought it to life. I know Virginia is one of the states. There are a number of states that are like 20 states that have some version of GDPR in play. And this affects websites, it affects email, it affects social, it affects the way we can advertise, retarget people, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's a really delicate thing in general. And the best answer is, you know, a, what's working? What are people actually responding to? And B, like, not that you're the audience, but like, you know, you talked about reading some of your own copy or testing some subject lines and things like, what is this a thing? Like, like what, what I read this thing? Is this thing useful? What are other people telling me? Anything I say there trigger anything for you?

One thing I do think about, like you said that a lot of people are like, it's been dead for 12 years. Right? Like it's, you know, email is not, it's not, it's not what it used to be. People don't read them. You heard this? I've heard people and either leaders talk about like E alerts and setting up saved searches, like, oh, everybody gets those from everywhere. There's no point in doing them. Great, keep telling people that because I'm going to continue doing them. And like our, we changed the subject line in our E Alert and our E Alerts on average get about 70% open rate. Now click through rate. Most of them will look at the E alert and look at the listings on there, you know, but if you, if you don't do that and then if you start doing it, pay attention to your direct traffic, your direct traffic will spike. You know, so a lot of times what people say is not really the truth, you know, like E alerts don't work. Okay, well, I'm still getting 70% open rate on 100,000 people, 65%. Just do your own. You know, for me, a lot of the, like, I, I listen to a lot of audibles when I run or work out, but I also do A lot of self study myself. Like I try trial and error. Like for me that's people like oh, who did you follow as far as marketing and everything else? I mean I looked at different things but for me it's really been self discovery and trying things myself like subject lines and just different things that you know, over the years still reading the marketing and following a lot of different things. But for me it's more kind of self discovery and doing them. And I'm not saying that's the best way. That's not, you know, there's, there's definitely options out there that you don't have to do that as much. But for me that's kind of how I got into the whole marketing side of the business and everything else.

Yeah, really fair. I want to go into like one more zone with you here before I get to my, my three pairs of closers. You know, I heard you say, you know, a lot of people are taking the same action plan and sending it out and you like essentially it's, it's a lot of mediocrity and replication. People are sending doing the same things. I also heard you talk about your own approach, which is I get my hands into the tools, I look at the numbers, I manipulate things, I do the writing myself, etc and where I am here is on the doorstep of AI where I see one of my fears for people in general is they see these tools, they approach them in a quick and simple oversimplified way. They do basic prompting, it's not super customized. They take the output and they publish whatever publish publishing looks like, whether it's to a website, an email, a voicemail script or whatever the case may be. And if everyone's doing this now you have like again some mass version of mediocrity where everyone doing about the same thing because hey, it's super fast. Like I have a, like I don't know where you stand on what I just shared this general concept of like what is its right place and how much the human should be involved in making any tool, whether it's an automation or, or it's actually is artificially intelligent. I think a lot of things get the AI label slapped on them that are not actually intelligent in any way but like give a go at that. I mean I, I think you're of the same mind as me of like you got to be in there, you got to get your hands dirty. That's where the learning happens, that's where the experimentation happens. You have never know what you're going to Learn. And you can't be doing things quickly and risk being undifferentiated in the process. Like, it needs to be you at some level.

Yeah, for sure. And you saw that, like, when you talk about AI and SEO, like, there's ways you could use it, but most people aren't using it. The ways you need to use it to make like it's not, hey, I'm gonna just copy this URL, rewrite this blog and not do anything with it and just copy and paste. You know, there's. Even if you go that route, we don't even use AI and blog writing. We just write them all. Because. Because, yes, it's more expensive, but what we see to do it correct, you got to do it, you got to edit it. There's probably two hours, two and a half hours per blog. You know, some of my really good writers can write a blog in that amount of time with all the. They'll do it for, like, different ways to pull resources and things in, but not to write. And Google updated SEO last year. So there was Google, the helpful content. They launched. They did two core updates. So they did. I think it was like five or six updates the second half of last year, which destroyed a lot of your. A lot of the websites that had a ton of traffic, you know, because they're trying to figure out. They're like, all of a sudden we have this, you know, the amount of content created a day is like, what, tenfold what it was three years ago or whatever it is. So they're trying to figure out, okay, what's good content, what's not. And really what you're starting to see is more of the. Which has always been the case, but more of the hyper local, you know, more of the, hey, this is based on an experience and a story I had, you know, writing in a way where it's actually based on experiences you had and, you know, all those things. So AI can't do that. AI can't produce a, you know, experience or, you know, this is with a client, you know, write about that, those type of things. And then for me, like, you know, the FCC guidelines, everything that's coming out around that and changes. And with AI, AI calling and everything else, or, you know, you're already looking at maybe a 30 answer rate on phone calls. Maybe what happens when every company is using AI calling to call 5000 phone numbers a day. Yeah, but that's going to be part of, you know, and, and so it's like we're going to build all these Things based. We're going to build a company based on things that probably aren't going to be allowed to do or if you do it and you get caught, it's 500 for every time it happens, you know, and if you're making 5,000 phone calls a day and say 500 of those are ones where you'll get fined, there's a place, I think obviously there's a place for it. Like I could see like when you talk about AI calling, you know, if you, if you load. And a lot of them aren't true AI. They're, you know, they're learning. You got to pump a bunch of data in them to learn. Right? So I could see it on a customer service standpoint. If you're calling in and I have a company and it's a AI bot, you know, that you're speaking to, I could see it there. But you know, when I see people share it and it's like ISAs calling AI, I just, I don't know. To me it's, it's a little bit. You just got to be careful. I mean, you know, and that's what I look at like first and foremost, whatever I do, whatever I'm selling, I want to make sure I'm protecting whoever I'm selling it to. And if I don't feel comfortable with something, then I'm not going to stand behind it. It's just, I mean that's, that's just the way I am. I just, I'm not going to sell something that, you know, six months from now I could in myself, I could dedicate a ton of time and energy to it and it's not working. So I've never really dug. I use AI some, you know, I've used it to create subject lines is a great thing, right? Create subject lines and different things like that. But I won't use it for my email content. I'll write it myself.

A lot of really good stuff there. I appreciate your approach. It is again, I think, timely, relevant, anticipated. Experiential was a great theme that you offered in there. This idea that it's story based and experiential. The kind of thing that other people can relate to more effectively and something that only you can do. Okay, I got so many other follow up questions, but that's for another conversation. Preston, I would love for you to share what, what your favorite team to root for is or the best team you've ever been a member of.

Yeah, man. I mean this one's, you know, you mentioned him earlier, you know, for me, I think, because I've, you know, was with real estate webmasters and, and saw what he. He's done and he's probably, you know, as far as speaking, I think he's kind of in the. In line with me as far as like an introvert more so than an extrovert as Justin Haver's team. Like, Justin I've known a very long time, wouldn't say I had a really great relationship for him, Tom, but. But seeing what he's done, and to me it's like he's. He's done it without that, those national lead sources, you know, without all those things, you know, Canada. Zillow is not in Canada. I don't. Realtor ca, I think is owned by the Real estate association up there or the country, however that's set up. But just seeing what he's been able to do from a legion side, and it's kind of a lot of what I've done through the years. You know, I always love seeing him, you know, having success and being successful. So, you know, and Gary Ashton as well. But, you know, all those guys have kind of been part of REW back in the day. I think Justin was probably around the same time as me. Gary Ashton might have been right before me or right around the same time. But, yeah, I love rooting for those guys for sure, because they're all good. They're all good human beings as well.

100%. Yeah. And we do talk real estate webmasters, I think, on both episode seven with Justin Haver and episode one with Gary Ashton. So if you want to bounce back in YouTube or your podcast app, check those conversations out. Preston, what is one of your most frivolous purchases? Or what's a cheap skate habit you hold on to even though you probably don't need to?

Yeah, I thought about this one, man. And I like, I don't know if I have really have. Have any frivolous purchases, you know, Cheapskate. I think I'm okay eating canned tuna for lunch with black. You know what I mean?

It's like out of the can or you at least put it on a plate.

That's what. No, I'll put it in a small. But probably I actually have a paper bowl in my office, so I'll just, you know, for me, a lot of time I'm in the middle of it and obviously I know I need to eat lunch. I'll just grab a can of tuna with a little bit of mayonnaise and mustard and black beans.

Love it.

Probably totally different than any other answer you've been, you've been told, but it's. Yeah, for me, I don't really, you know, frivolous purchases. For me, I don't really have much. You know, a lot of things we do is travel based and anything with my family, I don't see frivolous.

So, yeah, good call. How do you invest your time and energy in learning, growing and developing? Or how do you invest your time into resting, relaxing and recharging? What does it look like for you to do either of those?

Yeah, for me, I haven't been doing it as much. Just, it's. I can't. It was just terrible to say this, but I'm not a very great. Like at cold weather running, you know, I enjoy running and throwing on and audible and listening. But also in the network, like I, you know, one of the best things that, of business decisions ever made in my life was, was joining, you know, coaching with John Chaplak and being a part of that. It's not only John, but it's also the community itself. You know, just, just being around other people because a lot of times you're on a, you know, you're, you're on an island, especially a lot of local markets, because you're not going to find a lot of people that really maybe think like me or, you know, or other people. So it's, it's great when you're in a national network like that, of people that are kind of going at it at a similar pace, doing the things, doing the things that are important to them. So for me, it's a lot of the learnings and a lot of things I've done have been a part of communities like that. So whether it's coaching community or seeking out people that, you know, that seek accountability, that want to be held accountable, you know, that want to get called out whenever they're not doing what they're supposed to.

Love it. Peer group is critical. It's like, especially, especially if everyone has a high bar.

It's just so much to learn too, for sure. Like, I listen to podcasts, so a lot of it, you know, throughout the day I don't listen as much because I'm in the, you know, on calls or whatever, but in, when I'm working out, I'm. I don't listen to music, which is sad to say, but I, I don't really listen to music. I'll listen to it in, in my car, but, but a lot of times I'm listening to audible books in my car or podcasts. And that's a lot of the times when I'm listening to, you know, reading books is. Is listening to the Audibles.

Yeah, same. I. I listen to a lot of podcasts and a lot of different types of podcasts too. Anyway, this has been great. I appreciate you so much. If anyone has made it to this point. We haven't hit an hour yet, but we're close. They might want to connect with you or learn more about you. I'll certainly round up all the core websites, but where would you send people who want to follow up on this conversation?

Yeah, I mean, Instagram. Preston Guyton, Instagram. Same on Facebook. You know, reside platform, chat, like digital. But those two social media obviously is the best place to message me and find me, for sure.

Cool. Sounds good. I'll link all that stuff up. If you're listening in a podcast app, it's right down below in the description. If you're watching on YouTube. YouTube, it's right down below in the description. And if you happen to be watching or listening@realestateteamos.com, it's right down below in the description. Preston, you're awesome. I appreciate you. I'm glad we did this, and I look forward to the next time we can connect in person.

Thank you. Thanks for checking out this episode of Team OS. For email exclusive insights every week, sign up at realestateteamos.com.