How Our Teams Create Growth Opportunities with Agents [SUMMIT]

Lead sources and lead distribution, recruiting funnels and agent avatars. Repeat and referral business threats and opportunities to the real estate team model. The Summit series continues with Renee Funk, Ken Posick, Jenny Wiemert and Ben Lobby. Each shares the unique ways their teams are generating opportunities with agents, organic database, social content, ppc, Zillow and beyond. They share what they're most focused on in today's market. They explain how they define and manage team culture. They look ahead to the future of real estate teams and more. The summit series continues right now on Real Estate Team os.

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Welcome to Team os, your guide to starting, growing and optimizing real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte.

Lead sources, pros and cons of different lead sources. You're all doing things a little bit differently. I guess we'll kick it off here. You know, we, we've established that you developed a very strong media presence, essentially via YouTube and other social channels. I assume that's your primary lead source. I assume it's primarily organic, but anything you want to share about your journey over the years of team building with regard to lead sources?

Yeah, I mean, early on it was, hey, come together, we're all going to prospect together. Expires for sale by owner's door, knock. And then I got to realize if I wanted to retain people, I needed to create some sort of source of them to stick around beyond that. And so, yeah, yeah, if you're training.

Me to do it myself, I'll just go do it myself.

You just go do it yourself. Yeah, you can hire a coach and accountability partner. You're good to go. So then it became, you know, let's, let's buy Zillow, realtor.com, pay per click, hire ISAs, all this kind of stuff, which became wildly unprofitable. And so I swung back the other way and I was just like, let's figure something else. So we started with content and YouTube became my thing and then it became the website, then short form and media and all that kind of stuff. So we have like 27 different sources of business now and we track everything back to the first source of when they found us. And so, yeah, but majority of what we do is content marketing based at this point.

How did it become unprofitable? And have any of you gone down that road? Like, like what was unprofitable? Was it conversion rate? Was it just the increasing cost, like what was it that made it challenging to build around?

I think anything can work. But you know, we were trying to do everything at once. And so it was like Zillow takes time and conversion cycles are longer than I was willing to make it. And so then we try, we're like, let's do radio ads at the same time. And like that takes a really long time. And so I just mistakenly said, I've got some money set aside, let's just spend it all. What I should have done is built a pillar and that's and kind of build on it from there, which is now what we've done.

Really good. How about you, Ben?

So we use primarily pay per click advertising through Ylopo as our main lead source. And I would say in reality the more important thing from just the lead source is really like the funnel that occurs and the leads experience after they enter the ecosystem. And that took forever ever to figure out and refine because it's almost different per lead source. So how we engage with a potential seller who's clicking on a cash now offer ad versus how we engage with a buyer in a specific community versus how we engage with an investor who's coming through bigger pockets, how we treat those customers and curtail the content and the follow up for those customers, that's really kind of what took us to the next level is once we had those steps defined.

When you say Ylopo pay per click, I think a lot of people have a sense of what you mean. Some people don't. I assume that it's Google and Meta, like Facebook and Instagram.

Yep. So they have social ads and Google PPC ads and then you can curtail the ads toward certain segments or target audiences, whether it's neighborhoods, zip codes, some demographics depending on the type of the ad.

So what I'm hearing is we can tailor ads with different calls to action, reach different people, target different people and we need to just make sure that we're matching up their experience from there in a unique way. How many different paths would you say you've developed as you started refining it to make sure that it was connecting with people and converting.

We used to have too many and we've narrowed it down. We used to have like 15 and we actually scoped it down because every different path also requires training for the sales team and the sales agents of like, how do you handle this customer? What do you say when you call them because you're saying something different to a potential seller versus an investor.

Are specific agents taking Specific lead types or do you just distribute it across kind of evenly so everyone's trained on all the different.

Yeah, definitely not evenly. Yeah. So we do it based on conversion rate and we also do it based off of their likes and interests because certain people would prefer a specific client type that they can interact with. They know how to handle them and that kind of thing.

How about you, Renee? I heard organic in our.

In our repeat referral, I mentioned earlier that I work together with my husband. I do not take credit for this. I'm just really darn lucky I married well. In 2007, Jeffrey Funk created a website, realtyinorlando.com and went into a back room of an apartment we were renting at the time and started building that website by hand at a time where everyone told him he was crazy, including his wife. Obviously it's one of his forever, I told you so because he was right. A large part of our business as a team over the years since then and to this day is sourced through our website, which is organically positioned. Over the last five years though, our business has branched out as far as sources that are relationship based. We have a lot of agent to agent referrals being notable in the industry and really helping agents stay lean and mean that you do not have to go out and buy leads. It's so easy for agents to come into the industry and hear shiny object. Certainly when you're at a level of a team leader that's built, it's perfectly acceptable to look at all different lead sources. But oftentimes agents hear that of others and think, I need to go do that. I need to do the ppc. When the reality is you don't. When you're aligned with a great team who's focused on building a database, protecting the content that's going out through email campaigns, and really honing in on those relationships, you can build a business lean and mean that lasts for your whole career.

Yeah, the term that I hear there a lot is like plug in. Yes, you could, you could go figure all this out. You could take the missteps, you could figure out that you don't have enough or you have too many nurturing processes or sequences, or you could just plug into a proven system that works.

Right.

And then on the distribution. Right. I think you and I have talked about this in previous podcasts before. Round robin is bs. Round robin is not good for the consumer. So we're more aligned with. What Ben is doing is identifying the passions, the skill set of an agent, and partnering agents up with the type of consumer who's hand raising and saying, this is what I'm looking at, having a team that is not focused on road warrior type service, which is I can serve everywhere from Miami to Jacksonville, Florida, perhaps if those two markets are your specialties. God love you though, being an agent who says, but I'll drive far if it's a certain price point. Probably not going to be an agent. For the fun collection. We're very focused on hyper local specificity. So if you say you live and work in Windermere and that is your area of passion, then you can deliver a higher level of service to the consumer that is looking for a home in Windermere.

Yeah. Really fair specialization to the degree that it's possible given the size of the team and everything is ideal, obviously. I mean, why would anyone, especially at a particular price point that would attract someone to drive two hours away like they're making an even bigger purchase with a more ignorant person?

It happens a lot. I'm sure everyone here would attest to that. It happens a lot that agents will do that.

Yeah. How about you, Jenny?

So we sold in 130 zip codes last year. So we have road warriors. No, we don't. My answer is going to be complicated, but I think it's important to go back. I was a farmer at the beginning as an agent, you know, you can generate easy, generate enough business for yourself without having to go to paid lead sources and so on. The reason I ended up in The Zillow and realtor.com game is because they came online, you know, 2008 ish 910 and gave the consumer the ability to do research now and see data and see other properties. And so I joined them for defense because I had farmed these communities. But now they're not just relying on my newsletter to get real estate information. They're going to Zillow realtor.com so if they go to 32828 are they going to see my fit face on the, you know, the same face that they're seeing on the newsletter. And we're like, oh, she is the right choice. So it's. It all started by playing defense and then I bought into the zip code and it's producing leads and I was like, oh my goodness, this is wonderful. And then all of a sudden we have too many leads. And then we needed an agent. Then we had too many leads. We need an agent. We're still in that a little bit. Where I think it is important to note that our business is 50% repeat referrals. So it is not our only pillar. It's not our only game. It feeds the pipeline. It allows us to bring new agents in. It allows agents to go in, get a lead, you know, when they're. When they're down, and backfill their businesses. The challenge with that model, and it's changed over time. There's been the heyday of Zillow and realtor.com that it was a great return on our investment. You know, the testimonials, people would come and choose us to be sellers because they read our testimonials. And I mean, there was a heyday period there. Now it's changing a bit. Where Zillow and realtor.com want a little more control over our businesses, they want to make sure that, you know, the consumer is being taken care of because they're getting a bad rep because agents aren't answering the phone or, you know, they're not specialized in the area, whatever that may be. So we have to give up a little bit of control in that area. If you're on the lead team, you have to be much more accountable because we have metrics to hit now and you could lose the opportunity. Over time, we have gained the opportunity to become maybe the flex team in the top zip codes in Orlando or the VIP realestaterealtor.com leads. Basically, what just is happening right now, as we speak, these top teams are edging out the small guys. They can't buy those leads anymore. You have to join one of our teams to be able to get those leads. For the most part, that has been earned over time. And we've stayed in business with those companies because there's no better leads. They're bottom of the funnel. They're calling on properties that are actively listed. They do feed the pipeline. For us, it works because we have the repeat referral and retention.

It's building a database and building a book of business for a growing team of agents.

Right then when you build the funnel. So those aren't our only two. We have several others. We have SEO behind us. We have website, we have farms still. We have our databases feeding. So we have a funnel of leads coming in every day from a lot of different sources, which are a huge challenge because you not only have sources that need specific updates and portal updates, and you know, you're counting on your agents to do that, which is challenging. So we have an admin, a VA to do portal updates just to play the game.