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Well, hey there, this is Beatty Carmichael. And I wanted to do something on this podcast that I’ve wanted to do for several years, and that is to get in front of a whiteboard and actually walk you through the different marketing concepts, only a few basic concepts that drive the most listings, so that whether you’re targeting your past clients and sphere of influence, a geographic farmer may maybe some sort of a niche market that you can actually start to extract more of the listings that come out of that market and have them be yours. I remember I was talking to an agent just recently. She’s down in South Florida and she’s targeting this kind of an upscale type of area and she’s been marketing for 16 years. Watch this. 16 years in this area. And in those 16 years, she is sending out mail pieces probably six or eight times a year. And within that, she is the number one selling agent. Watch this. The number one selling agent in that area where she’s marketing. And I was asking her what percentage of the listings that she have. She’s she was kept saying, I’m the dominant agent. Right. Okay. And the dominant agent for her meant that she was number one. Dominant agent for me means that you’re doing 25% or more of all of the listings in that area. And she said, Well, I’m not doing near that.

And as we started to talk, here’s what was interesting. She had maybe one or 2% of the listings and that entire farm that she’s been marketing for 16 years. And the question is, why was it so low for her? She thought that since she was the number one agent, that she was high. But the reality is she is really low. Let me just give you some perspective on this. I have a client, his name is Stuart, and he started targeting a 1000 home farm. The number one agent had about, if I remember correctly, about 12% of all the listings. The number two agent had 8% of all the listings. He comes in the very first year he started marketing and he eclipses them. He’s now the number one agent and took so much business from these agents that this top agent that was there started to threaten him. It was that bad. Or how about take another client of mine? His name is Nelson, and he’s targeting a 6500 home community. At the time we started to work with them, he was less than 1% of all of the listings in the first 18 months. He started. After 18 months, he was listing, get this, 22% of all of the listings. He was outselling the number two agent by seven times another 18 months. So this is now three years into it. He’s selling 50% of all of the listings that happen there. Or take another lady. She’s not a client of mine, but she’s one of the folks that I interviewed.

Her name is Marla, and she’s in a 700 home community. This is Marla, 700 homes, and she is a brand new agent, only a year in the business. She’s a single mom. She just moves into that neighborhood. And in less than two years, she’s now selling 43% of all of the listings that come on the market. Here’s my question. You go back to this number one agent I talked about earlier who’s been in her farm for 16 years, and she thinks she’s doing a great job because she’s number one, but she has less than 2% of all the listings you start going through. Kline After a client of all these others and other clients that we’ve worked with, and they’re hitting, you know, 12 and 15 and 20 and 30 and 40% listings after a short period of time. What’s the difference? The difference is understanding how do you drive listings? And the way that you drive listings is, you know, what the buyer is wanting the excuse me, the seller is wanting, and you make sure that you give it to them. Okay. We do a little survey with agents that we work with as we explain some of the things that we do and we show them to post cards and we say, as an agent, which of these do you like best? And the agent will always pick out the standard real estate postcard.

Okay. But yet what actual experience shows is that that’s not the postcard sellers are most interested in. And what happens is we get myopic as real estate agents. We get myopic in doing what everyone else does. If the crowd is going to the left, we go to the left. If the crowd shifts and goes to the right, we go to the right. And we believe that the crowd knows the right answer. But that’s not the case. The crowd does whatever they see everyone else doing, and they don’t have any reason why they’re doing it other than that’s where everyone else is going. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to take you into a more of a structured approach. And having spent my entire adult life in direct response, marketing and marketing in general focused on how do you take that prospect that’s thinking about selling or buying a product or anything like that, and how do you pinpoint who they are? And more importantly, how do you pinpoint your marketing so that those are the people that respond? Let me say it, this makes sense. Let’s say that you have a list. This could be your past clients and sphere of influence. It could be a geographic form. And let’s just say that there’s 300 people on that. I’m just going to use this right now as a geographic form because this makes it easier. So for my audio listeners, if you’re not watching the video, I’ve just drawn up a large circle and there’s 300 homes represented in that circle.

If you take an average turnover rate for a decent geographic farm, let’s call it 5% turnover rate. What that means is 5% of 300 homes, that’s 1515 homes that actually go on the market. So think about this from a marketing perspective. You don’t know who those 15 people are. So you end up marketing to all 300 people equally the same. And the way that most agents market to those 300 people is based on what the agent wants to market. I’m number one, I sell more homes than anyone else. Or how about this? Choose me to sell your home because I live in the area and my children go to school here and I know the market. You know what I think as a homeowner? Well, I would hope so. That doesn’t separate you on from anyone else. You want to know what I want as a homeowner who’s thinking about selling? Most agents don’t understand it. In fact, I was asking this one person. I said, Do you know what is the number one thing sellers want most? And the person said, I don’t know what and think about this if you don’t know the answer. In fact, let me ask you this question. The number one thing sellers want most when selling their home is what if you can’t answer it? Then all of your marketing is wrong. I can guarantee you that there actually three things that sellers want most, and this is the order in which they want them.

They want to know, can you get them the most money and the least amount of time with the least amount of effort? If you can convince them that you can get them the most money and the least amount of time with the least amount of effort, they will give you the listing. Over their sister, their brother in law, and their best friend. I know this because we had a real interesting case down in South Florida. One of our clients down there is named Roman, and Roman was marketing to this 1500 home farm and we were working all of his marketing for him and he was getting listings and one of the listings he he got, he said, Beatty, this is really cool. I just got a listing. It was already on the market and both the owner and the agent decided I thought that I could do a better job selling the home than the agent could. So they gave him the listing. How many times have you ever heard of another agent giving their listing to a competitor? Agent? That’s what happened here. A little bit more of the back story is both the owner and the agent lived in that community. They were receiving Mark Roman’s marketing that we were doing for him, and they both came to the conclusion because the agent was a friend of the owner and the agent wanted to make sure that her friend got the best sale possible for her home.

So that marketing was so persuasive that the agent reached out to Roman and said, We’ve been talking and I would like to give you this listing because we both feel that you can do a better job. Now watch this for a moment. If your marketing can convince an agent that you can do a better job than the agent for their friend, what do you think that same marketing will do for the homeowners who are thinking about selling? And the bigger question is this What was in that marketing that persuaded the person to do that? All of this goes into some of these different marketing, what I call these marketing concepts that I want to share. So let me go back to this farm idea of 300 homes with a 5% turnover rate and out of that 5%, what that means is there are 15 homes that will generally go on the market and sell every year. That’s what 5% turnover rate is. So the first step is, number one, how do you identify who these five, these 15 people are going to be? How can you look at that farm data and start to narrow it down into a tighter group so that you can focus your marketing on only those that are most likely to sell so that you spend less money and get a higher return. That’s number one.

The second thing is what is it that you’re going to put in your marketing that will convince these people to do business with you as opposed to doing business with someone else? I remember a few years back I was selling our home and we were upsizing, right? We had just become empty nesters, so why be normal? Rather than following the crowd, we triple the size of our home. And I remember I called in three agents. They were all very top producing agents, and I asked each one in the interview, Why should I hire you? And you know what? None of them could give me a good answer. Why should I hire you over some of these other top agents that I’m. I didn’t mention the names, but I just mention I’m interviewing several other agents. Why should I hire you over them? And none of them could give me an answer. You know what they gave me? They gave me platitudes and, well, I would hope so. Type of answers like, well, I work really hard. Well, I live in the neighborhood and I know this area or I’ve been selling homes for 15 years or I’m honest and I will never tell you wrong. Right. All of these little things that we kind of come up with and we say, well, you know, this is why you should choose me. But think about it from my perspective as the seller. All of those answers, my first response is, Well, I would hope so.

I would hope, you know, the market. I would hope you’re going to be honest. I hope that you’re going to work hard for me. But the question is, why should I choose you over someone else? And none of them could give me a definitive answer. If you can’t give your prospects that are thinking about selling a definitive answer on why they should choose you over someone else, then why should they choose you over anyone else? Okay. If you go back to those agents, go back to that agent. My the first agent I shared, that was the number one agent. She’s been marketing to this farm for 16 years and she had less than 2% market share. Why was no one else trusting her with the sale of their home more than, you know, one out of 50 people? Because she did not know how to separate herself from the rest. What about the other ones like Stewart or Nelson or Marla, these others that were just getting huge numbers of listings right off the bat? What made them different? Those homeowners start to recognize that they were doing something different. And that’s one of the things I want to share. So with this as a backdrop, let me go into a couple of things for you. The first step I want to do is I want to talk about probably the at the highest level, the most important thing you can understand in marketing, and that is the whole idea about preparation.

And there’s a there is a an equation called the marketing success equation. The marketing success equation says if you take your marketing and break it down, you’ll find that 40% of the success in your marketing is due to the list that you market to. 40% of your success is due to the offer that you make to that list. And 20% of your success is due to your what I call your copy. The copy is how you write that offer. Real quickly, I’m not going to go much into this under the list. If you do have interest, like in geographic farming, there are some very specific ways to determine which farm is going to be the most profitable and the one that you want to target. It’s sort of like investing, right? When you look at investments, you look at multiple things you can invest in. You look at their track record, you look at other things of where they’re projected to go, and then you make a financial decision in which investment you’re going to invest in and which ones you aren’t. A geographic farm is the same thing because a geographic farm is just another investment as an investment of your money in your brand into a general area within your selling radius. And they all have a characteristics of how have they performed in the past and where are they going in the future. And you can pull all that information out of the mills if you know what you’re doing.

So we have some stuff up on our website and get sellers calling you that will guide you through that. So I’m not going to spend much time on the list, but I did want to talk about one aspect of this list. And this is what I call micro targeting micro-targeting. I’m just going to give you the high level on this. So micro-targeting is when you take that 300 home geographic farm and then you start to look at the data of who is living there, how long they’ve lived there and some other stuff. And you can narrow that 300 homes down to maybe 100 homes that are the most likely to be selling in the next several years, either right now or next year or possibly the next year. That’s where you want to concentrate your focus. You still touch all of the farm, but you concentrate the focus of your touch into this micro-targeting. One of my friends does micro-targeting. Watch this. He knows he has a list of in fact, Stuart right In his 1000 home farm. He has one micro list that is 78 people. He has another micro list that’s probably about 100 people. And if I have my data correct out of those 178 people. More than half of all of the listings come from that group. Think about that. Rather than putting all your marketing into a 1000 homes, you narrow it down to 178 and half of the listings are within that group.

That’s how you start to make a lot of money from a little bit of added effort. So this is where the whole idea of preparation. If you take time to prepare your list, even if it’s your past clients and sphere of influence, you can do micro-targeting within that. I won’t get into that so much right now. But let’s talk let’s keep this focused on like a either a niche market or a geographic farm. One easy way of doing micro-targeting is what I call age characteristic cells age. I’ll just call it age based criteria. If you think about the typical home now, this is in primary residences. This isn’t second home. So in a primary residence, most people sell their homes based on some sort of an age characteristic. Watch this. If I’m in a diaper road type of neighborhood. The age characteristic is my oldest child starts to go into first grade. Five years, six years, seven years, right in that age period. That’s usually when they move from diaper row, which is usually smaller homes. You don’t worry about the school system. And then they move into the school system home because now their children are old enough to start to go into that school system. Another age based characteristic might be when the youngest child is 17 or 18 or 19 years old. Why? Because they’re in that that school district house and they’ve got this larger home for all their family.

But their youngest child is now graduating high school, 17, 18 years old, and then going off to college, 19 years old. And now they’re empty nesters and they say, you know, it’s probably a good time to downsize. And then they downsize to a smaller home. And then you still have an age base characteristic of a sale. And that is as they get older, let’s say they get into the mid seventies and now it’s time to start moving into maybe assisted living or into independent living, but into a different facility rather than a single family home. So then they sell. You can also see that age by age characteristic with what I call a feet first. Sellers Right. And I’m not leaving my house until you pull me out feet first, right? I’m going to die here. And so what’s interesting is you get into the higher age characteristics, like let’s say the high seventies, mid eighties is the decision factor decision making. People at that level are now the adult children of that person. But all of that is based on age. And with a little bit of research, you can use all kinds of services like neighbors who’ve been verified, things of that sort. You can actually research your list, see their ages, you look at the sales in the last 12 months, analyze what were the age characteristics of those people that sold. And now with just doing a little bit of elbow work.

Right. And and looking at your list, you can start to come up with micro lists that will make you a ton of money. So that is the list. The next thing I want to talk about, and this is where I want to park for a little bit longer now, is the offer. We can help you with lists. We do this with our clients all the time. But the offer is real interesting because the offer has everything to do with what does your marketing say? This is really what does your marketing say to your prospect and what your marketing says to your prospect. If you want them to choose you to sell their home, it has to say what they want it to say, not what you want it to say. It has to tell the prospect what they want to hear, not what you want the prospect to hear. And so this is where I asked a question. I was doing an interview with someone and I said, Well, and I show them two postcards, right? A standard real estate postcard, and then a different type of real estate postcard that is totally different than anything you’ve ever seen. And I said, What do these two postcards as an agent do you like best? And all agents picked the standard real estate postcard. You no great big, beautiful photo just sold. Had some information about it and it looked gorgeous. Right? Because they carry this really high end professional image.

And then I asked that person and I said, What do you think Sellers want to know? You know, what is the most important thing to a seller when they’re starting to sell their home? And this person said, I don’t know. Okay. And so I went on to share a study that we did for many years. You probably know that we did. A few years back, we did a number of studies on over 2 million postcards that we mailed. We 21 of those studies were split test where we split testers where you do one offer and a second offer and you see which offer pulls the most, or you do one design and a different design you see which design. So you’re testing only one thing with each mailing to see which is a higher resulting thing. And one of the things that we were looking for at this early stages was what was the most important thing to a seller? Because the first step in marketing is to know what offer you want to go out with because the offer is 40% of whether you have success or not. And so a number of the marketing pieces we did were different offers, trying to identify what was most important. And then we started to narrow it down and we did Then a final mailing that was a split test offer. A offer be. And what happened was a conclusive winner, 800% increase response rate on one offer over the other.

Trying to figure out what should the marketing say? And the simple answer is how do I get the most money for my home? In other words, every marketing that we tested on how do you get more money for your home? Is the marketing that those homeowners who are thinking about selling responded to the most. Anything that was a negative offer like how not to lose money when selling your home or how to pick the right agent, or how to choose where to move or anything like that was a far second or third or fourth response. The number one response was How do I get the most money? And doesn’t that make sense? So watch this. If you go back to the standard real estate postcards, almost none of them tell the agent, tell the homeowners, how do you make the most money? When you look at what we’ve done with our clients, like Stewart, the number one selling agent in that 1000 home farm right off the bat, so much that it really ticked off the number one agent that was there. And he started to get threats. All he did is he started to talk in terms of how they can get the most money. Same thing with Nelson, same thing with others. And by the way, once you start to do that, then you market to this micro, this micro list micro-targeting where you’ve narrowed it down. Let’s say that well, for Stewart, let’s say you had 178 homes, right? Roughly in that 1000 home farm.

Not all of those people are going to sell this year, but a large number of them are going to sell next year. As you keep your marketing focused for them how to get the most money. Now they’re responding to your marketing. So that’s the offer and that’s the marketing success equation. You have to go out with the right offer to the right list. The next thing blew my mind. There are a lot of things in marketing that really blow my mind because the results are so significant and I want to set this one up real quickly for you. We when we started years back, over ten years ago, working with real estate agents, we had a product we call a listing grabber at the time. And the whole idea was to identify sellers before they went on the market. Hence all this testing on what the sellers want to know. How do you identify the list and all these things, right? And so what we did is we started to identify these sellers and we aged all of those people for a year. We went back and analyzed every single one that we identified for our customers. And we and then we analyzed. Which agent actually got those listings. So this now becomes sellers who listed, right? Sellers who listed that we identified and we put on a graph of some sort.

How many of those did our clients list? And we found that there are two groups of clients. One group got an average of 10 to 15% of the listings that we found. And the other group got 90 to 100% of the listings that we found. This is an 8 to 10 times increase in results. And it it astounded me. So I started calling in to my customer base and saying first the 10 to 15% percenters and said, you know, what are you doing to follow up? You know, let’s say we found ten listings that were supposed to come on the market. They got one of them. Right. Okay. What are you doing to follow up? And we got the same response from everyone in this group. Almost identical. Then we started calling the agents who were getting 90 to 100% of the listings. Of those people we identified going on the market. And guess what happened with them? We heard almost the same response out of this group. Not the response from the old group that weren’t getting listings, but what the response was. Everyone in the 90 to 100% conversion rate, we’re all doing the same things. And that one thing that they were doing watch this is they met the homeowner in person. That was it. They actually knocked on the door and said, Hi, I’m so-and-so with this real estate company. And and they went on in and they engaged. So Gary Keller was saying that when they got all the data in that you could put all of the leads in only two categories.

And those two categories were those that were met, that the agent had met them and those that were not met. So this is where you come up with, if you’ve heard the terms, a met list or a not met list. Well, that’s the same thing that happened right here with our clients, those who were that we identified sellers and they never met the agent. They got this typical one out of ten sellers that they got. But then those who went out and actually met the homeowner, then they got 90 to 100% of all of those sellers that came on the market an 8 to 10 times increase simply because they met them. I’ve done further research both with clients of mine who measure this in their own marketing and other data that’s just online. And all of the data points to the same fact that it’s about an 8 to 10 times increase and conversion rates if you’ve met that prospect. So the question then is why? And I won’t bore you with all the details behind this study and what we found, but the bottom line with the fact that they met you is now they trust you because now they know more about you. Okay. Let me see. Let me share this as really cool. There is a study, this is done back in the 1980s, I believe, and they were looking at communication and it was a large study and they wanted to identify what percent of communication of your ability to make a sell to someone, communicate that sales information to them was effective.

Here’s what they found, that the words you say are only 7% of the communication. How you verbalize those words is 42% of your communication and your body language is 51%. So think about this. Most of our marketing is done only in words. We’re going to send out a postcard. We’re going to run a pay per click ad. We’re going to send out an email or do a flier. We’re only communicating at 7% level. For those listening to my audio, you’re hearing not only the words that I’m saying, but also how I’m saying them. So that adds. Now you’re at 49%, 42 on the verbalization and 7% on the words, because the inflection, the tone, the tenor, the the rhythm, all of that is communicating. Think about this. I didn’t say she did it. I didn’t say she did it. I didn’t say she did it right by the simple inflection is a completely different message. But then for those of you who are watching this visually on my video now, you see my body language and you’re actually getting 100% of the communication and you’re actually going to retain more than anyone else because you’re seeing it. This is what happens when you meet someone. Once you’ve met them, they get to see your body language, see your personality here, how you speak here, how you say, how you hold yourself, listen to what you’re saying and your expertise and all of that builds into trust.

Nothing will increase trust more than them actually getting a chance to meet you. So in all of your marketing, one of the things you really want to focus on is this trust level. And the more that they can hear you and actually see you, the more likely they’re going to do business with you. And with that, I want to leave you with one final thing. And that one final thing is how do you incorporate this into your marketing? Okay, So think about this. Let’s go back to that geographic farm for a moment. By the way, people ask me, why do I do postcards? Isn’t that old school? I did postcards for one simple reason. As a marketer. See, I’m not a we’re not a post card company. We are a marketing company. And if you’re looking for sellers, the most effective thing you can do is to send your mail piece directly to the person who is most likely to be thinking about selling. A typical postcard actually has a 17 day, what I call duration period. So if you think about like a pay per click ad, they see the ad, they move on and it’s only got a few seconds. If you send an email. They may look at it for a little bit longer and maybe it’s 30 seconds, but with a mail piece physically in their hand, they actually hold on to it.

In fact, with the type of stuff that we’re doing and I’ll show you in just a moment. We’ve had clients that have told us they go on a listing appointment and their sellers have kept all of these postcards for months, said, Look, I got all your postcards. Why? Because it’s giving information to the seller that they want to know, which is, how do I get the most money for my home? And if you can start to educate your consumer, your seller on the things that they want to know most, then not only do you become that trusted expert in their mind, but they hold on to your information because it’s a value and that starts to give you the dominance, what what we call mindshare dominance within that person so that they would feel they’re a fool to choose anyone else besides you. So where I’m going on this seller’s postcards, you can directly go directly to them. But where I wanted to really touch on this very last thing is there’s a way to infuse a video into a postcard. Okay. We call it a video infused postcard. Video infused postcard. And as part of our what we call our VIP program, video infused postcard. And it’s one of the most effective ways to market to a geographic farm or any sort of list, because it gives those homeowners, those people thinking about selling a chance to meet you personally without you ever having to meet them.

Think about this. It’s like being in two places. You’re over here doing your work, spending time with your family, and then you’re over here in a video introducing yourself to those homeowners, helping them understand how to get the most money for their home when they sell. And all of that is separating them, separating you in their mind as to why they should choose you over someone else. And then when you meet with them, if they say, well, why should I choose you over anyone else? Now you’ve got a bullet point list of different reasons why, because all of that’s tied into this type marketing. I’m going to break right now. I’ll come back on another session and I’ve got several more things I want to talk about in terms of marketing for listings. But right now, the only thing I want to share on the video infused postcards, it’s totally new. No one else is doing that. And if you want to check it out, simply go to our website which is agent dominator dot com. Forward slash VIP agent. Dominator dot com. Forward. Slash VIP. And you can learn more about the agent, the video and fuze postcards, but hopefully this makes sense. Make sure you focus on your offer. Make sure you focus on your list. Make sure you get in front of people. Make sure you meet them.

Make sure you talk about what sellers want most, which is how they can get the most money for their home. And when you start to use video and fees, postcards, you can do it all through the mail. Never have to meet with them. And by the way, just as a high level, you can target 100 homes with this approach for about $72 a month. So it’s a really amazing type of thing. Thanks for letting me share and have a very blessed day. Hey, this is Beatty Carmichael again back in the studio and I hope you enjoy this training. The next session will tee up the next two topics on driving listings in the cold market. Just a quick reminder, if you do have interest in the VIP, the video infused postcards. That address again is on our website. Agent Dominator dot com. Forward slash VIP agent Dominator dot com for VIP. It’s definitely worth checking out. Have a blessed day. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, be sure to subscribe to it so you never miss another episode. Also, if you want an easy way to grow your business, check out Agent Dominator. We guarantee listings and sales from past clients and sphere of influence, geographic farming and commercial investment properties. If you don’t get the sales, we promise we’ll give your money back. Learn more on our website and get sellers calling you and select Agent Dominator from the menu. Thanks for listening to the guest sellers calling you podcast and have a great day.

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