TRANSCRIPT

Caroline:              Welcome again, thanks everybody for joining us. Today we’re going to talk about how to double sales and referrals from personal contacts this year.

Caroline:              I’m Caroline Springer, and the way we’re going do it is we’re going to do an interview format with Beatty Carmichael. Some of you may know Beatty, he is the founder and CEO of Master Grabber, it’s a boutique marketing firm that focuses on helping professional sales agents, a lot of you are real estate agents, but helping professional sales agents better engage consumer prospects to generate more sales.

Caroline:              And like I said, today we’re going to be talking about doubling sales and referrals from your personal contacts. So welcome Beatty.

Beatty:                 Welcome, thank you. I’m glad to be here. How are you, Caroline?

Caroline:              I’m great. We are all well, we’re getting over the flu, and we’re all well. So I’m happy, we’re all good over here.

Beatty:                 Well, I was over at the hospital last night, and if I get wind noise on the microphone, let me know, I’m outside right now, but over there to pray for someone we’re administering to, and on the way out, just asking, saw a lady at the … So it’s Sunday night, so not many people there, and this lady was right there at the elevators when we exited, and so I just said, “Hey, can we pray for you about anything?”

Beatty:                 She was saying, yes, her son, 52 year old man, caught the flu and then got pneumonia, and he’s been on life support now for 32 days. And I was thinking, boy, you know, it really hits home. We hear, you know, it’s always someone else, but then you’re there in that environment, and it’s like, wow, I just can’t imagine. So I’m glad everyone’s healthy.

Caroline:              Yes. Oh, man, I know she appreciated that so much, even just coming from my own mommy’s heart, I would appreciate that so much. So I know that blessed her.

Beatty:                 Well, I hope so. It’s so important to just pray for people when you have the prompting to do that, and just share God’s love.

Caroline:              Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, I feel like that was a good little snapshot of just your heart and who you are, but do you want to start off, for those of the callers that have joined us that might not know more about you, do you want to just share a little bit about you and your background?

Beatty:                 Sure. Yeah, so gosh, my background, I love marketing and I love the Lord. Got involved with marketing over 20, 30 years ago, and started to … I was involved with, back in the telecom, for those that are old enough who remember, back in the 80s and 90s, the telecom industry kind of went through some changes, ATNT was broken up, and a partner and I started a company to start signing up customers on one of the [inaudible 00:03:25], one of the competitive local exchange carriers.

Beatty:                 And that went really well, but one of the things I found out really quickly is it’s hard to sign up customers if all you’re doing is cold calling. It’d be a lot easier to call someone who already had an interest in what you wanted to talk about.

Beatty:                 So we started developing marketing tools, or marketing methods, to reach out to customers, reach out to prospective customers, create leads if you want to call it that, and at that point, it was kind of revolutionary to a degree. And we started having some really great success in doing that.

Beatty:                 I then left the partnership and started my own business in the realm of marketing, and one of my first customer bases were other companies and sales reps involved with the telecom. And some of the things we developed just totally blew their sales out of the water.

Beatty:                 I remember one sales manager from Ohio, after using some of the things I developed, she said, “This is just amazing.” She said, “In three or four months, we’ve increased our sales out of our team by like ten times,” if I remember the number correct. It may have only been four times, but it was really, really dramatic just the impact that that had.

Beatty:                 And so over the years we started to do more things reaching out to consumers, and what I call professional to consumer marketing, everything from health and fitness to weight loss to legal and accounting, think about those guys, and then, and also real estate.

Beatty:                 And then just to kind of make a short story shorter, in 2012 we took a strategic focus with our company to say we’re only going to focus on the residential real estate industry moving forward. And we’ve been working now with some of the top realtors out there, a lot of teams that do 100 to 300 transactions a year, individual agents that do 15, 20, 30 million dollars in volume, one of our clients, a million dollar producer, no team, all by himself.

Beatty:                 And the focus has really just been sort of a continuation of what started many years back. It’s been “how do you take a list and get them to want to do business with you before you reach out and contact them?”

Beatty:                 And so that’s kind of a short story of who I am and how I got here. Does that make sense?

Caroline:              Yes, it does. I love always hearing your background too, just to kind of see how you got to where you are and how knowledgeable you are in marketing. But then too, I think it is interesting even, I’m sure that perked a lot of realtors’ ears that are listening now just hearing about the kind of clients that we do deal with and what we’ve even learned from them about what’s successful, and how they can implement that, I know they would be interested to hear.

Caroline:              But just even us talking with the topic today of how to double sales and referrals from personal contacts, I know it might seem obvious, but just even thinking that could be a good place to start of just why, why the personal contacts, why start there?

Beatty:                 Yeah, well you know, it’s interesting, and I don’t think most agents really understand the power of your personal contacts, the people you know.

Beatty:                 So let’s put some terms on this, a lot of agents think about past clients and sphere of influence, I’d like to expand your personal contacts to be not only your past clients and sphere of influence, but also anyone else that you’ve met who would know you.

Beatty:                 What we’ve learned is, if they will see you on the street and recognize you and call you by name, that’s a personal contact. And if they call you by name and they know something about your family, and you know something about their family, that’s a really good personal contact.

Beatty:                 And here’s what’s interesting, your personal contacts, the people who know you, are eight to ten times more likely to respond to your marketing and do business with you than anyone else.

Beatty:                 And let’s say just a neighborhood list, okay? So if I’ve got 100 people that I met and I’ve got 100 people I haven’t met and I do the same marketing to all of them, I will get eight to ten times more transactions out of that group that I’ve already met than the group I haven’t met.

Beatty:                 That’s a big number, wouldn’t you agree?

Caroline:              Oh, absolutely. I think that’s good even to just hear it quantified. I’m sure we all think that, yes, the people that know you, maybe it’s just earning some kind of foundation of trust, not just somebody that you see on a billboard, but that is even higher I guess than I was even assuming. Eight to ten, that’s pretty enormous.

Beatty:                 Well, if you kind of break it down, there’s a fundamental reason on this. And you know, action item, okay? For those of you listening on this call, whether you’re live or whether you’re listening to the podcast version, the action item is this: meet people and build that relationship, because the key is this: so much of your marketing, if you’re targeting a list that you haven’t met, and let’s just think, you know, everyone knows about neighborhood list or geographic farm, that concept, then what happens is so much of your marketing effort initially is spent just trying to get them to remember you, to recognize you, to even begin to trust you, because you’re trying to do it vicariously through some other method, be it online or offline.

Beatty:                 But once you get to meet somebody, and they put a name and a face and a personality to you, now they know you. Now it’s a world of difference. And so if you can simply just meet people and then stay in touch with them, that by itself will turn your business around.

Beatty:                 But that’s why your personal list is so impactful, because they’ve met you already, they know who you are. If they see your photo, they instantly know you. If they see you on the street, they instantly say hello. And it’s that level of familiarity that gives them a trust level, and even to some degree a top of mind level, that they end up calling you or referring you. It’s really outstanding, it’s really amazing how powerful it is.

Caroline:              Well, it sounds like you kind of just touched on it a little bit there, and hearing you talk in the past, that there is even a psychology behind marketing, and a psychology behind how you would increase sales and referrals from those that you know.

Caroline:              Is there any way that you can expand on that too, to share? Or any even studies that you may know about that?

Beatty:                 Yeah. So there’s a study, a real interesting study a few years back, and they wanted to really quantify this concept of your personal contacts and what it means. And they wanted to quantify and understand how many sales should you be getting, or can you be getting, from your personal list? So surveys were sent out to thousands of agents all across the country with the goal of understanding this question.

Beatty:                 As the results came back, and once the results were compiled and tabulated, here’s what they found, that once you cross a threshold in terms of how significantly you consistently touch your contacts, they found that the average agent in that study, Caroline, was getting 17 sales for every 100 people in their personal list every year, 17 sales a year for every 100 people.

Beatty:                 Now, when I share that some agents, they go, “Oh, that’s impossible. There’s no way.” But if you break it down, it’s really kind of easy, because this is both direct and referred, it’s both seller’s side and buyer’s side, and typically half of them were direct, half of them were referred. But that’s the impact, that’s the average.

Beatty:                 What that means is a lot of those people on that list were getting above average, and others were getting below average. But 17 sales a year, that’s strong.

Beatty:                 And if you think about this, the average agent, let’s say the average full time producer, okay? The average full time producing agent, I would say probably 15 or 20 transactions a year. Would you agree?

Caroline:              I would think so. I mean, even that 17 number seems so high.

Beatty:                 Yeah, it does seem high, but think about this, the average agent knows 200 to 300 people. Let’s just cut it in the middle and say 250 people.

Beatty:                 If you were to make a list of everyone you know, go through the proverbial yellow pages if you’re old enough for that, you know, who do I know that’s an accountant, that’s an actuarial, that’s a baker, that’s a banker, that’s a chiropractor, that’s a dentist, that’s, whatever, go through all those things and just do, who do I know? Who do I know down the neighborhood? Who do I know from school, from college?

Beatty:                 All those people that are within your selling area, the average agent can easily come up with 250 people. Mix in there your past clients and friends and family. So with 250 people, at an average of 17 transactions a year per 100, what’s that, 34, 45? Somewhere around 45, 46 transactions a year that are possible. That’s three times what the typical agent is doing.

Beatty:                 And what this means is how many sales they’re losing simply by not really going after that personal list and really honing in on it.

Caroline:              Mm-hmm (affirmative). It sounds like it’s really how much you work it. If you know 100 people, you can’t just expect that, “Oh, I know 100 people, and 17 of them are going to choose me,” you’ve gotta work that list and make those people pick you and trust you out of maybe other realtors that they know too.

Caroline:              So that makes sense, I think that’s the marketing key right there.

Beatty:                 Yeah. So then the question comes up, how do you do it? because all these agents know these people, but they’re not getting those sales.

Beatty:                 I’ve got one client that is a real top producing agent, he is touching his list, get this, watch this, he’s touching his list, I forget how many times a year, it’s like 28 times a year or something, he’s sending them postcards, handwritten notes, he’s got a full page, four color newsletter that he sends out in the mail four times a year, another full newsletter that he sends out every single month electronically. And out of that, for every 100 people, he’s getting an average of two and a half sales, an average of two and a half sales a year, and he’s doing all that work.

Beatty:                 I’ve got another client, he has a list of 160 and he’s touching them 12 or 18 times a year with a postcard, and he’s calling them periodically, several times a year. And he’s getting 25 sales a year out of that 160, so he’s blowing that average out of the water, or he’s right about at that average.

Beatty:                 So it’s not just how many times you touch, the key is what are you doing when you’re touching your list that’s causing them to choose you versus choose someone else? And that’s really where the money is going to be made, in not how frequently you touch, but what are you doing when you touch?

Beatty:                 Are you kind of following the logic there?

Caroline:              Yes, that really does make sense, that they’re … I’m just trying to think as a caller that’s listening in, can you expand on I guess a quality versus a quantity touch? What would make a quality type of touch?

Beatty:                 Okay, so let’s, yes, I think so, so let’s first say, let me start with this [inaudible 00:16:15], this may help in the discussion, why does a consumer choose an agent, okay? A consumer chooses an agent for two things, trust and top of mind.

Beatty:                 If they trust you, they’re more likely to choose you. If you’re top of mind, they’re more likely to choose you. But when you add trust and top of mind, you get a multiple effect. One plus one is two, but when you have trust and top of mind, you don’t get two, you get like four, okay? It’s an exponential amount because of the way they operate.

Beatty:                 So in real simple terms, top of mind is how frequently are you in front of them? And so this big client agent of mine that I was telling you about, he’s sending out, he’s trying to stay top of mind, so he’s sending out these beautiful full color newsletters every quarter, every month he’s in the email inbox with a 12 page newsletter as well.

Beatty:                 Question is, is that the type of touch that keeps them top of mind? Survey says no, because they’re rejecting it. That may be getting him something, but they’re overall rejecting it. So you have to look at the touch and say, is this something that they really want? If you’re just touching them with something that they don’t want, then you may be causing yourself more harm than good.

Beatty:                 I have a loan officer, I’m on his touch campaign, and invariably every three weeks or so I get another email from him. And it’s stuff that I have no interest in, how to clean your pillows, okay? I’ll call them silly things like that, which I guess if I needed to clean my pillow right then, that might be interesting, but I have no desire to open his email because it offers nothing of value to me.

Beatty:                 And so when we try to send out, you know, say I want to put someone on an email touch campaign and I’m touching all these people. No, you’re not. All they see is your name come in the email and they click delete because they don’t want to read it. That’s not …

Beatty:                 What you want is something like another friend of mine, another client of mine, he’s been sending out a monthly email, excuse me, a weekly email every week, 52 times a year, for 17 years. And here’s what happens with his people. He misses one and someone calls him and says, “Hey, Stuart, I didn’t get your Monday morning email, can you resend it?”

Beatty:                 When you have your contact list asking you to resend an email because they didn’t get it, then you got something powerful. That means they want to open it, they now appreciate it, and now that touch becomes more significant.

Beatty:                 Is this, are you kind of seeing the difference between these two?

Caroline:              Yes. I guess it’s figuring out what they want, what they want to open and receive.

Beatty:                 Yes, and what they want and what you want … What they want to receive and you want to give them are totally different. I gotta tell a funny story, but this is the way we operate, two stories.

Beatty:                 Many years back, I was a kid at this time, my dad thought he was going to do my mother a wonderful blessing. And so she’d been complaining, her vacuum cleaner wasn’t working and she was always frustrated with it. So my father went out and bought her the very best vacuum cleaner money could buy, I mean, it was really expensive, all these attachments and everything, and gave it to her as a Christmas present.

Beatty:                 Now, let me ask you, as a mother, as a wife, if Wes gave you a vacuum cleaner for a Christmas present, how does that make you feel?

Caroline:              I mean, of course I would be appreciative because it’s something we need, but it may not be at the top] …

Beatty:                 It’s not what you want, is it?

Caroline:              Maybe not on my want list.

Beatty:                 Okay, so there is a difference between what you want someone to know and what they want to know. And what happens is we always try to send them what we want them to know.

Beatty:                 Let me tell you another story equally as funny. My middle son, his name is Beatty Junior, he’s a very unique child, and the Lord has blessed him in so many ways. He’s very quiet, and he is everything abnormal, meaning he doesn’t care for lots of money, he just lives this real simple life, and he has very basic needs, he just prefers … He’s the guy that you would find out in the mountains as a mountain man many years back and just living on his own out in the hills, okay?

Beatty:                 My daughter, on the other hand, is the epitome of a teenage girl, everything pretty, everything modern, everything updated, all the social type of stuff.

Beatty:                 And so it was my daughter’s birthday, and my son bought her a gift, it was a necklace. And it was gorgeous, she loved it, and my wife loved it. And everyone said, “Beatty, did you pick this out?” And he said, “Yes.” He said, “You couldn’t have picked this out, you had someone pick this out because only a girl would’ve picked something out like this, this is really beautiful.” And he said, “No, I did it.”

Beatty:                 And so we asked him, “Well, how did you pick this one out?” And here’s his answer, this is how we need to be as agents communicating to our homeowners, he said, “Well, I was at the store, and I first picked out everything that I liked, and I took it off the shelf. And then out of what was remaining, I picked the ugliest one that I liked the least, and that’s what I got.” And that’s what my daughter loved the most. And so, in other words, it was the total opposite.

Beatty:                 And what happens a lot of times when we’re touching homeowners, touching our list, we’re trying to touch them with what we want them to know, what we want to give them. And what they want to receive is something different.

Beatty:                 So therein lies the rub, that’s why one client that’s touching his list all the time is only getting 2.5 sales a year for every 100, and another client, out of 160, he’s getting that average, right at 17 or 18 or a little bit higher sales per year out of 100. It all has to do with what type of touch, and are you delivering what that homeowner really wants to receive as a touch, or not?

Caroline:              Well, do you have any I guess marketing services that you offer that you’ve seen that can bring that type of touch that a homeowner or a prospect is actually wanting versus maybe one that realtors are giving that they don’t necessarily want? Is there anything you can suggest or share on that?

Beatty:                 Yeah. So let me share, and I know we’re going to run out of time, so we’ll need to carry this over into the second call probably next week and kind of pick up on this, because there’s so much that I want to share on this because it’s so cool, but yes, the answer is there are things that we’ve done, that we’ve tested, and they’re things that those that are listening can actually start to do on their own that will make a big impact.

Beatty:                 So let’s first talk about the simple thing of an email, because that’s what most agents tend to gravitate toward, it’s free, it’s quick and easy. Most of the CRM systems, you can put email addresses in there and it’ll do some sort of a drip campaign.

Beatty:                 But here’s the point I want to make real quick on this. My other friend that’s doing an email every single week, alright, let me tell you what he’s doing, so this is going to rock your world. He has a personal list of about 500 people, he emails them a postcard a month and an email every week. That’s all he does.

Beatty:                 Would you care to guess about how much money he earns every year off of those 500 people?

Caroline:              Oh goodness, now you’re going to make me pull out my calculator. I guess without doing that …

Beatty:                 I’ll make it really simple, it’s about a half a million dollars a year, roughly. It may be 400,000 dollars a year.

Beatty:                 So here this guy is, he’s sending out 500 postcards a month and he’s writing four emails a month, and that’s it. And he’s making between 400,000 and 500,000 dollars a year. And these are the easy sales, they’re calling him up and saying, “Hey, Stuart, will you come sell my home?” He shows up for a listing appointment, and there’s no one else there. He’s got it all.

Beatty:                 And so what he’s doing is real simple. So let’s talk about the email. What he’s doing is he’s sending out human interest stories. Have you ever watched the news, Caroline, and they put on some human interest story, like how this eight year old started a campaign in the neighborhood to help children with cancer and was able to raise 20,000 dollars and send this cancer patient or two on this wonderful trip to Disneyworld before they die? You know, those things that you just really feel good about, you’ve seen those, right?

Caroline:              Yes.

Beatty:                 Yeah. Don’t those just make your day?

Caroline:              Yeah, that’s the only kind of news I really like to watch.

Beatty:                 Yeah, well, and we’re all the same. So what this agent does is he gets just human interest inspirational stories that you can read in about a minute or two, and he writes those down, he can probably get them out of a book someplace, and then at the beginning he just writes a little blurb about what’s happening in the real estate world at a macro level, just nationwide, what’s going on with home sales or the economy related to real estate, what’s going on with mortgage prices.

Beatty:                 So he’s [inaudible 00:26:46] … as a professional realtor, you know, three or four bullet points, and then he has a human inspiration story, and that’s the email. But what happens is people get it every month, excuse me, every week on a Monday, and they love it. And they read it, and when they read it, it impresses him in their mind.

Beatty:                 That’s the difference between that email versus here’s how to clean your pillows, okay? So give them what they want, that the people in mass will want, and that gives you permission to stay in front of them in a really powerful way.

Caroline:              That makes sense too why somebody would call him up and be missing it. And just like you said, it’s something that they want to see, they want to continue having that in front of them, versus something they just delete out of their inbox whenever they see the headline.

Beatty:                 Yes, yes.

Caroline:              Well, I know we are running out of time, so it sounds like we can just continue our discussion next Monday, because I know we were kind of getting into the meat of it. And I’m excited to hear more of what you have to share.

Caroline:              So thank you for your time, Beatty. I know, I was just going to share too, just to learn a little bit more about what Beatty’s talking about, you can go to agentdominator.net to hear more about a program that’s kind of implementing a lot of what we were talking about today.

Beatty:                 Let me tell this real quickly, so not to be an over plug, but so what we’ve been doing for all these years now is really assembling the processes and systematizing them on how we can deliver superior results to clients if we want to target that personal list.

Beatty:                 And so we developed a product service we call agent dominator, we actually guarantee the sales that you will get out of it or your money back. And you just go to agentdominator.net, you’ll see a short, what I call a teaser video, just a quick overview, and if you have interest, if you want to look at what we can do for you, then fill out the form there, we’ll reach out to you.

Beatty:                 But a lot of what we do, you can do on your own if you’re just willing to go through the work to put it together. And hopefully on next week’s call we’ll wrap up a lot of those things on specifically what to do, because it’s really amazing, it’s a lot of fun. Anyone can do it if they’re just willing to sit down and put a little bit of elbow grease on it.

Beatty:                 But I appreciate you having me on the call, appreciate the opportunity here, Caroline.

Caroline:              Yes, thank you for your time. And thank you to everyone that joined us. If you’ll stick with us for just a minute, we’re going to open up the call for any questions that may be out there.

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