Kevin Johnson33:23
Maybe possibly. Okay, that's another great thing because you if you get a husband and wife on a Zoom call, doesn't matter if they're in the same room or not, but if you're going through the list of options that you might go look at on a Saturday, and you know, normally if you're going through them and saying, "Okay, we're going to go to 123 Main Street, we're going to go to 457 Smith Street, we're going to go these." And if you see one of the couple rolling their eyes when you're going through some of them, then you stop and you say, "Okay, you may it doesn't matter if it's him or her, you know, but you stop and you ask that person, what's your thoughts on that house?" Like just accelerate the inevitable. Do you want to like drive all over, you know, Charlotte or you want to drive all over, uh, Minnesota looking at houses that it's just not going to happen? This is what it looks like for you guys to show up as a leader. Followup is another big one. It's not just the first phone call. It's staying with them. If I were to survey everyone on this phone call right now, every one of you has stuff going on. Okay, I can tell you. And it doesn't have to be bad stuff. Hunter had a lot going on right before he got married. It was a lot of going on, right? And he's trying to keep everybody happy. He's trying to show up for his wedding. He's trying to like make sure that everything's, you know, bags packed to go on vacation, all that kind of stuff. If someone had called and introduced something new to him, talked to him, what have you, what do you think the likelihood is that he even remembers after he got back from his vacation, his honeymoon? Probably somewhere between zero and one. Okay. So, people, everyone has stuff going on in their lives. Don't be afraid of followup. Just do it because they all there are people that they go through seasons. You're going to have somebody that's all in with you and then something happens in their life and you have to keep going. That's why you always have to be working multiples of leads at all times because you're going to have someone that shows up seem like they're hot to trot and then suddenly they just start ghosting you and it could be that their parents fell ill. You're not a priority anymore and that's why you need another five leads behind them that you've been talking to and five more and five more. So, another little pro tip, I kind of alluded to it earlier. Before you go to a listing, send them a video message. When you're getting ready to meet someone on a Saturday, send them a video message. This is the kind of stuff that sets you apart from other people. It allows them to see you, hear you. It differentiates you from everyone else. So, when I say add value, you know, your expertise is what sells. It's how you earn your commissions. And every now and then, you're going to need to let people get a little taste of it. You're going to need to give people a little taste of all those 12 things that I talked about. You provide that to other people and they get that taste and then they're going to say, "I need to call Sue." That's how that works. And back to Jason's point, we always like always be closing, always be prospecting. That's one of the things that we need to do. So when you think about what should your schedule look like, okay, and you could go through and say, okay, on Monday, and you could differentiate this, meaning you could mix it up throughout your day and double up on some of these things, but you could say, Monday, I'm going to do nothing but database and prospecting calls. You can do on Tuesday, I'm going to do follow-ups, but I'm also going to do video messages. Maybe you do some videos. Since you're doing video messages, you do videos that are you going to use for your marketing because you've already dolled yourself up. You look pretty and you're ready to do more videos. So just work it in there. So content marketing authority, you can do your referral partner outreach. So, one of the biggest things again one of the biggest things in the news is the fact that the real estate market is not what it was a couple years ago. Okay. So, a lot of people we hear all these things about realtors exiting the market, realtors getting side hustles, realtors doing all so that in a sense like people start generalizing. You need to demonstrate to your sphere and the community that you are an active real estate agent. I'm in this. This is my profession. This is what I do. So, it's what they call it is basically social proof. Even if you drive through a neighborhood, it's like you and your spouse might be going to dinner one night and it's like, you know what, I've not been in this neighborhood in a while. Video yourself doing it. Post it. Okay? It was just a little side trip, but it demonstrates that I'm just previewing this neighborhood. You know, always love this monument, how they landscape out here, blah blah blah. It shows that you're actually working as a real estate agent. You do open house prep. You know, it's funny again when Shelley started in Charlotte, she made such a big deal about open houses and when other people would do open houses, she's like, "You need to do it my way." You would not believe like she got super specific about sign placement and balloons. And if I, for example, if I was sent out to put out the sign and the balloons, if it wasn't done right, she'd go fix it herself. Okay? It's like it had to be done the right way. But the point is, you know, we don't just like show up last minute and say, "Okay, I'm here for an open house." And nothing happens. Like make sure you're doubling up on all of it. Shoot content when you're doing an open house. Make sure you're like doing a house preview when you're doing the open house. Social proof that you're acting like a real estate agent because people want a professional to show up for them. And yes, it might sound like grind, grind, grind everything I'm talking about. No, you need to make time for yourself. And one of the things that I frequently share with people is that when I used to lead and manage a really big team of we had a entire team of consultants and then all the support team, marketing department, all this kind of stuff. I managed all of it. And there were times where I looked at a few different people and I said, "You're going to bring me by Friday. You're going to bring me your vacation schedule for this year where you're going to burn your PTO or I'm going to actually have your termination letter. It's your choice." And it took a lot of people by surprise when I did that. But the reason being was I was looking at how they were starting to show up for their clients. I was looking at how they were starting to show up to other people. And some of them were starting to turn toxic. Some of them it's like their identity became negativity. Like everything was a problem. Everything was an issue. Every person they encountered was a pain in their backside. Okay. So you do need time to fill your bucket. You need time to work out. Take, you know, if you don't have a hobby, I really recommend getting one because if you don't have a hobby, you got nothing else in your life. You need to find time for rest and growth so you can be a better person and then you can be a better person for your family which is the most important. Then you can be a better person for the community as a real estate agent. So where can some of your leads come from? And again there are some people that can literally just work cold leads. They're a machine when it comes to dialing for dollars. They will convert cold leads into sales and they kill it like that. Some people they do everything through sphere of influence. Pick a few of these and just do it really, really freaking well. This is the kind of thing where I say again, distractions. You can go listen to a bunch of people and maybe someone is great at phone prospecting, but if you're not the greatest at that, don't do it. If you're great at working your sphere, lean 100% into that. If you're great at working referrals, lean into that. Okay, this is what I'm saying. You need to capitalize on what you're great at right now. You can build some of the other stuff later. Oh, not going backwards. All right. So, this is another exercise that I want you to do because if you can't get this across to your client, no one else is going to do it for you. Okay? What is your unique value proposition? I don't care if you're brand new. Okay? If and you know I think Lee has sold a few homes in his lifetime. Okay, but that is not the only unique value proposition he has. Okay, like he might and I don't know what he says when he goes to a listing presentation, but he might say, "I literally treat this like it's my house. I treat this like it's a business deal." Okay? Like I'm only going to make smart deals and you're the smart deal I'm making. Okay? One of the things that I say to a lot of my clients is that I am like a Swiss Army knife. I might not be the greatest tool for absolutely everything, but I'm good for a lot of freaking things, okay? And you need to come across like that to your client, but you need to know what those things are because again, you're either going to tell people when you meet them. And that could be your new client, that could be a referral partner, that could be someone else in the industry, that could be the community when you do your marketing that I'm talking about. You need to get these five unique value propositions to come across. One of you might sit in front of a computer and just absolutely geek out. In fact, I know not saying Craig sits behind a computer and geeks out, but one of the things when he and Shelley got together, there were not many people in the Charlotte area that I think knew the Charlotte region as well as Craig because he would go to every community and he would video every community and put it on a website. And the only way he could do that is through knowledge of actually doing it. Okay, some of you might use chat GPT or Claude and just pull up all this information. You might get the MLS information that's sent to you once a month. You might know that data forwards and backwards. Demonstrate it. Make sure the public knows that. That's what I'm talking about. If you're a great connector, if you're a great negotiator, okay, that's what when you will go back and this is where I want you to list out your five unique value propositions. And then I want you to go beta test this. I want you to then go to your spouse or your partner, your family, your best friend. I want you to go to maybe even if you have a short list of really trusted past clients, I want you to give it to them. It's like if you were to say, "I have three to five really valuable, unique value propositions. What would you tell someone else about me?" What would you say about me when I'm not standing there? Okay. What other people say about because some of you might think we all too often we tend to underestimate our capabilities and underestimate ourselves and other people might see certain things as being an absolute strength and we don't okay and this is why I want you to go through this exercise don't turn it into an academic exercise but I'm talking about like an exercise where you get this thing dialed in and then you lean into it really hard because I can tell you right now there's at least 10 of you on here that you have unique value propositions that you're not leaning into. Minimum 10. So when we go through this strategy matrix, I only have this here. It's also part of the book or the booklet that I've got is that there are certain things that should be easy wins for you and then there are certain things that they're just a heavy lift and not a lot of ROI. Okay? So, for example, if you put on like if you put on a client event of your own, okay, you're going to spend a lot of time and money just getting ready for it. You're going to spend a lot of money on the day of it. But the question is, are you really getting the traction that you want? So, if you know the opportunity cost is if you put on and did something, would you be better off taking that same time and money by reaching out to clients or putting on something different? The things that you want to do when you think about having marketing strategies for your own business within your team is we want to avoid all the resource pits. We don't want to just like be an expert in stuff that is going to have no ROI. But why not? For example, like it cost you nothing. Oh, I'm sure all of you are on unlimited phone plans. It cost you nothing to pick up the phone and call 10 people or 100 people. It cost you nothing to send text messages. It cost you nothing but to be able to like comment on people's social media posts. So, being able to do that, even posting once a day on social media to show people you're the person they want to hire cost you nothing, just a little bit of time. Okay? So, it's just a way to audit yourself and say, am I really investing my time the right way? So, there and you guys will get the slide deck. I'm not going to read this word by word, but there are things that you can set up to where when you put someone into your CRM, your database, they should be getting automated emails that leverages your time. Okay. I'm going to even throw something else out there. How many of you know that or how many of you already use a feature on your phone when you where you can send delayed text messages? So, for example, if I knew if I talked to someone who's like if I meet someone out and they say, "Oh, by the way, did you hear it's George's birthday on Tuesday?" or let's say Friday because today's Tuesday, it's George's birthday on Friday. I can today go in and create a text message and hit delay and then make it send out first thing Friday morning wishing him a happy birthday. If I went and met a client and my listing presentation went really well or we saw homes, I can set up a delayed text message while I'm thinking about it right now. I can create that message, delay it, maybe have it sent out the next day. That's like when I was talking earlier about overcommunicate. Be present. Use these tools to your advantage. Again, these things are our greatest and worst tool. Don't use it as a distraction. Use it as a way to leverage your efforts. So, you know, when you think about our medium effort, high ROI, and really the focus here is high ROI is it's not just about doing an open house, but it's the frequency. So, if you guys want to write this down, this is a concept I talk to clients about all the time and something that I shared with somebody yesterday that's trying to grow their business. Okay? Strategy multiplied by time multiplied by intensity equals success. Okay? So, if you have no strategy, but you sit down and invest the time, it's literally like a rudderless boat or a boat with no steering wheel. You hit the gas as much as you want, but we have no idea where this thing is going to go. We need to have strategy. So, you got five things that you lean into and do really really well and you outwork the competition by investing enough time. And you hear Brent all the time talk about massive action. That's what I'm talking about with that one. There are some people that again, you can make 10 phone calls a day, but there's no way you could make even, I'm going to say 40 meaningful contacts a day for a month and not be going to a closing table. There is no way. Okay? You could say the wrong things to people, they're still going to hire you, but if you're making 40 meaningful contacts a day, you will sell homes.