[00:00:00] All right, very well, come in. How's it going? Looks like you are muted, very.
[00:00:14] Can you hear me now? Yes, we got no we had we had people in the last last session saying, hey, you know, I thought this was about selling religion and nurturing hacks.
[00:00:30] So that's Barry. Barry is here with his nurturing hacks and his stellar legion. So welcome to the show, Barry. We're grateful to have you here today. Thanks for joining us at the summit.
[00:00:40] Yeah. Hey, honored to be here. And, you know, talk about something that is working for me, so that's great.
[00:00:47] Before we get started, for those of you who don't know, Barry runs a team are actually multiple teams and he has this beautiful Vilaboa shirt on there. He's also part of my LAPO. So stick your chest out. And anyways, Barry, Barry is really a lover of technology and a lover of Legian and super excited to have you here today, Barry. So let's let's dove in.
[00:01:15] Ok, awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much.
[00:01:18] So, yeah, just maybe just share with us what what it is that's going to set you up for twenty, twenty one, what are some of these new things on the legions side that really set you apart right now? Because we've heard from a few coaches over the last 30 after that, over the last hour, basically the last two sessions, talking about how important it is to be able to do your only GenZE. So you're not just paying Zello and others like that for all of your leads and giving away thirty five percent of your business. So, yeah.
[00:01:54] Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, so we we take cellar's from from the vantage point that it's selling your home is not good news, OK? Selling your home is not something that the home owner is excited to talk about. And you might say, well, why is he starting with that? Well, if you come from Legion and marketing expenses, from the perspective that the only person that's excited about selling their home is the agent, then you're going to approach the the methodology of advertising, the scripting, the the ad copy, your approach on the initial call. The way you nurture everything will be colored from that vantage point. And my team did eight hundred and fifty two transactions last year and so were the number one in the state. And we have a heavy listing inventory and I'm obsessive about looking at the ads from the consumer standpoint. And so I'm going to give you guys can you repeat that?
[00:03:00] How many transactions last year? Eight, five to eight hundred and fifty four. OK, and where are you pacing this year? Very in the best possible way.
[00:03:12] I can't remember right now. It we we we've had Sisu dialed in for one of the three subthemes. And I'm just now, as of six days ago, integrating it with the other teams. And so we're because of covid, we're a little bit behind last year. Last year we did two hundred and twenty five million in volume and right now we're pacing at about eighteen million less as of September than the year before. Still a really great year. Two hundred million and volume is fucking nuts.
[00:03:46] So yeah. So maybe, maybe paint that picture a little different. So eight fifty to last year. How many agents did you have. Fifty. OK, so with fifty agents doing eight hundred and fifty two which so let's dove in now I just want to just add that at that stage because I mean it's pretty amazing to do that kind of numbers and really be generating your own leads and it's awesome. So.
[00:04:13] Yeah, yeah. Well and so you know, part of my journey and my growth has been because I also am a full time employee I lopa. And what we've done is thinking about the ads from the consumer standpoint. So what does a home homeowner care about? Well, a homeowner cares about what their homes are worth. They care about saving money. They care about what their neighbors homes have sold for. These are things that even if you're not selling your home any time soon, it's interesting information. And so creating ads that offer that in an easy and effortless way are super important because what you want to do is you want your advertising to be like a radar, OK, and and so what?
[00:04:58] The reason why I'm saying that is we have a really large database. We've got a database size about ninety seven thousand people and we're running remarketing through Illo to all those people.
[00:05:09] And if we know that they own a home then we're running. Sellar remarketing Sellery Marketing is showing the homeowner the homes that have recently sold in their area and it's updated dynamically. So they go to their Facebook news feed and they're going to see an ad for me that says Check out these homes they've just sold and it'll be it's always fresh data when they click that what ends up happening is now they're going to come into my ecosystem. And we have for too long, we've kind of relegated legion to a lot of the big portals and we've kind of given in and honestly, I've been in the business for twenty two years now and for probably fifteen of those, I did not think I could compete and I just didn't understand the power of having your own little ecosystem. And you're running these ads to these people. Your brand is always in front of them. And then finally they click on an ad or they click on an email and they land on your website. Well, the first thing you've got to make sure when you're doing this is you've got to make sure that what you're saying you're going to give them, they're going to get when they land on the page and you might say. Why are you saying that? Well, because a lot of people are running ads and then you click it and what you see when you click the ad is disappointment because that's not what they were expecting.
[00:06:28] An example of what to do, like, OK, what's an ad you might run and.
[00:06:34] When they click through, what are they going to see?
[00:06:36] Sure, sure. So a good example of an ad is these homes have just sold and they've impacted your home value. Check your value here. They land on the page and a box that's just there very plainly that says enter your address, no forced registration, not yet. We need to suck them in a little bit more and and so on. Remarketing they're already in my database. So they put in their address and they hit enter. And what we do is we instantly start showing them data. And for us, we use the it's a tool that scans my database and shows the consumer how many buyers I have looking for a home like theirs. And it's a real number. It's a real list of names of people that have searched online for a home similar to theirs. And what's great about that is that is not something you can get on Zillow. You can't type in your address and click a button and see who's searching for a home like yours. But you can on my website. So I'm appealing to what I know they want. They want to know their home value. They want to know how many, what it's worth or what they could do with their value. They they want to know who's looking for it. So then they land on it and they put in their address and you've got to give them that immediate gratification.
[00:08:00] And so we give them the list of buyers that are looking for a home like theirs. And from there, we we also provide them with what's called a home bought report. I don't have a home, but is another service. And it instantly pulls their the loan amount that when they bought the home. So they know the software pulls the loan amount, the bank and the interest rate from that, they they take the monthly payment and they know the loan balance. So how much the person owes on their house, they take that, compare it to what homes worth and instantly have a big pink letters, how much equity you have. And based on the equity that you have, they then go into all of this detail about all the things they could do with their equity, all the refinance scenarios. If you want to live in the home for another 20 years, you can use your equity and refinance and save X amount of dollars. And so so far, nothing about what I've said to you has to do with me selling their home. And so I just want to pause for a second and remind you guys how I started this presentation. I told you, I think it's bad news. I think selling your home is not something the consumer wants to talk about. They either want to talk about what their home is worth or the home they're going to buy.
[00:09:19] And so what I'm doing is I'm using technology to give people what they want, regardless of whether or not they're looking to sell their home. That is not a part of my advertising. Most of my seller Legion comes from would you like to to cash out your equity type ads? They almost look like financing ads and its back doors you into people that want their equity and they're not sure if they want to refinance and get their equity or they want to sell their house and get their equity because again, they don't like the fact they're interested in the cash, but they don't know what that means is going to be to get to that point. Exactly, exactly. And so the big idea here is give them what they want without asking for anything in return. And then we kind of play a watch and see approach, like when a seller or a homeowner comes into our database from there, what we're doing is we're monitoring their behavior because we're continuing to run ads to them. We're emailing them regularly and we do have some seller nurture tools like some texting and some other things that are going out that are just designed to do. We personify an administrator, a receptionist. Did the report load? Were you able to see the data? Did the numbers make sense to you? Like, we're not saying, hey, so you checked your home value, wanted to meet with you seem to talk about listing your home work.
[00:10:46] We're doing a tech check in. Did it work? Do you have it? And if they communicate with us about what we sent them and any degree, no, I didn't get it or yes, I'm confused or I got it made perfect sense. We say, great, I don't care what the answer is, we say no problem. Do you have ten minutes to talk in the next couple of days? I just want to get them on the phone. And what we like to do is when we get them on the phone is we like to talk to them about the data. Again, administrative personify a receptionist. This is bad news. They don't want to talk to a salesman yet. And what we do candidly is we kind of just flirt with the the number of buyers looking for their home. And we say, did you happen to see that? And they say, yes, and we can actually pull a list of names out of our database and show you if you'd like to see that, would you like to see that? Now, if they say yes in any capacity, we know that's someone that we need to get in front of. And so. Then what we do is we just plainly say, OK, sure, no problem, we'll send it to you.
[00:11:55] And because I do have such a long list of people looking for a home like yours, I just I'm just out of curiosity, are you open to the idea in the next couple of years if someone wanted to buy your house and the price was right, would you be open to selling it? If they say anything other than. No, than what we do is we tell them, good, we need to meet with you while you're not ready. We need to meet with you during the period where you're like, you know, it's not even on the horizon. And what we found, if we can get in front of them, what we do is we de-escalate the meeting. We talk, we say it's a pre listing appointment, and we say the market's so good that a lot of homeowners, you know, everything that's wrong with your house, every nook and cranny, every crack. And so some of you are overdoing it. And what we want to do is kind of talk you down a little bit and say, look, people are doubling over themselves for homes right now. Know, I think you could get a lot and people end up listing their home with us. And it's just because we kind of cozied up to them. And so I can't say it's necessarily a hack, but like, it's a process.
[00:13:07] So very one thing I want to point out here is that.
[00:13:16] Asking the right questions is so important, the way you phrase things is completely different than the way most are usually used to phrasing those. And every speaker we've had today has given us these little things on how to ask questions correctly. And that's such that such a take away that I'm getting today on just not being aggressive, but really being interested in them and helping them and serving them, not just being after the cell.
[00:13:49] Well, yeah, and it's kind of funny that you're saying that because so for my tenure for the last three years that I lapo one of the things from day one that we did that. And part of the reason why they hired me was my team. We used a question base script, so we didn't actually have a script. We had questions that were designed to be able to talk to the person that didn't know what they wanted. If they were thinking about buying, they had no idea what they wanted. They had no idea if they were going to sell their home. It's the person that most agents are disappointed with talking to. We call them looky loos, tire kickers. That's I'm scaling my business off of that person. And it's because I'm not waiting for them to tell me what they need. I call it don't get me wrong, being a waiter or a waitress, totally honorable way of making a living. But as an agent, if you're a waiter or waitress, you're waiting for them to tell you what their order is. And that's that's lead follow up for a lot of agents. And don't get me wrong, I love a good prospect that knows exactly what they want as the next agent. But I can't control the readiness of the prospect on the other end of the phone. So I will not relegate supporting my family to luck because that's what most agents are doing. And the more people you talk to, the better luck you have because you've made your chances better. So what we do, I thought I invented it. Socrates, Jesus, supersmart. People that talk to asking questions, I thought I invented it like the Socratic method of selling. It was a book in the eighties, apparently. So I was really disappointed. But so you these questions, they're they're designed to surface.
[00:15:32] The truth from the lead and when I mean the truth, I mean I need to hear them, I need to hear what they really think. I need to hear their mistakes, the wrong assumptions, their poor planning or lack of planning. I need I need them to talk to me. Right. So that the moment they tell me something stupid or wrong, that's my shot. That's my shot is to teach them where they're wrong humbly in that area. The second you do that, you're valuable. It is so much easier to set an appointment with someone when you're valuable. And what we do is we say, hey, I'm valuable, let's me. Well, like, let's look at this this meeting right now, right. If the bulk of this conversation was me telling everybody how awesome I think I am, I guarantee you everybody would drop off.
[00:16:23] Like if I was like, I really know what I'm doing. So a lot of homes sellers love me. You guys, you know, like people would be like this stupid. Right? But I'm not I'm I'm sharing information that's valuable and therefore people are listening. And that's the same approach with a homeowner or and actually this works with buyer leads to. So so you're spot on about the questions.
[00:16:45] Ok, so Ricky's asking for this type of leads or do you have a playbook or an intake form or something you could share with everybody.
[00:16:53] Let's see. An intake form. So. I'm not done with the seller playbook, but I do have a buyer playbook that has some of the seller copy, I made it for a while, LAPO, and it's actually an entire course for white customers. And the synergy between Sisu and LAPO has always been so amazing and so I need to run it by them. But maybe what we can do is if if there's a way for some of the users to that are on this call to like let you guys know these are people that want some information, I might be able to talk to I lapo and say, hey, the weather there are a user or not. This is something that people are asking for because like I said, I created a whole onboarding course and training around this that I'm not selling.
[00:17:51] It's a product of it was very if you if you are able to share that out, if you want to just get that to me, I will share it out through this link and make sure everybody has access to that.
[00:18:04] Yeah, absolutely. I'll I'll circle back after this and make sure the people that want it can get it.
[00:18:09] Ok, so Barry, we have we have ten more minutes. Where do we go, where do we go from here? You've taken us to this is how we're going to get people interested. If you guys have questions out there, by the way, please. Now's the time to bring those in for Barry, but. The way you guys have taken this approach on the sell side is very, very different than most of the things I've seen. Maybe let's talk about the buy side for a minute and how you guys do it or what percentage of your business is actually sellers versus buyers. Remind me that.
[00:18:45] Well, we'll actually have a lot more. But I can say about the sellers. I'm definitely coming down that road. Yeah, absolutely. OK, so because I'm providing data that's relevant to the consumer via advertising, email, marketing, and if they've opted in texting and voice mail drops. So because I'm interesting to them, I'm going to blow everybody's mind. They are using my website and up until twenty seventeen I could get them in to my website, but they wouldn't stay there. And so I want to let you guys know that there is it's not just Vilaboa, but there's technology out there that you can keep the consumer's attention now. So this next part is predicated on they are using my website because ah we use follow up. And so our CRM is we've broken everything down with ninety seven thousand contacts. If it's not super dialed in, it's a mess. And so we're able to see who is doing what. And when the consumer comes into our database, we only call them for ten days. If they don't, if they don't respond in the first 10 days they are dead to us and we have to move our focus to the leads that we haven't converted that are now on our radar because they're active. So we've split up new lead and marketing leads 50 50. And with homeowners, what we do is we actually have been running our homeowners that are active. So this is just the process we've ran. So I took last week, I took twelve hundred homeowners that were active on my website and I did two things with them. One, I ran them through.
[00:20:31] I've data, I've data is like a new version of Coal Realty. They're not related at all. I'm just trying to conceptually help everybody understand. I did that because I want to augment these. One thousand people are important to me. So now I'm going to augment the data, see if I can get additional phone numbers, additional emails. Then I took those one thousand homeowners and I ran it through revaluate, which is it takes everything that was cool about smart zip and drills it down into one product where the smart zip was like, we're going to find the people that want to sell and then sell you all this ridiculously expensive marketing products. I probably shouldn't say that on a live thing, but anyway, it's really expensive. Revaluate is reasonable and it's it's scoring based on like thirty life events, people that are likely to move buyers and sellers. And so I took these one thousand people, ran it through revaluate it has a deep integration with volleyball's and so it creates a custom field and that custom field scores it. And anything that's eighty or above is considered to be someone that's likely to move. And so what I did remember, I took a thousand people that were using my website, ran it through IVI data, augmented those one thousand people, then took that same file, ran it through revaluate. And now I found one hundred and twenty five people that were over 90 percent or above that we're likely to move. So then I take those one hundred and twenty five people and I spend a lot of money on them. So what, what all this has done is it's helped me to find active people and then instead of spending a lot of money on a thousand people, I multiply times eight or so the amount of money.
[00:22:16] If I would have spent a dollar per person and spent a thousand dollars, well, now that I'm only running ads to one hundred people, I'm able to spend ten dollars per person. And so now it's airland. And see, it's postcards, it's drib campaigns, it's voice mail drops, it's potpies, you name it. And so we're we've we've leveraged technology. And now what we're doing is we're going to them. And then I've got an essay that is doing circle prospecting. Hey, I've got buyers looking for a home like yours. And we do it. We scan our debt. We really do. Would you like a report? And so we're hammering those one hundred and twenty five people and we're talking to people before they're ready.
[00:22:58] And so for a lot of you that are like, wow, this is so awesome, you need to understand something. All this cool stuff is surfacing. People that think they don't need me yet. So like, you could buy all this cool stuff and you would still get people on the phone that think they don't need you yet. And so unless you're able to ask the questions that we're talking about here, you're not going to capitalize on the opportunity and not to scare everybody. But I think in ten years, it's only the agents that know how to talk to people that don't know what they want yet, that are going to be selling a lot of houses. I think the days of buying leads that are like, can I see the home tomorrow? I think those are going to get more and more expensive to the point that we've got a fish in a different river pond or so, told you had more man. I think you're muted, though.
[00:23:46] I was muted, thank you, Barry, I had my phone ringing here in the background, so I muted myself, so. One of the things you said was after 10 days, they're dead, I think dead to me.
[00:23:58] So many agents, teams, whatever, follow up for months with people who are ignoring them, which I think actually can ruin your reputation rather than build a reputation. So I love that you said that. And you really focus in on, hey, I'm going to spend more on those that are expressing some interest and really provide value. So as I listen to you, though, if I'm a team owner out there, my question is how difficult is it to make this happen with technology? Because you are a technology guy, Barry, you drill in on technology. So do you have any tips on like how do we drill in on that kind of stuff?
[00:24:39] Yeah. So I first of all, don't like setting up technology, but I almost in many ways feel like I'm handicapped because if I don't, I'll forget or won't do it. So what I'll tell you guys is whatever you automate, whatever systems you create, the the dividends of the work that you've done. So the voicemail drops I created in twenty sixteen, I'm still using and those dividends continue to pay off. Every Xabier connection or micro performance hack that I've done over the years continues to iterate and makes it to where I can be in like 30 places at once. So the first thing I would say to you guys is whatever is annoying or underperforming or lacking in your business. Pickett is there something you can, like, automate to help you with that? So Sisu is a great example of this. They're doing a good job of bring it. And you didn't ask me to talk about Sisu, but I'm going to different elements of my workflow to try to make it easier for me so that, you know, transaction management and agent performance and Agent Pay-out, all these things are in one. And the more they simplify that, the more time that saves me as a business owner. So the first thing I would tell you is start don't do this so that you can get more sellers, do this kind of stuff so that you can be freed up. Right. So you can buy back more of your time. And as you start to iterate on your on your workflows and try to make them a little bit easier from there, what I would recommend is build a database. Database management is like one of the most underrated aspects of the real estate digital marketing space master your CRM. If your CRM is not a place that provides peace and comfort, if it's a place you go to to get an anxiety attack, that means you're not using it the way that it was designed or it's a really crummy CRM because you're supposed to be able to use this to pass thousands of contacts.
[00:26:46] And if it's not doing that, something's broken, whether it's your understanding of it or the platform. So just to reiterate, the first thing I said was to just to make sure that your your your your hacking, different areas of your workflow, then master your CRM and then once you've mastered your CRM, have something that's running advertising to them. Again, why Logo is not the only company that does it to make sure they're using your website and then when they're using your website, capitalize and spend that money on them. I don't know if I even answer the question.
[00:27:21] To be honest with you, you're a very we have a lot of people asking for what what are the links to the two sites you're talking about as it I've data or what? What is it?
[00:27:32] Well, you know, I don't have my referral links. I'm just getting like poison ivy. Ivy. Why data? They've got a really cool text. You can text an address to them and they instantly return the record.
[00:27:47] And the data has been pretty solid. It's been really good. And then the other one was revaluate. So think about the word valuate and type the word re r e in front of it. So revaluate and Ryan is their head of sales over there. Really sharp guy.
[00:28:02] Ok, so after ten days, do you still retarget these people in my lopa or do you just say everyone in your database. Right.
[00:28:10] I mean they're always evolving. When I say they're dead to me we don't. We only delete our trash is actually the context. Like we don't use trash unless the person's like belligerent or something. So we never remove anybody. When I say they're dead, to me, what I mean is I'm not focused on them. And so why local remarketing?
[00:28:30] While oboH listing alerts call action Dritz and Rhia Ehi texting is going out and they only come back on my radar. They haven't earned the right for any more of my time after ten days. Put it to you that way, OK? And the only way they're going to earn the right for more of my time is that they do something significant with either my dripps or my marketing or something. OK, I created the smart lists around that, so the smart list are dynamic and that they only show up when they've done something important very we need to jump into the next session.
[00:29:05] Thank you so much. Before you drop out, I've noticed a lot of people have questions for you.
[00:29:10] Do you do you have an email? How's the best way to get an overview? Do you have anything you want to leave behind for everybody?
[00:29:18] Oh, yeah. I mean, I think probably I guess just email so you can email me at my agent email address. It's very be a r y at. Your friendly agent, Donnette. Because that one's hard to remember, you can also email me at Barry at Y Lapo Barry at why o opio dot com your friendly agent dot net.
[00:29:43] That's not so hard. All right, Barry. Hey, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for all of your tips and trades and secrets and marketing, which most of us don't know that much about. So thank you so much. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Have an amazing day.
