[00:00:02] What's up, everybody? Doug, Greg, Greg, how are you doing, man? Good to see I live in the middle of times.
[00:00:11] It's always nice to get connected with you again. And I'm just honored to be a part of this amazing community that you guys have built. And being able to watch these speakers earlier was just really eye opening in the fact you guys put together this content and it's great to be a part of it.
[00:00:28] Yeah, we love having anyone tuning in, dropping the comments. Tell us what you want to do in twenty twenty one. One big thing that you plan on doing. I think it's cool to hear that from anyone. Greg, I've loved working with you from the start. You show me a lot of technologies I hadn't heard about before and the way that you were kind of peace and things together. And you've also, whether you know it or not, have pretty directly pushed some of the reports and at some of the ways that we do things internally here at Sisu as far as the way our product works.
[00:01:05] So we wanted to talk lead source Arawa and lead source conversion right today. And maybe before we jump into that, you could just give us a little background on you, where you're coming from and some of the things that you're doing today.
[00:01:21] Sure. So I started in 26 as a single agent, 2011. I launched Allare Realty as an independent brokerage, started with just myself and slowly kind of piece to the rest of the pieces together in twenty twenty. We have ten agents, including myself. We have one transaction manager, we have one listings manager, and then we have one inside salesperson as well. Last year we did four hundred and fifteen units and this year we are at four hundred and fourteen closed in pending. So we've got a few more months to finish strong.
[00:02:02] And I remember I was speaking like five years ago and I was doing a session and we had talked about the conversion numbers and this guy in the back raised his hand and challenged that conversion number. And that man was somebody is a good friend of mine now, Jeff Cohen. And the instant that question, I was like, oh, it's kind of like picking on me. And my answer to the question is, hey, let's crack open the spreadsheet. Let's take a look. And from that point forward, we became friends and obviously a big supporter of Sisu and tracking, knowing your numbers, KPIs and things.
[00:02:45] I think the real estate industry is full of a lot of people with really big egos and a lot of people that like to brag about how great they are. And I just I try to not do that.
[00:02:56] And I just think a lot of times when agents talk numbers, I think that they're if I say no, it's typically not necessarily the true number. So I really got specific on the tracking from an early stage. And for us, it's been a huge part of our success. Like we can really model where our future business is going to come from. We can double down, we can Triple Crown, we can do experiments on these horses.
[00:03:26] I'm so happy to see ISA's here because we can now really trying to mastermind and open up the hood of what we call it, our Ferrari here at Dealer Realty. And we'd like to always make small tweaks to the Ferrari. We don't want to completely drive the Ferrari off the road, but we want to make small tweaks and the transparency that you guys bring to the industry by actually being able to truly quantify your numbers and not fudge those numbers. If you're fudging those numbers, you're only lying to yourself. And there's a lot of people that are all about getting the most sales. But at the end of the day, it's in my mind it's all about profitability, providing better lives for the teammates. You know, all that production wouldn't be possible with all of our support staff and just the leaders, the people that are standing up to help on our team all the time. Our culture is very probably one of those cultures. You could have just from a competition, gamification, camaraderie, like it's it's it's like an explosion when somebody gets an accepted offer on our team.
[00:04:29] And what is that? Is is there actually a system for congratulating and recognizing that? Or is it just people hear about it and they freak out?
[00:04:38] Yes, but we actually use slack. I know you're a big slack user. You're right. You love. And we've been on slack really since it came out. And it was one of the things I'm going to see if I can share my screen on that real quick when you share it, and I'll throw it up there. So some of these, they're they're they're totally fine as far as being politically correct, but you can see here, like I'm not seeing on your screen yet.
[00:05:11] If you click on the out, there's the screen yet. There we go. I'm going to go ahead and add this. You guys got Meems all over the place.
[00:05:20] We have memes all day long. But yes, like this was yesterday at 70 in the morning. I mean, there's a lot of times where and there's explosions here going on. And, uh, and it's fun to to celebrate together and have that camaraderie. And and it's really like it ties in with the gamification of Sisu, et cetera, to really get like almost healthy competition. But nobody's bigger than the team here. We're like the Notre Dame football team or no one's got their name on the jersey, on the back of the jersey or the Patriots come out together as a team. That's some kind of big for us, but. The it's a lot of fun and it needs to be fun because this is a very serious business and we help people with very serious decisions. But you got to work hard, play hard, and you can see that we definitely do that.
[00:06:13] Yeah, I'm always throwing in the slush given on slack so I can bring one of the girls in. And I see a lot of a lot of top team screengrab.
[00:06:25] Of course, this is where they have like a handful of different channels.
[00:06:31] And it's always surprised me how actually engaged those channels are, right. For for an agent, because it's on your phone. It's like Kenny fastest talk with them the other day. They basically have like an internal it's like your internal social media network. Right. And it's live. And you can create a lot of engagement there for us.
[00:06:51] When we started with Slack, it was probably, I don't know, eight, nine years ago. You're really early adopters of it. And for us, it was just purely to get interoffice email communication out of your email. We want to make sure that our emails are as humanly clean as possible so that we can be attentive to the high dollar, productive emails that come in and try to avoid that. So any of the interoffice communication really transitioned over to that, which it was probably one of the biggest things from a camaraderie standpoint. We had that camaraderie even before Sisu Sisu just like amplified that camaraderie, which is by anyone listening to Slack's free.
[00:07:32] I mean, you can get you can pretty much do anything you need to do with it for free. There's a couple of features. If you want more storage and things like that, you pay for it. But it's cheap.
[00:07:41] Easy to use a great communication. Yeah, we have 13 users. It has been free the whole time. We get the upgrade notification, but I just still haven't found a reason to upgrade. I love giving them money, but like you said, it's a tool that and there's Facebook, workplace, etc. and those types of things, but.
[00:08:01] Yeah, the other thing is, especially with a lot of people moving more virtual, having that place where you can go and have kind of like little campfire, a little place to socialize, a little corner of the web to do that.
[00:08:15] It's a big deal. So another culture thing that you guys did that was really fun. You tell us a little bit about the belt and the belt telling us one.
[00:08:26] I actually do have one of those. So obviously the key performance indicators are performance on. The people can have commanders, and this is who has the most actual talk to prospects for the month, and then we actually have three ballots. We have a pending powerhouse. So for the monthly person who has the most poundings that wins that award, we give them raffle tickets to win a opportunity to go to either the Zello conference, boomtown, unite or whatever we decide is a raffle ticket thing so that the sometimes you have contest and somebody runs away with a contest. And it's kind of like this deep motivating. It takes away all the power of the contest. I was fortunate enough to come up with that idea so that you can continue like even if they win that this month with the raffle tickets, they still everyone still has an equal shot to have a chance to win those those prizes, which is pretty cool.
[00:09:28] So you have to do that on contacts, on pending. So what was the other thing?
[00:09:34] Pokemon Pounder and Commander Pending Powerhouse. That's from my graphic designer, Blaine, who is just a just unbelievable like fun to like. Like I said, we want to have work hard, play hard kind of scenarios. So it's been a really good thing, obviously, but it's kind of put on the back burner. So we've got a bunch of flights in reserve for and we're trying to find something we can do when things get a little bit safer up there. So we're excited about that.
[00:10:06] Yeah, I love it. So so let's shift gears a little bit here. And going into lead source conversion, how do you what are the things you do to track and improve conversion?
[00:10:18] So before Sisu, it was all done by spreadsheet. It was done kind of haphazardly. It wasn't done as consistently as it should have been. We had formulas built and plot numbers in and total number of leads in versus pending closings, et cetera, with Sisu. It makes it ways here. And I'll kind of give you a sneak peak here of. Can you see everything OK in there? Yeah, so so with when we transitioned over to Sisu, one of the big things for us was the ability to go in and look at our individual lead sources of being able to put in our expenses into these for each individual source. And then we did all of this lead counting manually so we would go into Boomtown and we go into what's called our traffic dashboard and we pull up the stats for that specific month and manually input these leads. That was kind of like stage one. And I had always looked at our lead sources on a quarterly basis.
[00:11:41] This is something that we look at quite a bit more than that. Now, this is how we make a lot of the decisions on where we're going to go forward.
[00:11:49] So all of these numbers were manually inputted for a long time. Sisu I remember having a meeting with you guys. It was like probably within a couple of weeks of joining with you and being on a session with Kyle and myself. We had some really good ideas and I always was kind of passionate about a lead source through I-Report and eventually getting it to the place where you could eventually pull up individual teammates. So we could not only look at your lead sources as a whole and eventually get it to the point where you'd be able to break it down. But if anyone has done this manually, this takes a lot of time, a lot of effort. And as a realtor is not always are we the most consistent beings on the planet Earth. That's where Sisu comes in and makes it really powerful for us to be able to go in here and get these numbers put in here quickly with a partnership that you guys have with real sync that with the ability for lead counter. So with boomtown registers on the website and goes to a specific agent, fatales done in the system automatically, which is probably the biggest game changer for anyone that's ever done this stuff kind of manually and try to figure out that it's extremely difficult to constantly deploying time and energy into it and there's just too much room for error. And it was the automation of that. I actually like these little breakthroughs that I have some times where I'm like, wow, I didn't even realize. I forgot.
[00:13:37] We were tracking a new lead source and it's already converting at ten first ten point eight point four percent and.
[00:13:47] If I didn't have that counting system going on, so the counting system basically will plug in all of the information into your sources area, I'll give you an example of. This so there's accounting expenses. This is where you put your expenses, it tracks total number of leads for certain months, you can put in your expenses. These can be fixed all the way down going forward. So if you have a consistent spend with something, it's really easy to track that and know that you guys also have integrations with cookbook's that you can probably play with as well. But this system is counting these leads in real time. And you can see over time that you'll be able to build scorecards for your each individual agents, which how important is it to know who is really doing well on Zillow, like Zillow is asking for a lot of information that they weren't asking for before. And people that are using Sisu and using it to the fullest level have this information available to them at all times. But to flip it on the other side, obviously there's a lot of changes that are going on in the industry right now. And people are really scared about some. Some big changes in the real estate industry is constantly evolving and changing. And it's more important than ever, in my opinion, to determine where your business is coming from. I mean, I have some friends that have big portions of their business with the portals, and it's not uncommon knowledge now to know that that is the way that that's working is changing. But to be able to see that we've got other sources that perform really well for us, you know, and Zillow is about nine percent of our business as an example. And we're always trying to find resources to kind of like fill into those holes and also like to be able to go back and see like this is what I love about Sisu. It makes it very fast, easy to pull up things like last year we had nine closings from collection.
[00:16:00] That wasn't collocations fault.
[00:16:03] That was our fault, and in our weekly team meetings, there's numerous conversations about the importance of a signed call and it was almost like and we get it. We're fortunate to get a lot of phone calls. So it's not like. But our phones are constantly buzzing. And we have with call, actually, thanks to them, we have the ability to have all of our agents ordering phone rings. At the same time, whoever presses one gets deleted, gets pushed into boom town. You know, they book an appointment in Boom Town. It goes into Sisu and it tracks all this information. But you can see here we're going to end the year with twenty six years, not over. So we doubled our closings from more than doubled our closings from coal action. And those are inbound calls we use to manage all our inbound calls. And it wasn't Collection's fault that we only did nine the year before. It was our fault. We didn't put enough precedents on the importance of clients. And if you're not putting precedence and Collins in the future. If you don't answer the telephone, they will go to the easy button whenever it's available. Think about it. Everyone wants the easy button. The best way to have them not hit a scheduled tour button is to answer the phone when they call, which is an opportunity to have a great conversation, give them exactly what they want and then dig for motivation, dig for their ability and close the deal. But I use these reports with a call action as an example. I use this to be able to go to my team meeting in twenty eighteen and say, hey guys, we're really missing the boat here. So we make our decisions based on that.
[00:17:41] We run split test. Sometimes we make changes in our department. We're trying to see if we can get tiny little bits of improvements in our conversion rate and if I go back to twenty eight.
[00:17:58] Uche.
[00:18:01] If I go back to twenty eighteen, I can see here that our. Our conversion rate here was one point zero nine percent here. And then in twenty twenty, it's pretty close to that right now as well. Two point two percent, it's actually double, but there's less leads, so careful there, too, because you can look at this like, oh my gosh, my conversions double, but your actual number of transactions is down. But that was by design, like we made a change to to make that happen. Yeah.
[00:18:47] This is cool stuff, maybe, Greg, could you just scroll down on that report or I guess we lost it now? I think for that pie chart. If people were on here earlier, I think if you zoom out a little bit, you might see it. Or this graph right here is a really nice representation of expenses versus income for any particular lead source. Right. And a lot of people that are looking at this stuff weekly or monthly or at least quarterly, because the reality is, is the more often the more real time data you have on this stuff, and the more often you come in and analyze it, the more often you can pivot and course. Correct? Right. If I'm an agent, I look at my numbers once a year, I can make a correction once a year. That's databased. Right. And and that's not really going to change a whole lot because over the course of the year, I could get really off track. Right. But if you can measure this stuff monthly, weekly or even daily, then you're talking.
[00:19:51] And looking at the health of your company and spotting if you're too reliant on one source of business, that's a very scary thing. And it's a very real thing for a lot of companies out there. There's still time to change the course, change of direction, make changes. And even for us, I love this time of the year. We're still going forward. We're in the business planning stages, almost finished with everyone's business plans. But it's an exciting time for us because it does seasonality slow down a little bit where we can get our staff and our team to band together and make tiny tweaks to the Ferrari and improve our you can see our number one thing years past clients, Google Organic is up there on referrals, is up their sphere of influence, friends and family.
[00:20:39] The people that nurture those relationships for the long term are the people who will be playing the game in the future. In addition to other of the other options available. But don't think that your know, the big national sites won't be trying to nurture those people, too, and we need to make sure that we're staying relevant and also making sure that we're spending the money where it makes the most sense. And I know some of this stuff isn't super sexy, but I'm telling you, like and you may not like the numbers when you actually get them plugged in your correctly and the conversion number that you said was five percent and realize it's one point zero nine percent on a certain source. It's a real gut check to say, hey, here's here's what's really going on in the business. And when you put the accurate information in here, the numbers don't lie. And I'm just so fortunate that you guys have going from a overly complicated spreadsheet to an actual full blown. Software system like you guys have changed the game for us, along with there's so many layers to this, like even Boomtown, like I'm a boom town coach and I help teams either train agents on on accountability and in improving the system and improving conversion and having better conversations that matter.
[00:22:09] But the tracking without the tracking of the stuff. And being able to see that journey, it's really exciting when you have somebody that, like, doubles there in a year but didn't add a ton of expenses, that gets me excited. I'm all about trying to get as much out of every system that we use. But Sisu and Boomtown are like. You think you think you got it. You think you've got to figure it out. There's always something. There's another layer that you can dove deeper into it. We're not we're not like we're in beta testing of your task management system right now, which I'm super excited about. And it's not beta for you guys. It's Beta for us. Like we are testing it behind the scenes. Before we go live with our transaction coordinator and the agents, we want to make sure we are testing these things beforehand. Yeah, and that's kind of how we run the company and knowing our numbers and these conversions are the only way that you can improve. And, yeah, it's it's scary. Sometimes you put them in there and especially you put the accurate information, but I promise you, you'll grow and it'll help you make better business decisions.
[00:23:20] So you guys you guys do a lot of experimenting. You do a lot of split testing. You have any examples of maybe some interesting split tests or experiments that you ran and you were able to learn something from the data?
[00:23:34] Yeah. So probably one of the biggest ones for us was we had kind of an environment where the ISO kind of absorbed all of the inbound leads and we made a transition away from that and still have the ISO obviously helping. But I'm working on other different sources. But getting the agents more actively involved in it did increase the conversion a small little bit. But then the agents got really, really busy. And you got to get this playing back and forth that happens where you're constantly for us.
[00:24:08] Also another example, I some friends in Milwaukee that love real True.com. They love it. And we had run a year on iconium.
[00:24:17] You look at the end of the year and said, hey, we did OK on the source, but it wasn't it wasn't great. But we kind of dug into it a little bit deeper and just realized that a specific zip code that we had chosen, it just really wasn't the right zip code for what we needed at the time. And we made a small tweak over to a different zip code and went with it for another year.
[00:24:38] And it was really interesting because the cost per lead went up a little bit, but the actual number of closed transactions more than doubled. And so it was one of those scenarios where I was kind of like, I don't know, I'm going to cancel realtor dot com.
[00:24:57] I don't want to I always want to know what other sources are doing. And that's how you measure this stuff. This is exactly how you do it. But we almost gave up on it. And I think that when I talk to our Issei, I get to spend a lot of time with looking at this information and trying to make our spending decisions and where we want to invest our money, or maybe we want to gamble a little bit. We try not to keep the Ferrari gasoline in the Ferrari, but we'll always have some side things working.
[00:25:25] But yeah, you got to get you've got to get a gamble it a little bit to see if you can find something right. Then you're not going to find that one that might be a killer for you. And so other question. What what's cool? And I noticed the way real things pumping data in there for you is you've got a team lead count which tracks everything every eight tracks, every lead. That's a system. And that lead is one. And that's a one to one ratio. Right. But if a lead hits the system, correct me if I'm wrong. I think that's the way you have it. Set up a lead hits the system and it's assigned to you and you don't follow up and you've got Shark Tank or whatever or however it works, it gets pumped to someone else. And maybe three agents had an at bat with this lead.
[00:26:11] It's going to track that right as it changes hands, as it changes hands, which is if you think about that, that's pretty a complex thing. But yes, it will make those transitions for you in the fact that it's tracking per agent. It was I can get boom town on the traffic dashboard about like what we're getting for sources really easy. But if I want an agent level, there are so many extra clicks to get. And this was like the the huge breakthrough when you guys when real same work together to get that lead enabled. I was like, I told you, people just need to see this. And it's in it seems really complex. But once you get a set up and support staff in the tutorials that you guys have, I mean, I remember the first time I was like going through your tutorials, like if you read if you can watch a video, you can figure some of this stuff out, but you get guys who are happy to help. And I've always been a big fan. You guys know that and having to help any way we can.
[00:27:06] My favorite customer testimony of all time is when you told me when we rolled out some of this our. He said, I will now run through a brick wall for Sisu like my family, put that on my wall testimonial ever. But I want to ask you, are you noticing a discrepancy between agents or differences between agents that, hey, my my conversion on this source might be X, but this agent actually converts higher or lower. You have you dug deep into that? Pulled any insights out of that?
[00:27:40] Yeah, absolutely. We on a quarterly basis, when we review goals, we look at their goals and their accountability meetings pretty regularly. But we'll really dove down and try to get more on the specifics of each individual sources. He was performing the best. And you can make decisions as a leader on who really should be on those opportunities. We do have an abundance of opportunities in our company. We're not about having the most agents. We want the most productive agents. We want the most powerful support staff around them. Do all of the things that realtors don't want to do or don't do consistently and do that for them. But not everyone is right for each individual source, and there's no better way to tell who is is right for something. I think scenario more where we don't have enough people that really want to work. That source isn't really good at building people's pascaline databases and helping them doing the things that really matter, make an impact and doing it for the agents. And over time, what we find is the the longer they're with us, the bigger their client databases and the more referrals they have. So they don't need as many company opportunities. They still take plenty. But because so it's an interesting cycle.
[00:28:53] And so I'm proud of to help our agents build databases that really matter. And and we've been very fortunate with turnover. We have very little.
[00:29:03] Yeah, no, it's just you got some awesome systems. I'm thinking back to one of the earlier sessions we did yesterday with with Josh Cunningham. They worked, I mean, millions of leads and he was all lead sources are good. Right. And then Patrick Faery just a little while ago saying you can take one lead source and you can really master that one lead source. Right. So when you have the data to guide those to say you have those two principles and say, OK, I can take one agent and I can coach them up and I can teach them how to master one lead source because working one lead source is drastically different than working another.
[00:29:41] I mean, I've got to go to where this person is when that lead was created and figure out how I'm going to get them to know me like me and work with me either now or in the future. So that data is what helps make those decisions, right.
[00:29:54] Just like they call action example, where we doubled more than doubled work because we put an emphasis on that talk to meetings. I mean, they were sick of me talking about it every week, but it was something that needed to be said. And we've made massive improvements, but there's still room to tweak it a little bit more and push a little bit further.
[00:30:11] Always. Always. Yeah. Greg, thanks for helping on, man. You got you got anything else, any other knowledge bombs you want to drop for us, folks?
[00:30:23] Well, I think that the industry is rapidly changing. I think everyone that is in your circle definitely knows that. I think there's massive opportunity. I think we have to have the right mindset. I think we also need to plan put together year three year, five year, 10 year plan and really get clear about where you see your place. And I think there's an opportunity of change. I've I've been fortunate enough to embrace technology and and learn as much as I can the minute we stop learning and improving, the minute we get slapped.
[00:30:52] So my best advice is just a student, like the minute you think, you know, everything is and then you're in trouble. So don't go with don't ever go there. We have so much room for improvement, which is pretty cool.
[00:31:04] Always everyone knows you're coming on and we'll be in touch.
[00:31:10] Everybody take your seats.
[00:31:13] And that's information that.