Ditch the Losses: Nick Waldner's Blueprint for Profitable Online Lead Generation in Real Estate

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Transcript

Nick Walder: [00:00:00] When it comes to Sisu and CINC, when you guys asked me to do this, I just want to be really clear that I had no problem sharing everything because these two companies helped me build such a great business. But I wouldn't just go out and tell you every company's great, and you can use anybody. Like I only want to talk about the companies that I'm using on a daily basis that are actually working for us.

Zac Muir: Ditch the Losses: Nick's Blueprint for Profitable Online Lead Generation Real Estate

Nick, give us a little background on yourself, please.

Nick Walder: I've been selling real estate for 22 years, something like that. I run the number one team in the Maryland/DC region. We've been number one for the last five years. I think we'll sell close to 500 homes for around 200 million.

But as far as all that goes, I spent 12 years probably [00:01:00] just struggling trying to sell 30 homes or 40 homes a year and just trying to figure it out and put it together piece by piece. So it's not like I had 22 years of success. I had a small chunk of success by a lot of failure to get there.

So we're going to talk about some of the failures I had and some of the things I screwed up and some of the things we learned along the way. And as you just stack those things one after the other, you start to see a pattern, you start to actually succeed, but it doesn't happen overnight, and this will just be the start of you stacking your wins if you follow some of the stuff.

Zac Muir: You made me think of something, Nick, that we actually just talked about this on our team today. It's the poem with the stonecutter, and it says, When nothing seems to help, I go and look at the stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow, it will split in two. And I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

So [00:02:00] yeah, there's a lot of overnight successes in this industry and none of them really are. It's all just distance. And that's, definitely something we're gonna dive into today.

And when it comes to lead gen, I'll shout you out because we were looking at your numbers in Sisu and the spread of sources and the way that you guys have approached multiple different lines of business is really healthy. I think some struggles in the industry today can be tied back to like reliance on just one type of lead one line of business, right?

It's no different than investing. You're not gonna put all of your money into one stock or one type of investment. You're gonna go diversify a little bit, right? That was one of the main reasons that we really wanted to have you here on this webinar is because I think you've done that exceptionally well.

Nick Walder: I think Zac, before we dive into you, because I want to introduce you. One of the things that I laugh about all the time is like one of our lead [00:03:00] gen methods back in the day was Craigslist. We literally would put Craigslist ad up and get phone calls, and back then for Craigslist, you could only have two or three ads per phone number. So we went and bought five burner phones and kept them in a drawer in our office so that we could have 15 or 20 lines out there of those leads coming in, and it's so funny to me that imagine if my entire business was built on that and then all of a sudden it's like Craig who? Like it's gone.

So you have to make sure that you're in multiple arenas if you're going to succeed. All right, let's look at that. Look at that fresh face. Now I haven't seen Zac without his hat on and quite a few years, but I can tell you from the first time I met him at a conference and just, he, his passion around this and Sisu and understanding how to use it and digging into it. And what he's done over the years - helping [00:04:00] our team use it to the highest level, connect us with other teams that are doing it - like I can't speak highly enough for Zac's role in making Sisu such a huge part of our business.

Zac Muir: Thanks, Nick. I appreciate it.

So Nick you shared this analogy with me and you shared it very well, but we started talking about your approach and your philosophy behind lead gen lead conversion.

And, you brought up this analogy of, fishing, deep sea fishing, basically. So maybe you share a little bit with us about that and your philosophy behind this lead gen, lead conversion.

Nick Walder: Yeah. So, this picture this is a much cooler picture than what I had said that Zac pulled, but it's basically if you've ever gone deep sea fishing, you've ever gone out through the ocean, which is right there. If you've ever gone out, it's like a three hour trek out and then you're going to go try to find tuna or mahi or whatever it may be. But it's not like you throw one line and wait. Like this, boat has six. I've seen as many as 12 different lines, exactly like [00:05:00] that, all out at the exact same time so that when you're sitting there, fishing can either be super exciting or super boring.

There are times when you have 12 rods going and you're just sitting there looking around, probably having a beverage or two, and then all of a sudden, one of them hits. And bam! You're jumping on that. You're on it. The, all the excitement of deep sea fishing happens when that one line is hitting. And then as soon as you get that fish on, you're waiting for one of the other lines.

You're rebaiting that one, throwing it back out, and you never know which one's going to hit. So I use that analogy that if you have a lead generation strategy, it better be a bunch of lines in the water cause you don't know what you're going to catch. It could be a mahi It could be a tuna, a marlin. It doesn't matter. You have to be prepared by having all those lines out there.

Zac Muir: Yeah, it actually, the way that I look at it, it actually becomes a question of, management, of how many of these lines of business can you, as a leader, manage and drive and, drive a strategy behind each one [00:06:00] without getting overwhelmed without your team getting overwhelmed, right? And I see the teams that are doing this really well. They have well defined strategies and tracking and measurement in place for all their different lines. But the point is when one of them is cold, another one of them is going to get hot.

So we talk about the roller coaster. I look at a lot of Sisu dashboards and a lot of them are like the up and the down and the up and the down of like you have a great month and then all of a sudden your next month's cold because you've stopped focus on lead generation in that month where you were winning, right?

But as businesses start to mature they start to introduce or master multiple lead sources and probably grow their agent count a little bit, and you start to see graphs that are a little more flat across the top. And what does that do for you as an owner? Now you're not wondering whether this month's going to be profitable or not.

Because when one line of business is down, when one lead source is cold, the other one's hot and picking up the slack, and you have enough diversity that that you can weather [00:07:00] even the tough times, but you're really just not riding that up and down rollercoaster.

Nick Walder: And, with tracking, you can determine which one of these rods, Hey, maybe I shouldn't spend any money here anymore.

Maybe it's been cold for so long. We need to change the bait or change the system or change who we're spending money with because it's not working anymore. So like, my Craigslist analogy, like if one of these rods was Craigslist, we certainly aren't spending that money anymore because we track the ROI on it, and we got rid of it when it wasn't producing anymore.

And I think that's a huge key to being profitable is you have to understand what every one of those lines is costing you in client acquisition and that return on investment. If you spent a dollar, did you get 1 back? Because what was the point? If you spent a dollar and you got 5 back? Maybe you should spend $5 and try to get $25 back.

Maybe you should spend $25, and you grow that until the point where you're not seeing that return, but you got to track those [00:08:00] to understand which ones to cut and which ones to give more to.

Zac Muir: Yeah, exactly. And we're going to talk later in this webinar, we're going to actually talk about a strategy. If you're looking to introduce a lead source, like what's a way to do it the right way so you don't get bit? But I'd be curious everyone in the chat. I would love to know What is a lead source that's doing really well for you right now? And what is a lead source that maybe you're wanting to introduce or you've just started to introduce? I'm curious, and I think it'll be valuable for everyone to see what are people doing well with and what is maybe everyone focused on adding. But Nick let's dive into yours because we took this from some of your reporting And this is that healthy mix, and I know there's even more than this. These were the top ones, but walk us through these and maybe a little detail on any of them. We're going to go deep on one after this.

Nick Walder: Yeah, so I think the first thing that everybody has to know is your number one lead source if you're running your business correctly, should always be your [00:09:00] referral and repeat. So that's your sphere. That's your past client. That's your past client referral and your past client. Repeat. And if you're running your business correctly, that's a massive part of it. So how do we lead generate for the people that are already in our network? We do it really simply. We have four events a year and we invite - physical phone call plus mailed invitation to every single one of our past clients.

"Hey, we're having this ice cream event or wine tasting or whatever. We'd love for you to come." So I think before we get on the online lead and we get into all the other strategies, I want to make sure it's really clear. You have to start there. That is where every team across the country that has gotten any type of success, their number one source is always referral and repeat business. So that means when I'm reaching out to my past clients, 1) Do they want to buy or sell right now? Probably not because it's probably six or seven years before they're ready. Or Do they know somebody who's thinking about [00:10:00] buying or selling? Probably so and are you capitalizing on that? Are you getting those referrals from that sphere that helps grow your business? So I think that's one of the big ones.

The next one that that, I love on here is Google. Like Google has been an absolute game changer for us over the last probably three years. And we're not talking about pay per click. We're talking about Google local services. So just to give you an understanding of, Google. Basically when five years ago, if you would go into Google and say, I need a plumber, they would send whoever spent the most money on Google to get that lead would get that lead.

So the companies would come in and they'd all spend a ton of money, and they were just lead aggregators. They were just capturing the lead and then they would call a local plumber and say we'll sell you this client who needs the garbage disposal, and it's going to cost you 20%, or whatever [00:11:00] it is. And the local plumbers are like, okay, and they would pay it.

The consumer started getting upset. Hey, I need a local plumber in Baltimore, Maryland, and you're sending me to some call center in Wisconsin, who's then calling some plumber who's 40 minutes from me and it's hard to schedule. And it just got clients got fed up, or the consumer got fed up.

So then Google was like, wait a minute. If somebody says I need a plumber, then we need to highlight the best plumbers in that specific area. We're not charging them for that. We want to highlight them and make sure they're showing up so that people come to us when they have a problem. And they made that switch and they did it across all industries.

So real estate is one of them. So if you Google, I need a top real estate agent in this area. Yes, you're still going to see Redfin and Zillow and all the other ones that paid to be there, but on the very top, you're going to see your [00:12:00] local providers that people can reach out directly to. And if you're anything like me, you're going to go there before you're going to go to some national provider, you want the local source when it comes to real estate.

So, if you're on Google and you're an average consumer and you're like, I need to sell my house, I need to buy a house and you put in top agent in Maryland, or real estate teams in Howard County, Maryland, right? Super specific. If you look, that's my picture that came up first.

And then there's three more for that. And it's not like I'm paying tons of money to be first on that. How we're being first Zac, take a guess. Why do you think Google ranks us number one?

Zac Muir: I'm seeing a big old 1063 right here.

Nick Walder: Yeah. We've got over a thousand five star reviews. So get rid of real estate for a second and think about if you're in a new town and you're going to go to dinner and you jump on Yelp or any of those sites to figure [00:13:00] out what restaurant you want to go to.

The Schiff team, I know him very well, has a couple hundred reviews. Wendy Slaughter's team has 100 or 200. Bob Lucido has a couple hundred. And then all of a sudden this other team has a thousand. So if you're looking at restaurants and trying to decide where to eat, one restaurant has over a thousand. Everybody else's has a third of that. Which restaurant are you going to choose? It's the same thing here. When you're looking for local, you're looking for the best. And Google, if people are finding me and then give me another five star review, then Google's like, all right, we found a great plumber.

We need to make sure we highlight this plumber so every time somebody calls they get a great plumber and they keep coming back to Google. So this was a massive impact on our business as far as our lead generation. But you have to focus on reviews. If you did all the same stuff we did and you had a hundred reviews, you'd never get the results that we're getting because we spent years focused on [00:14:00] nothing but reviews.

Zac Muir: What are some of the things you guys did? I'm assuming you have a process built in to basically make sure you get reviews, but i'd be curious to hear some of that.

Nick Walder: Yeah, so number one everybody on the call get out your phone right now, and go to this website reviewwt.com. It's going to pull up the five stars. I want you to click on the star on the far right. And then I want you to write anything in the comment. Nick's great. Nick's fun. I'm really humorous. Anything you want, write anything and then just hit submit. So reviewwwt.com and go with me on this.

Follow me here because I think this is going to be really impactful in your business. Reviewwwt.com, far right star, write anything at all, whatever, and hit the submit button.

All right. So if you did that, You [00:15:00] just gave me a five star review. And truly from the bottom of my heart, I appreciate that. I really do want your five star review, but what I want you to see is how easy it was for you to give me a five star review exactly where I wanted on Google. That would show up and help my GLS account.

So do you have a system that you can so clearly send your clients, your past referrals, whoever to that, it's that simple? Could you imagine if I would have said, all right, guys, go to Google, Waldner Winters Team, then look for the review button, click on leave a review. Okay. Then the next, and then... no one's ever going to do that.

So you create a vanity site and then you send every one of your clients that it's a one click. It takes you right to the five stars. They click on the right star and it's done. It's really that simple. So I don't want you guys to think like, Oh, he's out here just trying to get five star reviews. I absolutely am. Like this is [00:16:00] our business and this is what we do to make money. But I want you to take away that. Oh man, maybe I need to create my own vanity site that goes directly to the five star reviews so that I can start building that. If you have a huge Yelp presence, that's fine too. Use Yelp and go in and create a vanity source or vanity URL there that sends it directly to there.

If you're big on Facebook or social or whatever it is, that's where you send it. That's where you point your URL. Now, we started this on Zillow. And I think we have somewhere around a thousand reviews on Zillow as well. And that was our number one source. But we realized a long time ago, I say probably three or four years ago, we realized that Zillow is not in it for us, Zillow's in it for them.

And at any moment in time, Zillow could say, we don't need Nick anymore. We have our own agents or we opened up our own brokerage or we did whatever. And then all of a sudden my reviews are worthless. [00:17:00]

But Google has no plans to come into real estate. So for me, I'm going to build my reviews around a source that's not going to compete with me ever. So we pulled away from Zillow and we redirect everybody to Google now, but it could be Yelp. It could be Facebook. It could be whatever that source that you want to make, but pick one. Cause I get this question all the time. Nick, I'd like a realtor.com one, a Zillow one, a Google one, a Yahoo...

No one's doing all that. You're lucky to get them to do one. So you've got to choose your one and double down on that. And for us, it was Google, and it's paid off tremendously.

Zac Muir: I love it. I also McKenzie and Sandy asking different places to leave reviews, which I think is valid. I was actually at a mastermind a couple weeks ago and what people were talking about is. I don't know if you've ever done anything like this Nick, but basically it was a, when you go to reviewwwt.com or whatever your website [00:18:00] is, which I think is brilliant, you could actually put like a normal form on there, like a type form, and it would say, did you have a good experience in the transaction?

If they say yes, here's. You're going to redirect them to wherever you want and you can change that redirect whenever you want. You could make it google one month and maybe next month, I want to boost realtor.com and maybe next month I want to boost yelp, right? So all the people who say yes, we had a good experience, You're sending them to one of those sites to leave a review. If they say no, you're giving them a place to leave long form feedback right there and then not sending them to any review site, and you're capturing that feedback internally. I thought it was a smart way to go about this.

Nick Walder: I love that. And there's, some companies that promise you go and do you put a review on or you, use their site and it syndicates to all the different sites. But what I've found is, that's not the case. Google wants you to get the review on Google and that's how it shows up and that's how they count it.

And, there's just so, same [00:19:00] thing with Zillow. Zillow, you have to have a Zillow account in order to leave a five star review. So we struggled with we got a thousand reviews there, but how many did we miss because people are like, I don't want a Zillow account. I get it. It's fine. Google pretty much everybody has. I would say while we want it at all the different sites, the bottom line is I'd rather be an inch wide and a mile deep than an inch deep and a mile wide.

Zac Muir: On Google, getting a little deeper here, you guys doing PPC and GLS or Google local service, are they two totally different things?

Nick Walder: No you're exactly right. It's two totally different things. And what it starts with is go with what's free. If what's free is your Google local service, or at least less expensive, then start putting all of your effort there, building your reviews, building your site, making sure that you have a good picture.

If you look at this, the first two pictures are myself and Mike, and those are relatable people that [00:20:00] someone's going to click on. That's a local person. Wendy's is a house. The next one is a house. I don't know if you're going to get the same type of reaction when somebody sees a house as they do an actual person, when they're Googling a real estate agent. They're looking for a person.

So go in there and work with your system to make sure that your Google appearance is exactly what it should be. You have all the different metrics hit. Then, work on building your reviews. So far we haven't spent a dime. Now it's review. Get as many as you can. Grow that. And with Google, they don't have to have done business with you.

You can call your mom and be like, Hey mom, can you send me a quick review? Here's reviewwwt.com. And she jumps on there and does it. Now, what I will tell you is Google's smart. So if you go in one day, you get a thousand people to send you a review. Most likely, they won't allow the majority of those to stay on there.

Cause they're like, wait a minute, how did they get [00:21:00] zero reviews and all of a sudden they got a thousand in a day? So what, Google wants to see is consistency. We get three to four reviews every other day. And with that, no one really flinches. We get them all counted there. 90% of them show up, and it's pretty easy.

But I know I've spoken at events before and had 700 people all of a sudden put a review on. And Google's... Nick, this doesn't seem real. So make sure that you're creating consistency. Every time we close a property, we were asking for a five star review. So if we're closing 40 properties a month, every month let's say 75% of them give us a review. We've got 30 reviews coming in, which is about one a day every single month. That is easy. And then to go out and get people that aren't buying or selling with us that know us, like us, trust us, listen to us, do the education with us, whatever that may be, and all of a sudden it's [00:22:00] instead of one, it's two, no big deal. And we can grow very quickly like that, so just be smart about how you're going out and getting those reviews.

Zac Muir: Couple questions here just on while we're still talking about variety, your lead sources. On your events, you mentioned your events that's a good way to grow a sphere. Is it about the number of clients that show up, or is it more about just the touch and getting in front of them?

Nick Walder: Yeah, that's a great question. And everybody worries gosh, if I invite 300 people, 300 people are gonna show up. But, here's the truth, guys. If I invited 300 people to my wedding... 20% of them wouldn't show up. And think about your wedding list. These are the people that you sat down and said they're important in my world, and I want them to be at my wedding. And you invited them and still 20% of them can't make it for whatever reason. So just understand that if I invited 300 past clients who know me, they're not [00:23:00] all showing up. In fact, you'd be lucky if 20% of them show up, but that's okay because 20% is 60 people and they each bring one guest. That's 120 people. That's plenty. That's a big enough event for me. But the point is I spoke with 300 of them. I invited them and whether they can make it or not, I gave value.

Think about it this way - if somebody called you today and said, Hey, I've got tickets to tonight's game, you want to go to this baseball game with me? Wherever you are, Baltimore Orioles or whatever state you're in. Somebody calls you right now and says, Hey do you want to go to this game tonight? Game's at seven, right? It's 3:30 right now. You're going to go? So think about that logically. I got to pick the kids up at school, or Oh, we already have plans to do this, or I have soccer tonight, or whatever it is. There's a million reasons why you couldn't go tonight.

But how do you feel about the person who called you? The one who [00:24:00] invited you and had the tickets. "Hey, I got the box seats at the Orioles game. Why don't you come?" I'm like, "Oh man, that sounds awesome. Really sorry, I can't. I've got soccer practice tonight or swimming or whatever." And I hang up the phone and I'm like, wow, what a good guy. He called me, thought of me.

Now, what we really should be thinking is. It's 3:30. The game's at 7. How long has he had these tickets? How low on the totem pole am I that he's just calling me to out two and a half hours before this game time? But we don't think that way. We think in terms of reciprocity. We really appreciate the offer, whether we can use it or not.

And then we turn around and feel like, oh, man, I owe him. I owe them. I really like them. And that's your opportunity to get referrals. That's when people are like, you know what somebody mentions real estate and they say, "Oh my agent just called me the other day, invited me to a baseball game. I couldn't go, but he's a great guy. Let me give you [00:25:00] his number." And you create the goodwill that creates your referral. So I think that's a great question, Zac. Do everybody show up? No! 20%, maybe.

Zac Muir: Yeah, I think you're right though. It's all about that touch. And that's, a really good question. Sandy Delancey is asking about newer agents and helping newer agents grow their sphere specifically.

Nick Walder: So, I think with newer agents, one of the things that I realized really late, 12 years in, is why wasn't I keeping track of everyone? Why didn't I have people in a database? Why didn't I use a company like CINC and put every single person I meet and have a real estate conversation in? If you imagine how big it would be. Now, we have a pretty big database with 22,000/23,000 people in our database, and a lot of them were from all of our different lead generation sources.

But imagine if I had a thousand people locally who actually knew me, liked me, trusted me, whether they [00:26:00] bought or sold real estate with me or not, it's not as important. But they know me, and I have a way to communicate with them. I have an email address. I have a phone number and I have a setup system where I reach out once every three months or once every six months, whatever it may be, but I can consistently go back to that well.

We think Oh man, 22,000, it'd be great to have a database that big. But the reality is you don't need that. You give me 325 people that know me, like me and trust me. And I could build a massive business just on those 325 people. And I would do it really simply. I'll just give you the the blueprint for this really quick.

I would call every one of them once a quarter. I would text or send a handwritten note to every one of them once a quarter. And then I would do some sort of social media touch once a quarter. So Zac gets a new puppy. I see it online once a quarter. I might say, Oh, Zac your puppy is so cute. Where did you get it? Whatever. [00:27:00] And that's how I connect with them.

Now, if you do that with 325 people, the math works out really simple. I need to call five people a day. I need to text five people a day, and I need to social media touch five people a day. So we have all that set up in autotracks in CINC. And then every day I wake up and my phone says, here's the five people you need to call. Here's the five people you need to text or handwritten note. Here are the five people, go on their social media and comment on something they did. And it's that easy.

So now every single one of those 325 people hear from me every single month, but it varies in intensity. So it's intense when I'm calling you. It's very low intensity when I'm on your social media, right? So nobody wants a phone call from you every single month. That's insane. Imagine if your insurance guy called you once a month. What do you want? But every three months if I call and say, Hey, we've got a wine event. [00:28:00] Oh, you can't make it? No big deal. Three months later. Hey, we've got an ice cream event. We'd love to have you. Can't make it? No big deal. Hey, we've got a Halloween pumpkin, blah, blah, blah. Hey, oh, can't make it? No big deal. And then the fourth one we have a Santa or whatever, our fourth event is.

Every one of those phone calls, they're like, Oh, cool. Nick's calling. I wonder what he's inviting me to now. "Hello." It's much easier, and that's four phone calls a year. So that's why we do the four events. Cause it gives us an excuse to up the intensity and call four times a year.

Zac Muir: I love it. And you can tell you're very intentional about this and I'm guessing you weren't always intentional about it from day one so you must've learned and grown.

Nick Walder: I was not intentional about anything, but I just, overtime, to be a new agent today and to start this stuff and work on your consistency and work on doing the same things, the right things over and over again, you will grow twice as big as me in a third of the time.

Zac Muir: [00:29:00] That's the value of teams too, because and as a team owner, when you're recruiting, you bring these new agents in. You've got the system, you've got the software. I see a lot of Sisu. You can do onboarding at Sisu, and you see the task list. And really all the teams that I know that are operating at an extremely high level, one of the first things is help this agent figure out what their sphere is. Who's in their sphere. Get it into the CRM and get them on some kind of plan. Exactly like what you mentioned. And that right there just blows the whole learning curve away.

Nick Walder: I'll give you an example of one of the agents on our team. In his first year, he made $50,000. His second year. He made $90,000. His third year. He made $175,000. Imagine going from your $40,000 a year job, three years later, you're making $175,000, and we literally just plugged him into the system. Every morning he woke up and we'd look at Sisu together. And I'd say, how many contacts did you make? And we checked that and we tracked that every single day. And we knew whether [00:30:00] he was making enough contacts. And then it was all right, how many people did you add to CINC? Did you set up a followup? Do you have reminder set, or any of your past your reminders past due? And it was just that consistency every single day that allowed him to ramp up really quickly. Because it took me a long time before I was at $175,000 in income. It certainly was longer than three years. So it's understanding that the tracking every day is what makes a difference.

Like we talk about, I want to lose 10 pounds. It's not like I got to eat really healthy today and tomorrow I should be 9 or 10 pounds lighter. No, it's like removing 100 calories every day for the next year. That's the healthy way to reduce weight is little changes every single day that over time add up. It's the same thing here, but if you're not tracking it, you don't know if you're performing.

Zac Muir: Getting a little deeper on this. Talking about, if I'm on this call, I'm like, okay, I like what Nick's talked [00:31:00] about with Google, or maybe I want to go introduce, I don't know Zillow, or or any of these. There's so many lead sources. You want to go introduce a lead source, right? A system to systematically bring these sources into your business and do it well. And you and I started talking about this, but really there's a couple of things for me that are non negotiable. One, every quarter, at least every quarter, I'm sitting down with my leadership team or with my partners, and I'm looking at a report of our lead sources.

The teams that I know that are doing this extremely well, they're pulling up that report. They're stack ranking them by conversion over that time period. And then they're basically making decisions on, is there a source that we're under investing in that we want to invest more in? Is there a source that we're over investing in? And is there a source that we want to cut? And what is the new, lead source that we want to introduce in this quarter? And you're doing that at least every single quarter. If you don't do it that way, that's where you wake up one morning, like profitability is not where we want to be. So will you elaborate on that a [00:32:00] little bit, Nick, and your guys approach if you were going to go add a new lead source today.

Nick Walder: Yeah. We literally call that our state of the company. And instead of every quarter, which is how we used to do it. Every single month, we look at what's the ROI for each one of our lead sources?

The only way you can do that is to know what the lead sources are when the leads come in. So we track that through, Sisu, which then connects right to CINC so that we have that in there. But then you have to look at CINC to make sure, do we have reminder set? Are we following up? Are we doing everything in order to maximize that lead? Because you could have the greatest leads coming in the front door, but they could be walking right out the back door if you don't have your system set up over there.

So when we're tracking, I need to track everything coming in. I need to make sure the back door is closed and we're doing our follow up and doing our reminders. And then I add up the numbers. Okay, we had we spent $5000 a month for the last four months. That's [00:33:00] $20,000. How many closings do we have or do we have in process? We have five under contract. We have two people that are searching for houses right now. Just haven't found one, and we've closed two.

I'll look at those numbers. Our average price is around $450,000. I'll look at those numbers and be like, that's great. I'll spend $5,000 a month if I'm getting four, or five, six closings a month, that's easy. And most people would, and most of you will sit there and go yeah, that makes sense. I'd spend that too. But if you're not tracking it, you don't know that. And if $5,000 sounds like too much, make it $500. If you spent $500 a month, are you tracking that to see how many closings, whether the closings have happened or they're in the process of happening. Either one of those is fine. I just want to know I'm getting good leads.

So we have a lead source that we're using right now that we just added. And this is a perfect example. We started getting leads in like a lot of leads. It was really good in terms of [00:34:00] the lead number. But when I started looking at our tracking, when I started looking at Sisu, we would have a lot of initial phone calls and very few would follow up. And then I started reading the notes and it was like 580 credit score, 500 credit score, no income. And it was really quick to realize, wait a minute, these leads are terrible. It's not like we weren't following up and we weren't doing everything on our plan. We were just not getting great leads. So we immediately, within 60 days, turned that entire source off.

Because it just wasn't providing us the leads we wanted. And then there's been other lead sources where we started with $500 spend. And after three months I saw such success. I'm like, let's make it $1500. And we kept watching it and then we made it $2,500 and then we kept watching it. And at some point you can only spend so much before you start encroaching on the business. So maybe we get to $4,000 and after $4,000, it's not worth spending an extra thousand [00:35:00] or $2000. And Sisu is what we track all that from. So we know what that return of investment looks like.

So your PNL, your tracking system and your CRM, that's everything in your business. And I'll openly tell you, like right now we were at 30.8% profitability right now. And that's a huge part of us managing every expense and looking at every return on investment. So we're only spending money that we're getting a good return from.

Zac Muir: I think it's important also to notice and recognize. There's a hidden cost with your leads you might have a lead source that you can generate leads at Two bucks a lead crazy inexpensive and you can you know pump a ton of leads into your system. There's also an opportunity and an energy cost of calling those leads, right? Just because you can pump a stupid amount of these leads in for [00:36:00] cheap, there's time and energy being spent converting those leads. And sometimes I think that's a hidden cost or it can be a hidden cost for somebody's resources, right? But really the only way to know exactly like what you said, Nick, you got to track it. And I would even recommend, especially if you're a team of five, five plus agents, especially stack ranking your agents per week. Sisu makes it really easy to actually do that. You can pull up any lead source and actually break it down per agent on that lead source because we've had teams that said, Hey, yes, we're unprofitable with this lead source, but actually when we nurture them this way, or we nurture them with this agent, or when we give them to ISAs, we're actually profitable, right? And so it doesn't mean pull the plug automatically. Maybe it's just your conversion approach, right?

Nick Walder: Zac, I'm glad you said that because there are certain lead sources that our ISAs do a phenomenal follow up job. And we see success where our agents were taking that initial phone call and it was like, you ready to buy or sell? Six [00:37:00] months? All right. Call me in six months. And they're just going from the next, they're cherry picking and picking the best leads. So the lead source felt like, Oh, this isn't working for us. But the, results were, we were just going through the wrong channel. When we moved it to our ISA department, they did the followup, and six months to a year later, those sales started showing up over and over again.

So then it was like, okay, great lead source with the right person. And same thing goes with social media for us. When we spend a lot of money on Facebook and got a ton of leads coming in, it's really simple for somebody that's just scrolling mindlessly on Facebook to click on a picture of a house and check it out. They call it real estate porn. And they're just like, Oh, I wonder what the backyard looks like. I wonder what the kitchen looks like. And then all of a sudden we get their information. We call them. We're like, Oh, you ready? You ready for that backyard? And they're like, Whoa no. How'd you get my number? And it was very difficult to go through a ton [00:38:00] of people that had zero interest in buying or selling real estate.

That lead source for us personally wasn't great. We moved on from that. There's other people that I know that have created huge funnels from that. And their social media presence is a little different than ours and it works.

One of my friends is a huge YouTube guy, right? He's down in Orlando. And when you are Thinking about moving to Florida, which seems to be everybody. You might say, all right, let's move to Orlando. There's all these different neighborhoods. There's all these different places. There's all these different positives and negatives for all these different places.

He goes down and just every day he's recording content. Hey, check out this new neighborhood from DNR Horton. They have this clubhouse, and they have this, and it's 20 minutes from here. And this is a great blah, blah, blah. The downsides are there's traffic here. They're blah, blah, blah, blah. And he breaks down every single neighborhood. So someone moving to Florida, that's not really sure where they're going to move yet [00:39:00] will watch 20 of his videos to help understand the differences, the nuances, and where they want to be. And then, when they're ready to come, that's when they pick up the phone and call .

Now we don't have as many people moving to Maryland like they do down in Florida. So that lead generation strategy absolutely crushes for him. And he tracks all the number of clicks and all the, everything that goes on with YouTube. So different markets will get you different results in what you're doing. So you're just A/B testing. You're trying this. If it works, if it doesn't, just going back and forth. But you can't do any of that if you're not tracking it. If you don't know exactly what's coming in, exactly what's happening with it. Sisu tells us, so we had 475 leads here and we got 22 of them closed. All right. Now let's look what we spent to get those leads and look at how much we made. Was it worth it?

Zac Muir: So just summing this up, If i'm an agent and I'm gonna go, and I would write these [00:40:00] three steps down. If i'm gonna introduce a new Lead source into my business, right? I want to do it the right way.

First, number one that source has to pump into the CRM, right? That's like first thing. You've got to get it connected somehow. And I know, Nick, that's one of your guys, non negotiables, like everything goes into CINC and the more time your agents ISA spend in CINC, the more leads you're going to convert, right? So that's number one, get it in the CRM.

Number two, you've got to be able to track the profitability of that source over time, right? First at the team level and second at the per agent level, right? And you could do that. There's a hundred ways you could do that. Sisu makes it extremely easy for you.

And then the third one I think is actually really important and you hit on it. Nick is different agents actually have different mindsets towards different lead sources based on the success that they've had. And one of the biggest challenges that you face when introducing a new lead source is just creating that belief because we all come with [00:41:00] biases, right? So if the first call that I have with a new lead source is a crap lead, I'm going to start carrying a bias towards that lead source. And one of the ways that I've seen great leaders overcome this is highlighting success on the lead source that they care about over time. That's the simplest thing in the world to do. On your team team calls, team huddles or whatever, you notice that somebody just set an appointment with X, Y, Z lead source. And it's really easy to, again, track that you track it a hundred ways, but really easy to track that in Sisu and show, Hey, yeah. John, you just set an appointment with XYZ lead source. Talk us through what happened. What was your conversation? How did you end up setting that appointment? And you do that over time and you start to highlight that success, celebrate that success. Hey, John, you just closed one with Google local services. Give us the rundown there, right? You start to overcome maybe those biases are limiting beliefs towards sources.

Nick Walder: Yeah, Zac, one of the things we do every meeting, so every Monday we have a team meeting. And when we talk about, we have a [00:42:00] slide every single week with how many five star reviews we had and what the change is in the last seven days. So we had a 1058 and now we have a 1064 or whatever those numbers are. We track all that. And we just added a new portion of that that's like our Google close we've closed 35 homes this year for a total of $315,000 that agents were a part of. So every time you get a five-star review, we get more calls on Google, you get more closings, you make money. So that means the agents alone made $315,000 from this lead source.

Can you imagine as an agent, if you're sitting there, whether yeah, I've gotten a lot of those and that's a great lead source. I need to keep getting five-star reviews, or gosh, I haven't got any of those. I need to get more five star reviews. I need my share of that. Literally without having the numbers and the tracking, you can't do that. You can't show them exactly why when that Google call comes in, [00:43:00] you better answer it immediately. Speed to lead. You better jump on that and be the first because the closings are happening just whether you're getting them or not.

Zac Muir: Cool. Okay. Wrapping this up a little bit here. First of all, thank you Nick for sharing all this.

And also as far as questions go let us know what final questions you have so that we can keep diving in here. One thing I just, I wanted to throw in if talking about conversion really comes down to, we've talked about it so many times, tracking, right?

And give my little spiel here of Sisu. If you're not familiar with Sisu, if you're already on it one of the biggest challenges is you can get all these leads into the CRM. But you need it in a place where it actually can compare it to the closings and the financials, right? So what Sisu does is it aggregates all of your lead sources.

It tells you who they were assigned to as far as agents. We can tell [00:44:00] you per lead source, how many leads came in from this source? How many appointments were set? How many appointments were held? How many did you sign? How many went under contract and how many closed, right?

Nick Walder: For me, having each one of those is extremely important when it comes to coaching. So you can tell somebody, here's the gap. We're doing this and this well, but all of a sudden there's a breakdown here. This is the skill we need to work on.

Zac Muir: So if this has been valuable, and it looks like it has been to a lot of you, and you're not on Sisu already, and you would do us the honor of letting us add even more value for you, please go grab a demo. It's sisu.co/demo.

Nick, anything else to add before we jump into some Q and A here for the last couple of minutes we got?

Nick Walder: Yeah, I'm wide open for Q and A, so anybody has any questions, I'm happy to talk about them.

When it comes to Sisu and CINC, when you guys asked me to do this, I just want to be really clear that I had no problem sharing everything because these two companies helped me build [00:45:00] such a great business. But I wouldn't just go out and tell you every company's great, and you can use anybody. Like I only want to talk about the companies that I'm using on a daily basis that are actually working for us.

Because in real estate, it's very easy to spend money. It's very easy to be like, Oh, let's throw money at this and this and this and this. And then you end up having 10 different systems that aren't doing anything and just costing money. So it's really important for me to have a small amount of systems that do a lot.

Zac Muir: Jumping in a little Q and a here. Sandy, you had a question. Is there a way in Sisu to see the source quickly for appointments set?

So two ways I like to do that. Sandy on the main dashboard, there's the appointment set circle. If you click on that, it'll pull back the layers and show you all the sources of those appointments set, but probably an even easier way is on the lead source ROI report, it will show you just like we were talking about earlier. How many leads came in for that source? How many appointments set, met, signed, under contract, closed? The whole funnel, [00:46:00] right? So you'll see, we got 100 leads, we set 12 appointments, 10 of those held. We signed 3 listings and we closed 2, right? Something like that.

Lead source by agent, lead source by source. It just depends. The way that I look at those two in SISU, the lead source by agent is if you wanted to break down one agent or a group of agents and look at all the sources. So if I'm sitting down one on one with an agent and I'm saying, Hey, here's all the sources that you got and here's how well you're converting them. I would want to do lead source by agent.

Now, if I'm trying to break down one source across all my agents, that's where I would do the lead source by source, which would break it down by agent. So they're the same report, just the X and the Y axis are flipped.

Nick Walder: You have the ability to go to your agents to see Hey, you're really killing it with whatever, make sure you're spending more of a majority of your time in this source because it's working so well for you. All of our agents have different personalities. [00:47:00] They all excel at different things.

So being able to specifically tell them that, Hey. You're crushing it with Op City. You need to put more time and energy in the Op City so you can continue that success. Or, Hey, you're doing really terrible and blah, blah, blah. You should probably cut that lead source out for you personally. Cause remember everybody has their own personality.

Zac Muir: We actually had a team that had an interesting Scenario where they were losing money on a lead source, and they actually pulled it up with the whole team. They just showed them flat out, and I'm a big fan of this like big transparency in your business. They were super transparent, just showed up all the numbers. Here's all our lead sources. Here's how well they're converting. The business is losing money on this lead source. So we have an option either we dump this lead source and we're going to go invest that money in a different one that you know, we hope will get us the right return. Or we can actually keep doing this lead source if some of you want it, We just need to do it at a different split level because the business can't lose money on this, right?

Every agent was like, yeah I'll keep [00:48:00] taking that lead source and I'm okay with the different split. But it's that transparency that allows that type of conversation to not get emotional, which I thought was really cool.

Question you're getting here, Nick, is do you set your agents up independently on google local, or you do it as a group as a team?

Nick Walder: We do it as a team because what I found is any one agent might have 50 Reviews, maybe 40 reviews, but as a team, 10 of us at 40 reviews is 400. So that's a huge part of it. Plus, I don't think that it's just the agent that's getting the five star review. For us it's our admin, it's our support team. So our support team, our admin are given a bonus for every five star review they get.

So if you think about that from an admin perspective, they want to get as many as they possibly can, because that creates an additional leads income stream for them. So if you're in that [00:49:00] position, it's an additional income stream, and knowing that's there, what are you going to do about your customer service? You're going to make sure it's absolutely phenomenal. So I think that's been really huge.

Zac Muir: Laura, on your question about like routing certain lead sources to certain agents, I think you guys have a lot of like your lead routing in CINC, correct, Nick?

Nick Walder: Yeah, everything goes through CINC because we want every single person to have, If you're in our system, then you need a reminder and a follow up plan. Like every single person. What's the point of having somebody in there if they don't have a follow up plan?

Zac Muir: I love that. Laura, the way that I see a lot of people handle this too is, you talked about like a state of the company type meeting or just really a meeting on a cadence to review your lead sources that's where I would make the decision of which agents are going to be on or off certain lead sources and then I'd go update your routing settings in your crm accordingly. That's really how I would handle that.

I [00:50:00] wish we had more time to tackle all these questions.

Nick Walder: I mean i'm available. Somebody needs me Go into social. Google my name. Send me a friend request. Reach out. Dm me. Whatever you need. Like I built my business on the help of everyone around me, so I have no problem sharing anything with anybody. So don't feel like we're strangers. Reach out whenever you need something.

Zac Muir: Okay, we appreciate you. Thank you for adding value and Thanks everyone for joining.