Experience the Power of Sales Automation Services for Real Estate

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um I built a company the wrong way before and I've failed as a team leader before and part of the reason was because I made these little uh concessions on culture this is stay paid a sales and marketing podcast on a mission to help you close more deals and retain more business welcome to another episode of stay paid I'm Joshua styke along with Luke acree and before we bring on our guest today we'd love it if you take a minute to subscribe to stay paid on Apple podcast or Spotify if you're not already subscribed while you're there drop us a review to let us know how we're doing we'll read it here on the show in fact this week's featured review comes from classic Calo Caleb via Apple podcast Caleb says perfect timing I love the stay paid podcast I was considering signing up for reminder media so one day I visited the website and did some research the very next day I was listening to the podcast and got a phone call it was a member of the reminder media team following up with me we had a great conversation and during that same call I signed up to have the start healthy magazine mailed out to 50 people in my sphere of influence I can't wait to hear what my sphere thinks of the magazines keep doing a job a fantastic job Josh and Luke you all are crushing it wow I love it so you can tell Steve now you can tell Steve our owner no the Pocky is working yeah we're generating leads here baby we're bringing in the deals love it our guest today is Ray Ellen Ray is a national speaker at T team leader for the pixel properties team with real broker and the host of The Wire podcast which helps agents know what's happening in the housing market and economy in addition Ray has been featured in Realtor Magazine Inman and is a regular contributor to broke agent media Ray welcome to stay paid thanks for being here yeah man thanks for having me this is awesome great man super excited to have you on already excited for this before we came on guys we were already talking about chat GPC we were talking about bot automation I mean we got into I mean he's even talking to this thing conversationally I think it sues him he's made a friend yeah he's made a friend no it's going to be fantastic if you are interested in um you know hey how do you automate conversations for your leads and stuff we're going to talk about that a little bit on the show but before we get into that Ray could you share your story maybe introduce yourself to the audience how you got into real estate yeah uh so I'm in Arkansas I started real estate as an assistant in 2006. I helped a whole bunch of agents in Northwest Arkansas sell a bunch of houses and I thought man I should get my own license because had I sold those properties my life would be a lot different so I got licensed in January of 2007 had an amazing four or five months what I mean yeah the whole world real estate market crashed around me I still hung out with real estate a long time and did uh you know business brokerage because I could sell commercial property in the business inside so I did some stuff like that came back to residential real estate in 2013. now I'm in central Arkansas and we've just never looked back we spent a couple of years focusing on processes and systems looked up and we were one of the top agents and then developed a team and really went full bore into marketing and that kind of gave us some national attention so and here we are I feel like in 10 to 12 years we're going to have a group of like super successful top producers were interviewing they said I got into real estate in the middle of 2022. because the people that we interviewed today that are crushing it so many of them started it is true and one of the worst times but it's because you have the talent and the ability and the perseverance resilience yeah the resiliency I would love before we jump into the whole Automation and everything because you said something that interested me you said you're a guy that has a beard you don't wear the suits wear street clothes as a real estate agent not your typical real estate image but you also warn against this advice of ubu or I guess being being yourself what do you mean what do you mean by that I'd love to pick your brain on that first so well specifically for new agents okay so and for new agents and I would say for agents that really haven't kind of made it yet they're just kind of hanging around with real estate but really haven't broken through there's this philosophy that a lot of people preach about you do you you know if you want to get sleep tats go ahead and get all your sleeve tats if you want to wear t-shirts and wear t-shirts it doesn't matter you do you you're going to work with your own tribe and I think that's true but only when you know how much you doing you cost you because if you go into it blind without without realizing that if you use that t-shirt there's going to be somebody that doesn't use you as an agent but yet you need money then you can you do you right into your old job as a bartender so so I think you should do you but only when you've kind of laid the foundation when you know the contracts well when you know how to talk to clients when maybe you've done everything that the old dudes are telling you to do around the industry when you've done some calling when you've done some door knocking when you've done some mailing and I did all those basic things and I wore the suit and I you know had the trim and all that stuff but then one day came where I looked up and I was pretty good in the industry and I thought you know I'm going to change some things I'm going to shake it off a little bit I'm going to do some things that aren't the norm and so I'm just going to let myself go not I mean not physically I'm a little bigger but I wear I eat cake hey man you have a great beard I'm just saying go watch the Youtube video guys just see the great beer so I did I you know I just let it start growing and along with that came my transition in business to do some things in marketing that nobody had done yet and I think I was one of the first people in our state to do a listing video and I was some of the first people to attack you know um Facebook and then Instagram and then we really started going into social media and it didn't make sense for me to look like everyone else anymore because I was now at least on their same level if not Beyond them so I think you do you as good advice for people that already know what to do in real estate they've already got a sphere they've already got some credibility but I think when you just start if you're just starting saying I'm Gonna Be Me great but you may not get any business like let's let's talk about what makes you successful as a real estate agent is paying your bills so let's pay our bills and then then let's put on some T-shirts we were uh it's funny we were just uh coaching a couple new real estate agents today and you caught one of them in the Trap of hey you're spending too much time thinking about your branding and your marketing you're not getting out there doing the activity oh yeah are you seeing the same thing yeah yeah like I mean I remember whenever we were kind of refocusing on this residential real estate in 2013 when I kind of re-came back to it I can remember going to the office and I could either make calls or focus on brand and so what I do of course I Googled like real estate logos you know because that's the easy thing I need to build my brand and what to have in my brain then but when you look around the industry you see some stalwarts that have been there and they have beautiful Brands and and they just exude their brand how did they create that most of them didn't sit down with somebody as a new agent and create the brand they did Real Estate and how they did Real Estate created their brand and then it was a different project then they had to find this is how I'm treating my clients this is how my clients expect to be treated this is how other agents in our industry around me are treated when they interact with me what is a graphic expression of that what is a color palette expression of how I'm already doing business and so they did set out to create a brand and then do real estate they set out to do real estate and their brand was created and I think that's a huge piece that people Miss yeah it's so good because your brand is really this trust that you've built with your audience with your audience it's a representation of what they believe you to be and so that's such good advice so talk to us a little bit about this idea since we're on the topic of marketing right is you have leads come in like I mentioned to you before we came on that we're generating Facebook leads right for people but it could be from anywhere and you you there's this new thing where you can get bots to literally correspond with your leads can you talk a little bit about what you have found how are you using Bots are they coming is it Facebook is it paid advertising and they're chatting what Bots are you using can you walk us through that a little bit yeah so I mean there's so many different ways we're using Bots right now the basic premise that I have I've kind of Taken I just I used to be totally anti-mod just so you know I used to be like no that's not authentic I want to build an authentic brand I want people to interact with a real human but then I realized that back in the day when people would call you and you didn't answer the phone what happened the answer machine right yep and people would wait on that answering machine to go beep and then would leave you a message not one person was offended because you were imitating the actual answer of a call right not one person was like Oh I thought this was you but instead you told me to leave a message ah this is terrible I'm jumping off so I think Bots today are the answering Machines of way back when and maybe one day we'll get tired of them kind of like we are now like please don't leave me a voicemail but right now it's an answering machine and if you treat it like that and you let people know that this is a bot I think they start to appreciate it more and then they start to test it so one of the cool things is if we call like if you go to my website the bot's name is Anna and that's our deceptive bot because she talks like a real person and looks like a real person and our agents can actually interrupt the interaction and interact and so they don't know if it's a bot or if it's real person like is this a real person answering my career is this is this the bot so that's the most deceptive bot we have and I love that because she will ask a general question hey how can we help you and see that you're looking at this home can we get it you know can we set up a showing for you so there's just like little cues based on the activity and that those little cues are pushed out there and as the person responds it alerts us to that response and then we can jump on but that's the most deceptive one the ones that I'm really loving and that one sometimes gets in trouble too because people are like oh this is a bot I hate it right right because it's deceptive the ones I'm really liking are the interactions where people know it's a bot because then they start to explore it's just like what we see people doing on the chat GPT like we all know it's a bot we all know it's not a real thing but is it it might have Consciousness I'm just saying no I'm just kidding but we're all like exploring it right we're all right yeah and I think that's what people are doing to the to the like Manny chat Bots and stuff like that I have they're they're trying to explore the limits to the queries that we have so that it knows where where they have to now use a person and so on on our website sometimes they'll be asking uh showing instructions some sometimes they'll ask do I need to be pre-approved before I show this one and it can have some default inquiries whereas we have a simpler bot set up where if you want more information text me this or message me this and we'll send you that information and then we have like a two hour follow-up and then we have like a thing that follows up a couple of days later checks in with them and they know it's a bot they start to explore it and they start to say yeah sign me up for that yes give me that guide too yes let me have and so they just it's so receptive to what the Bots then feeding it towards I don't know that I can do a better job so you said you're the ways that I'm really loving it did you say you're using manychat is that for both that's for the deceptive bot and the uh the other ones you were mentioned our deceptive bot is through chime through China CRM our uh the Decepticon I love that that's the first thing I thought of too Anna the Decepticon yeah that's right they were using mannychat and a whole bunch of different contexts that integrate with our email platform and with chime and so it'll like label people and move them around under Google spreadsheet then zap years into our CRM and so I know uh by the time I get a buyer that's gone through that process I know what guides they've received what emails they've gotten in red uh where they are in the process if they're pre-approved all that stuff just fantastic hey if if you want this free guide you know text me guide and get it yeah now how many um I guess iterations or how much testing did you have to go through until you finally hit on a nurture stream or some sort of stream that actually produce results and I'm still testing yeah I I'm constantly looking at it um you know one of the interesting things is when it gets repetitive when somebody hits a trigger multiple times and they didn't mean to you know making that process a little smoother so it's less annoying um you know I'm testing when someone sends me their email on Instagram and then they ask for another thing I don't want to ask for their email again okay I want the bot to say yep we've got it you've already been sent it you know so those are like the there's some additional layers of tagging and you can get really deep into the Mani Chat thing and and you know you can also carry over those Integrations because it's the same user so whenever we recognize that user somehow whether it's the name or the email whatever that piece of identifying information is that can be carried over on multiple platforms so somebody can send me a message through Facebook Messenger but if the bot recognizes that's the same person then they they can already say okay I'll send it to this email now have you seen like one particular question because we've been testing this as well with Facebook leads for our clients and we kind of hit on this one question that would actually get a response fairly consistently from people have you seen any particular prompts that are working better than others I mean it's real seasonal is what I've noticed so far right now the home valuation questions those are getting mostly action uh whereas the buying is not I'm I'm just assuming that's because rates are high during the holidays uh you know buying and selling through the holidays types of questions so for me I'm using it more but that that I could be seeing those results because that's the main way I'm using it but no there's no like one particular I wish I mean I would start writing the book yeah when you look at your conversion um of these like how do you take from the bot conversation to conversion to you when do you pick up the phone when do you get face to face do you um insert yourself in the process do you wait till it gets to a certain point like how do you map that out um again all this is kind of so new but it's not it's not extremely mapped out um because we can see the interactions that are going on on the various platforms and through ads and stuff like that sometimes I'll just jump in and say hey I notice you're interacting with the bot is everything going well is it okay and people are like real researchers like yeah this has been great this has been super easy um other times we have the handoff where they'll go through the tree to a certain point where the bot says okay awesome I'm going to connect you with one of our people yes and and when that happens obviously we try to follow up within five minutes or so but the uh it just kind of depends on where they are in the process and what we're seeing is the conversation unfolds okay how many people do you have on your team uh it's just me and three others right now but we're growing I think we're about to add two more okay about to do more awesome so when you look at like um the conversion of these leads that are coming in when someone picks up the phone and they they actually call the person how do you guys process that lead from there like I'm curious like do you if they don't answer do you keep following up and leaving voicemails do you when you get them on the phone are you trying to qualify them based upon the data points you have like give me a little bit of insight into how you treat the lead after that wait so these are super warm leads uh so if they're not answering then we're just not calling at the right time or they don't recognize our number so we I mean we hit them pretty aggressively what's the type of number what's aggressive so the minimum number of contacts before we put somebody like before we unleash the bot back on them yeah is 15. yeah I love that dude yes that's so good and we'll try in the morning and then in the afternoon and the next day we'll text an email and then try and evening and so we would try to move it around but 15 contacts and then we just turn on the turn on the bot again to monitor their their situation because throughout the process they get links to our website and they're kind of registered on our website okay so whenever they go to our website it'll set up a search for them they start getting those search results if they're a seller or a buyer they start getting something a market report or a search and as they're engaging in that the bot is monitoring the behavior through chime and then that's what they start to that bot will then pick back up if they don't touch base with us but I mean usually we get something you know sometimes they're like yeah I'm not ready yet I was just testing your Bot uh that happens a lot and then other agents test the bot but um you know usually they have some kind of response to us because it's it's kind of a warm situation they've asked for a guide they've uh been pre-approved uh they are buying within you know zero to six months okay Austin let me connect you with one of our people and then we can call and see where they are um when you say guides what type of guides are you seeing people like to request from you I mean it's really the basic stuff we our listing presentation is full of like here's how to buy a house here's how to sell a house and so we just took little sections of that and created guides that are it's not real flashy it's just real basic like here's how to get your home ready for sale I love that I hear things to consider in buying a home in 2023 it's super basic to every real estate agent already knows we just put it in writing and made it kind of pretty and then so and they just get a PDF I mean it's uh sometimes it's text to them but most of the times it's emailed to them so we have to capture the email too now it's super helpful though because like you know I just think of the new agents we were coaching earlier it's just amazing it's like when you go out to implement even something like this bot the literal things you have to know are okay what is the name of the bot okay it's mini chat okay and then I'm calling 15 times and it's here's how to get your home ready for sale these things are so practical that people can Implement I'm curious just Switching gears a little bit how do you get your team members to stay consistent calling the leads because we talked to a lot of team leaders and that's a struggle to get agents to make their calls like what would you say to agents not making their calls uh so a lot of threats [Laughter] so uh you know we talked about it today we have a we had a team meeting today and we regularly revisit and so today you know I said hey everybody bring your computer since we sat down and we opened up chime and I was like here look up this type of search how many people do you have like this how many people are interacting it was just a reminder of like here are the people you need to talk to and here's the people you need to call and the thing that uh we are struggling with is called logging I think they are making their calls because they're getting results and then that's usually when they have a positive result they log that and say hey I've been calling I got this guy spent an hour of calling today and got this guy I'm like really it only looks like you called that one person like no I called this whole list like well you gotta log that too so that's the part we're struggling with it's the logs but uh I think the biggest factor is culture um I built a company the wrong way before and I've failed as a team leader before and part of the reason was because I made these little uh concessions on culture and some of them were out you know you don't want to be on video okay that's okay it's not a big deal even though that's a core principle of who we are as being in media and on video and if you don't want to do that that's okay you don't have to do that you don't want to make all those calls okay as long as you'll just do this and that's okay because you know as a team lead we're like well that's you know that team member that could be some money so and and I like them and they're a good person so let me just bring them in and I'll put up with stuff they don't want to do and that really starts to just erode the whole culture so I guess you could say we cut massively back in the three that are left are high culture and they are High I mean they're aggressive uh two of them sold 20 houses a piece last year wow okay that was their first year yeah and it's not like they're not aggressive to the point of annoyance they're all very you know well spoken and they kind of know how to frame their words and they know how to not annoy people but they're aggressive I guess you say a Relentless they're just Relentless in the pursuit because we don't cold call I mean all of our people are warm calls there's no we get people we get people in we have so many inquiries it's about 13 14 leads a day that they're just they're coming to us so these are people that are asking for information I'm not asking you to like cold call the neighborhood these are all people that are like I want info here's my info send how are you getting that traffic how are you attracting those people uh well our number one lead source is Google uh Google ads or the trusted the trust okay both yeah both we're running Google ads we're running Google uh local ad Services I should say the number one outside of our sphere our sphere is number one okay obviously uh but then number two is uh agent agent referrals around the country um that would be tied with like paid sites that are sending us a bunch of stuff okay uh the the best leads the highest quality leads are the ones from our sphere and the ones from Agents agent but the other stuff's been really good the local ad Services has been great and then the Google pay-per-click some of the ads that we're running there are good what do you uh for your ad collateral for the Google um ads what do you find is working just high level is it putting up list of properties what what do you find that's working on Google ad side uh keeping it high level I'd say two things one is the uh home valuations right now are kind of back and I would say the um retargeting okay retargeting based on you know the stuff they've clicked on okay yeah that's awesome man I feel like I I'm just getting started I could talk to you all day hey we we asked this question a lot of people who come on the show and I'd love to ask you because you had mentioned that you built a team the wrong way and I thought that was a really powerful takeaway knowing what you know now when you look back um and you know think about your younger self maybe High School age what what advice would you give them oh High School Andre is a very different person out until High School age right lay off the cake bro it's all right no no I would say um man you know just a couple of years ago I would have probably told myself no compromises I mean just you know five years ago don't compromise on what I think is right and my vision of what the future is for adding people or for being bigger that doing the small things every day is going to make such a larger impact especially magnified when you have the right people and so focusing on the right people around me and the right people in the company and the right people alongside me and just really ignoring everything else that is outside of that not giving them head space or power over me to change my mind or to change what I post or to change what I write that would that would have been huge advice for me that I probably wouldn't have taken five years ago and would have to learn on my own but there you go but I'm telling you like no compromise like I I think there's a lot of people that set up the basis for a team it's like okay here's my team and I want to run it this way and I want it to run this way and I want to collect these leads and then they start to compromise and say well I guess it's okay or yeah okay I'll take them even though they're not exactly what I want because they're cool and they'll sell a lot of real estate it'll just kill you yeah it'll kill you so true Ray thank you so much for being here before we close out let people know how they can connect with you connect with me on Instagram raysorback r-a-y-z-o-r-b-a-c-k and actually you can send me the word gear speaking of bots if you want to experience one of the Bots just send me the word gear and I'll send you a list of all the gear that I use to put together my studio and it will take you through a whole tree of stuff all the all kinds of questions and stuff so raise or back on Instagram r-a-y-z-o-r-b-a-c-k awesome thanks again Ray and thank you all so much for listening you can dive deeper into this episode get those links and those instructions for texting Ray the word gear to his Instagram over at staypaidpodcast.com and while there you can find the videos for all of our episodes as well if you enjoyed this episode and want to show your support two ways we ask you to help out first way is to head on over to Apple podcast drop us a five star review and a comment about this episode and the best way to show your support is to Simply share this episode with a friend or a colleague if you want to get hold of me or Luke you can email us at podcast reminder meaty.com and you can follow us on Instagram we are at stay paid podcast for this episode of stay paid I'm Joshua styke guys I'm Luke great episode Ray thank you so much for coming on my action item for everybody coming and listening to this show right now I have two for you one is you need to be researching if you're not going to implement a bot on your site you need to get your head in the game with the spot automation because it is the future it is now and it's going to keep progressing with AI so I want you to get in all our audience you need to get in check out manychat check out chatgpt these Bots check them out play around with them so that's one action item your second action item is what are you compromising right now of your values that you know you should not be compromising what are you compromising that is true to your values that you know you should not be compromising that is eroding something in your organization you need to stop that you need to cut that out remember the difference between top producers and mediocre producers in every business top producers take action take action on that today [Music]