#158 Mail-Right Show With Special Guest Beatty Carmichael

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Beatty is recognized as one of the leading experts in professional-to-consumer marketing — from branding to lead generation to top-of-mind.

A veteran marketer, branding and direct response expert, Beatty’s professional career began in 1997 when he formed a marketing company to service the booming telecommunications industry.

His clientele were independent sales professionals for whom he developed proprietary marketing technologies. These technologies helped clients generate ongoing sources of pre-qualified prospects for their services. One sales manager in Ohio exclaimed her sales team had increased their sales by ten times after only five months using Beatty’s technology.

Jonathan: Welcome back folks to the Mail-Right Show. This is episode 158. We’ve got a great special guest with us. I’m going to totally butcher him name completely folks. He’s Beatty Carmichael and I’m going let Beatty introduce himself to you. Would you like to do that quickly Beatty?

Beatty: I would love to. Hey everyone. Beatty Carmichael here and love being here. In terms of an introduction Jonathan, a little bit of my story or just hello?

Jonathan: Just a quick couple sentences of what you do.

Beatty: Okay. Sure. A couple of sentences. I love Marketing. I’m passionate about it. I love marketing to generate listings. Been in this business for about 20 years working with sales agents generating consumer leads. Started working in the Real Estate world 2012. We started getting tremendous results with our clients, helping them earn as much as $100,000 within 6 months to a year and geographic farming using some things we’ve done. And then, over the years, started work on additional things to help them win more the listings that we are identifying for them and that brings us real quickly to today on what we do and working a personal list and past clients and sphere of influence.

Jonathan: That’s great. And Robert, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers?

Robert: Robert Newman, founder of InboundREM. That should be enough for the moment. Your turn.

Jonathan: And I’m the founder of Mail-Right. We provide a platform to get you quality leads with an emphasis on using Facebook to get those leads. So, in this show folks, we’re going to be discussing how to build a really powerful and effective personal farm and how the techniques and the way of building up a relative small group of referrals but have a really powerful referral engine. So, Beatty, I’ve just given a quick outline. I thought that’s what we agreed. Hopefully, I got it right. So, maybe we can start with what you see as some of the mistakes, maybe some of the people that come to you are making around getting a quality farm that will refer people to them. How does that sound?

Beatty: Yeah. That sounds super. The concept, I think, is how do you take that personal list, your personal farm, your past clients, sphere of influence and other people and get more sales out of it on an ongoing basis? And I think the thing that most people, the biggest mistake most people make is they think they’re doing okay. Because what happens is you’ve got your list, you’re working your list, you get sales from it, you compare yourself to other people in your office that you know and you say, “I’m doing okay so this must be the right way to do it.” But what they miss out on is how many more sales over here you really can get if you just understood what was possible.

Can I share a study with you, that kind of correlates? Okay. Perfect. A few years back, an organization wanted to really understand how many sales should you be getting from your personal contacts list. So, they surveyed thousands of agents across the country, they got the data back and as they started tabulating it, what they found is once you cross the threshold, in terms of how consistently and significantly you touch that list, the average agent in that list was getting 17 sales a year for every 100 personal contact that they were marketing to. So, now that you’ve got kind of this statistical reference, you can start to look at how many sales a year are you getting on your list and say, “Am I really doing all that well or not?” And I think what happens with most people is they’re doing far shy of what they should be doing and that’s the biggest mistake. If you don’t know you’re missing the mark, then you’ll never hit the mark.

Jonathan: Truer words never said actually. You’ve got to be able to measure something before you can get a consistent improvement on it. So, you’ve outlined that fantastic so let’s go on. How do people improve the amount of quality referrals they get with the amount of people that they know in their community?

Beatty: Yeah. So, I would say there’s 5 steps or better yet, I might say there’s 5 pillars and what happens is all these things go and if you imagine you put all this stuff into a cauldron and kind of mix it up, all these things apply. It’s not one step after another but it’s these 5 different things. I think the biggest thing is understanding, how does a homeowner choose an Agent? Because once you can figure out what causes that homeowner to choose one Agent over another, then you can modify your marketing to apply these principles and you can start to get more sales from it. So, what we’ve started to learn is, it’s actually a formula. You have two things. You have trust and you have top of mind.

And the goal is to increase your trust and your top of mind within those homeowners mindset and a real simple way to kind of understand the dynamic is if you put trust on a scale of 1 to 10 and the same thing with top of mind on 1 to 10, then if your trust is a 3 and your top of mind is a 5, if you were to multiply those together, then 3 times 5, you’re about a 15 percent likelihood that you’re going to get a sale or a referral that’s coming out of your list. But if you can increase your trust, let’s say to a 9 and increase your top of mind to a 10, multiply those together, now you’re about a 90 percent chance of getting whatever sales and referrals come out of that list. So, the whole idea, the first thing is to start to understand that you’ve to increase both trust and top of mind. What I see with most Agents is they work on top of mind but they have no clue about trust and so, you have this lopsided that you don’t really get very far down the road.

Robert: When you say increase in trust, a lot of our audience isn’t actually going to understand what you mean by that or they’re going to need something more specific in order to make it more apparent. So, what is it that you are referring to when you say increase in trust?

Beatty: Very good. So, that’s actually step number 2 or pillar number 2. How do you do it? So, you have to understand that there’s a concept in Marketing that really applies to what goes on here and it’s concept of outside perception versus inside reality. And here’s what it means. The outside perception of that homeowner is that all Agents are the same. Would you all agree with that?

Robert: Sure. For the sake of this conversation, yes. I would say there’s a lot of filters in the average sellers’ mind. That’s been my experience being in this industry a long time. But let’s just say that for the sake of argument that whether or not they have filters or not, the average seller is in the same category as, or the average Agent is in the same category as the other Agents.

Beatty: Okay. So, let me give you a real-life example. A client called me up. His name is Jason. He is the leader of a team. That year, his team did 1120 transactions. So it’s a huge team.

Robert: Right.

Beatty: And they’ve been targeting a geographic farm of 2,000 homes for 6 months, no results. He called me up and said, “Can you help us?” And I said, “I think I can. Let’s get on the phone and talk.” So, I was on the phone with Jason and his assistant, Cam and I was asking him, “What’s going on in this farm?” And I immediately said, “Well, it sounds like you’re not well branded.” And I used the wrong term. He goes, “Oh no, baby. I’m really well branded.” I said, “Okay. Well, what do you mean?” He said, “I’ve been spending $8,000 a month for 2 years. I’m on the radio. I’m on the billboard. I’m on the park benches. I’m at the grocery store, at the athletic store, athletic event. I do a 12-page newsletter once a quarter that I send out. And I said, “All that’s going to this group of 2,000 homes?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Well, then, how many listings came on the market in the last 6 months?” And he said, “Probably about 200.” I said, “How many of those listings did you get?” He said, “I got a couple.” So, I said, “Jason, if you’re so well branded, why did only two people trust you enough to sell their home?” And there was this pregnant pause and he said, “I don’t know.” I said, “Would you like to understand why?” He said, “Yes.” So, I started to explain this concept of outside perception and the way I explained this, all these homeowners look at you just like any other Agent. All you do is stick a sign in the yard, list your home in the MLS and wait for someone else to bring a buyer.

He said, “Yeah. I would agree with that.” I said, “As long as they believe that you’re just like everyone else, then they have no reason to choose you because in their mind, they can choose any Agent and their home is going to sell in about the same amount of time for about the same price.”

I said, “Imagine for a moment that every one of those homeowners out there were Kim. She understands everything about how hard you work, all your skills, all your degrees, all the extra steps that you do, the nuances, the drive, everything. If all those homeowners were Cam, how many of those listings do you think you’d get?” And Cam piped up and said, “All of them.” And that’s what I mean. Outside perception is most Agents do the same thing but the inside reality is you’re special.

The way that you build trust, back to your question, the way that you build trust is you’ve got to help them understand your inside reality of your skill and expertise to the degree that they would feel that they’re a fool to choose anyone else besides you. The way that you get there is as we’ve analyzed this and as we’ve tested it, what we’ve found, there’s a formula. I call it the 3 Ss. It’s a 3 step formula that as long as you do these 3 ingredients on all your marketing, then you will consistently move that needle to where they start to lean towards you all the time. The first step is showing off your successes. That means let them know that you’re constantly selling. The second is to share the secret behind those successes.

Open up the kimono so to speak in terms of, what is it that you do special that causes that sale to move faster or for a higher sales price? So, they start to believe that you actually understand Real Estate at a level that most Agents may not and now, from their mindset, you’ve got the expertise. And the third thing is what we call showing any unique services that you do. If you’re familiar with the term unique selling proposition of USP, that’s your USP. So, when you show off your successes, explain what you’re doing with those and constantly have a USP and you package that and send it out consistently, that starts to build the trust level that gets homeowners choosing you. Is this making sense?

Robert: Yes. In order to understand the case study though a little bit better, because I’ve trained my segment of our audience in a very particular way. When we start talking about past, like a past history, a past client scenario, I’ve gotten them used to or trained to the concept of referring to that as a case study. The case study that you’re mentioning, which is great by the way and I’m loving it, but I am curious. This Agent, can you at least give us the part of the country that they were in?

Beatty: Minnesota.

Robert: I’m sorry?

Beatty: Minnesota.

Robert: Minnesota. Okay. Were they on the high end or the low end of the marketplace? In other words, were they selling your average?

Beatty: I think their average sales price is in the 250s, 280s, somewhere right in there.

Robert: Okay. All right. Perfect. So, yes. I do understand and I do agree with what you’re saying. The most important thing or the thing that you’re saying that is giving us more detail than things we’ve had on the show in past is definitely the middle S. It’s past successes but the secret to my formula, which is something that we’ve bounced. We’ve never packaged the information as beautifully as you’re packaging it and I’m really appreciating that. The secret of my success. That is not something that we’ve labeled that particular way. But anyway, please continue.

Jonathan: But before we go, we’re probably going to go for our break in a few moments folks but there’s just one thing I want to clarify because Beatty has used the term top of mind. We also us omnipresence. We kind of mix that top of mind with omnipresence. That means you need to keep you or your brand, and you are normally your brand, in front of your target audience because the more you do that effectively, the more chances that they will refer people to you. I just wanted to clarify that. So, we’re going to go for our break folks and we’re going to come back. We’re going to delve more into this fascinating area. We’ll be back in a few moments folks.

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Jonathan: We’re coming back. We’ve had a fascinating conversation. So, would you like to continue Beatty? I’m really mixing this up. I apologize. Go on.

Beatty: That’s no problem. I would love to continue because you’re getting me excited now. This is what I love to do. So, back to your comment Robert that a lot of people have talked but they haven’t gone into the level. So, let me talk about how specifically do you start to transfer because this a transfer of knowledge. This is a transfer of what you know about yourself so that it becomes what they know about you. Let me share another case study because isn’t isolated to just one location. I had another client. He was a 3-year Agent at the time. He was targeting 1,200 homes in a farm. He had been there for a year. He had no listing and he called me up and said, “Can you help me?”

I said, “I think we can.” And this is right at the beginning. This is like 4 and a half, 5 years ago, right at the beginning of the time that we started to be testing out this concept of the 3 Ss and long before we got it to the perfection level that we have now. So, we started to test some things out and it took us about 4 months to get in gear with it. And in those 4 months, he generated, I think, like 2 or 3 listings. And then, from month 4 to month 8, he generated another 4 listings and by the 8th month, he was getting two come list me now phone calls every single week. And here’s what’s really cool. Half of those calls were saying, “Josh, I’m thinking about selling. Can you come talk to me?” But the other half were saying, “Josh, my home is on the market. It’s not selling. As soon as my contract expires, will you come sell it for me?” They never met the guy but they were so convinced that he could do a better job, they were buying him sight unseen. When you can take a consumer who’s never met you and convince them that you’re the best vicariously through the mail with postcards, imagine what you can do, if that’s a geographic farm, imagine what you can do with your personal list, people who already know you.

So, the methodology is simple. First, you’ve got to remember you’ve got to keep showing off yourself. The easiest way to do that is a Just Sold postcard. But then, most Agents just do a Just Sold postcard and it shows the picture of the house and it says, “Just Sold”, gives he address and you flip it to the back of the card and it says, “I just sold this home. If you want me to sell yours, give me a call.” Just the same thing that everyone else does. But if you take a little bit of extra time and effort and actually craft that Just Sold postcard to tell a story. So, now imagine the postcard come out this way. The headline might say, “Sold in 5 days for full price.” Now, already that’s starting to express that you’ve done that most Agents don’t do. It’s pretty impressive. But then, I tell a story about it and the story might be, “The Smiths had just gotten a new job in another city. They had to move fast. They did not have much equity but they needed all the equity they had in order to buy their new home. They knew that they needed an expert. They heard of my reputation so they called me. Great decision because with aggressive marketing that began before the home even went on the market, we were able to generate 10 showings in the first 5 days.

We created 3 offers and created a bidding war, selling it for full price.” So, now, I’m starting to explain a little bit about what happened or I can take that same concept and use a different Just Sold postcard and outline what are the things that I did to get the home ready to go on the market so that it sold fast. We purged it of all the clutter. We staged it. We did simple fix-ups and repairs and especially new coat of paint in the hallway and in the Master bedroom and in the kitchen. We used professional photography. I wrote custom ads to target the specific buyers who would want this type of home and all of these things before it ever went on the market so that once it went on the market, we created a deluge of prospects wanting to come see it. It’s whatever it is that you do, you articulate it. Here’s the thing that’s really funny. I was talking to a client recently and what the client was sharing is like she said, “The light bulb just came on.” It’s not that you’re better than the other Agent, it’s simply that you’re telling the homeowner what it is that you do so they perceive you as better. I said, “That’s it.” Knowledge is power and if they understand you but they don’t understand the other Agent, they’re more likely to choose you. Is this kind of making sense?

Robert: No, it makes very good sense. There’s only one small alteration, again, just for Jon and I’s audience which is actually, I think the vast majority of the people that we communicate with are going to be Digital Marketers more than traditional Marketers. We have done Direct Mail specialists in the past on the show and I’m sure that Jon has done way more than I have so I’m going to say this for our audience. You can take the information that we’re getting right now and in your mind, transfer the Direct Mail piece into a landing page. This method would work beautifully if we were driving traffic from a digital source such as Google or Facebook, sending them to a page and we could use exactly what

Jonathan: It’s most uncanny. Robert just reads my mind. It’s a bit boring actually but we tend to agree on almost everything. But he tends to read my mind because that was what I was about to say myself. Sorry to interrupt Robert.

Robert: No, no. I was about ready to massacre Beatty. Is it Beatty? Did I get it right?

Beatty: Beatty.

Robert: Beatty.

Beatty: Just like Warren Beatty.

Robert: Beatty.

Beatty: No problem.

Robert: I was about ready to massacre Beatty’s name. Anyway, so that’s the only thing I would say. Other than that, I am loving every single, I have nothing to add.

Jonathan: Hey Beatty, do you increase how much you’re going to charge a client every time they get your Christian and Surname incorrect?

Beatty: I don’t think I could but I typically just forgive them. I’ve been forgiven for all the bad things I’ve done so I forgive those who do it against me.

Jonathan: All right. That’s true. Sorry. That was a bit of English humor there folks.

Beatty: That’s okay.

Jonathan: Back to your presentation. I just thought you were covering some fantastic material there.

Beatty: Yeah. So, let me play off of what you guys are talking about because I think you make a great point. This is not a postcard. The postcard is simply the delivery medium for the message. It’s the message that makes the difference. It’s not the delivery medium. And so, now, if we’re talking about landing pages, let’s talk about how do you make that landing page more effective. So, as long as you’re willing to go through a little bit more effort, you can take your numbers sky high. Let me see if this makes sense. I want to talk about in terms of what is it worth and how much time is it worth to put together. So, you take your average Agent, let’s say they’ve been in business for 4 or 5 years, that Agent’s going to do about 15 to 20 transactions a year.

They know probably 250 to 300 people. So, if you take the simple statistics of 17 sales per 100 as being what’s possible, at 250 people, that’s 40 sales a year that statistically you should be able to get from your list. If that average Agent is doing 20 transactions a year, probably no more than 10 are coming from their personal contact. So, 40 minus 10 means that there is differential of 30 sales a year that the average Agent is losing. But if when you start to multiply that by the average commission and probably call it $7,000 per sale, that’s $210,000 a year. Over 3 years, that’s over $600,000 in commission most Agents are losing. The reason I go through this is, because someone is going to say, “Boy, this takes a lot of work.” Well, how much work does it take to lose $600,000 that could be your family’s income rather than your competitors? This is the most important thing you can do. So, as we’re talking about Digital Marketing on a website, let’s talk about kind of 3 stages of how you can do it.

Stage number 1, you just put some text up there. Stage number 2, you put a photo of you and the house and the text and maybe a little bit of audio. But the best thing would be to do it on video because this is one of the elements we haven’t gotten into yet. But if you take trust, trust is divided into 3 different segments in terms of the trust I’m talking about that causes a homeowner to choose you. And let’s see if I can make sense in an analogy. I’m a homeowner. I want to sell my house and I have two Agents. I’m friends with both of them. I would trust my kids with both of those Agents. So, that’s one element of trust. One Agent I know is a brand new Agent. The other Agent I know if a top producer and has been a top producer for 10 years. I trust them both equally socially. But which one am I going to trust my house to? What do you all think? The new Agent or the top producer?

Robert: Jon, you do this one.

Jonathan: Oh, I would go with the top producer.

Beatty: Absolutely, because I trust his expertise more. So, trust is divided both a relational trust, have I met you? But then, there’s two other segments of trust and this is what we’re talking about. Do I trust that you’re constantly selling and do I trust that you have the expertise? And so, if I can then put myself on a video, what happens is now they get a chance to meet me. Just like those of you online looking at me right now. You start to look at this guy and say, “Okay. He looks trustworthy. He sounds trustworthy.” You’ve met me personally but you can put a face and a personality and a voice and you say, “I trust that guy.” And that’s what video can do beyond anything else. So, if you would create a series for every postcard that you have sent out if this was a postcard world, the content that you put on the postcard, put that in a live video. So, when people come to your website, they’re able to see you, hear you and you have your content underneath your video, they can read it as well but now, you’re multiplying all the elements of trust so you’re more likely to get the deal. Making sense?

Robert: Yeah.

Jonathan: Totally.

Robert: No, you’re saying a lot of stuff that we believe in strongly. I have conversations about video with my clients and my prospective clients almost daily. It’s always nice to hear another Marketing expert who makes their living selling Marketing services talking about the same thing that you talk about with your clients. I’ve had the same results as you’ve had. Video is very impactful in terms of demonstrations of past success such as testimonials, things like that. They’re great. They’re even better if you can take a 30-second video of a client you’ve just sold their home for and put that on your website. Video testimonials these days in terms of demonstrations of success are almost, I would guess, in terms of inspiring response, anywhere from 10 to 15 times more effective than simply getting a written testimonial in today’s world. So, those things I believe in strongly and you’re going right down the chain.

Beatty: Okay. Well, let’s hit that statistic you mentioned because it correlates with another statistic.

Robert: Sure.

Beatty: Did you know that your personal list, those people who have met you, are 8 to 10 times more likely to do business with you than that generic list that have never met you, did you know that?

Robert: I’ve heard a lot of statistics. So, yes, probably but continue.

Beatty: So, the correlation is that video testimony, they get a chance to meet the person as opposed to just read about them. And once you’ve met the person, that trust level goes up and that’s what I was talking about with video. Video allows them to meet you by vicariously, even if they haven’t met you in person so that’s why it’s so powerful, one of the real reasons why it’s so powerful.

Jonathan: Yeah. We need to wrap up the podcast part of the show. Hopefully, Beatty will agree to stay on with us for an additional 10 to 15 minutes and we have some bonus content because I think we’re having a fabulous discussion. But we’re going to wrap it up for the podcast. So, Beatty, how can people find out more about you and what you’re up to?

Beatty: Great. By the way, there are 5 steps, we covered 2, so maybe we’ll come back on another podcast if you let me on. Best way to find out about me and reach, I have a website. You can’t buy anything there. It is a full download of everything I understand about how do you generate more seller leads, how do you convert them, everything about Real Estate Marketing. It’s called getsellerscallingyou.net. And in fact, if you like this topic of increasing sales and referrals from your past clients when you go to getsellerscallingyou.net, it lands you right on the page that allows you to get a free training we put together. It’s a series of little 3 and 4-minute video clips. They come out once every few days or whatever and step by step really dissecting how do you get more sales, more referrals from your past clients, your sphere of influence and people you know and drive more business. You also have our phone number and email address there if you’re interested.

Jonathan: And you also do a podcast, don’t you?

Beatty: I do my own podcast right now. It’s a download. What I’m trying to do is, I’m trying to download everything I’ve learned on Marketing, on responses, on conversion, on driving in seller leads. And so, the podcast that we have over there, you can also find it at Stitcher, at iTunes and Google Play, is Get Sellers Calling You. So, yeah, if you want to look that up, I’d love for you to join in on the podcast as well.

Jonathan: And we’ll definitely have you back on the show as well. Robert, how can people find more about you and what you’re up to?

Robert: InboundREM.com. Come to the website, take a look at my blog or my University section. At this point, I have years worth of content in both sections and I do some really deep dives into reviews on Real Estate technology companies that you probably will not find anywhere else. So that would be a reason to come check out InboundREM.

Jonathan: And if you want to find more about the Mail-Right and what I’m up to, go to mail-right.com. There’s all our past episodes. There’s articles and you can find more information about Mail-Right. And if you want a one to one with me, you can book a session, a totally free session and I’ll show you more about Mail-Right and try and help you increase how effective you are as an Agent. We’re going to wrap it up, like I say, this week. Hopefully, continue the discussion which you’ll be able to see on our YouTube channel and on the Mail-Right website. And hopefully, next week, we will be discussing something that will help you become a more effective Real Estate Agent. We’ll see you next week folks.

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