#161 Mail-Right Show With Special Guest Beatty Carmichael

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How To Get More Quality Referrals From Your Local Farm (Part 2)

In this episode of the Mail-Right show we discuss with our special guest Beatty Carmichael how agents can by building a list of just 300 hundred and marketing to this list effectively you can get stream of 20 + transactions per year!

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.

As other clients began hitting sales records word of their success began spreading. Beatty’s business grew and, altogether, has serviced tens of thousands of independent sales professionals. One client group increased sales revenues by $5.2 million a month within 12 to 18 months as a direct result of Beatty’s expertise.

During the first 15 years Beatty successfully applied his expertise in over 15 industries including health & wellness, weight loss, legal, accounting, travel, medical benefits, nutritional supplements and more.

Jonathan: Welcome back folks to the Mail-Right Show. This is episode 161. We’ve got a guest, a returning guest. He was on the show in August and that is Beatty Carmichael. Beatty, would you like to quickly introduce yourself again to the listeners and viewers?

Beatty: I would love to. Thanks. I work with a lot of Agents primarily in the field of helping them get more listings. We work with sphere of influence, past clients and geographic farming.

Jonathan: That’s great. And I’ve my great co-host Robert Newman with me. Would you like to quickly introduce yourself, Robert?

Robert: I would. I’d love to. My name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound Real Estate Marketing or InboundREM.com is the website. That’s where I do most of my content and I have a lot of it, so if you want to learn more about me or my company, go check it out.

Jonathan: That’s great. And I’m the founder of Mail-Right which is a SaaS product that gets you quality leads with an emphasis of using the power of Facebook to achieve that. Right, Beatty. We’re having you back because it was a fantastic interview but of your five points, we only covered two.

Beatty: That’s right.

Jonathan: That’s all my fault. So, how would you like to restart the conversation and try and cover the three points that we didn’t cover?

Beatty: Sure. I think maybe just a real quick recap of the first two things for those who may be coming in late or it’s been a while since they heard the first podcast and then dive on into the last three. Does that work?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Beatty: Okay cool. All of this, by the way, if you want more information, we have a website and a podcast called GetSellersCallingYou.net. But what we’re talking about is the five steps to doubling your referrals from past clients and sphere of influence and what we covered on the first call is really two things. Number one is how homeowners choose an Agent and they usually choose an Agent by a concept of trust and top of mind.

And the whole idea of getting more referrals and more sales is if you can increase your trust level, not the trust of you as an individual but you as an expert in Real Estate, if you can increase that in their mind and so their perception and always be in front of them, which is top of mind, then you start to get more of those sales. The second thing we covered is how do you start to increase that trust and we talked about the concept of outside perception versus inside reality. Outside perception is what the homeowner believes you to be as an Agent. Inside reality is who you really are.

And the challenge is most homeowners believe that all Agents are the same, that they stick a sign in yard, list a home in the MLS and wait for someone else to bring a buyer. And as long as that’s what they believe, then they have no reason to choose you over someone else. But most of the folks on this call, especially if they’ve been around for a while, they know that they’re a lot of things that they do individually that adds an incremental level of value to their clients and if those homeowners on their list understood that value proposition, more of them would refer and choose that Agent. That’s the inside reality. So, we talked last time about what are some of the things that you can do to increase that inside reality. So that’s the quick recap and then today we’ll cover the next three things and they should go a lot faster.

Jonathan: That’s great. So do you want to start off with number three?

Beatty: Yeah. So the third thing is top of mind. So if we go back to the main equation trust multiplied by top of mind is what is going to give you approximately how many of the sales and referrals that your past clients and sphere of influence are generating will actually come to you. So the third thing in the equation is this whole concept of top of mind. And top of mind is how frequently you’re positively in front of that prospect. And I laugh at this because after the podcast call Jonathan, you and I and Robert were talking about what makes for a great touch and I remember I was doing this call, it with larger Brokers.

They had like 250 Agents. The Broker was in the meeting and a number of Agents there and I was asking the Broker, “Are all touches the same?” And he said, “Yes.” And I was kind of startled because all touches aren’t the same. So here’s what I like to propose. This is what I suggested to him. I said, “So, you’re telling me that getting an email that says, “It’s Summertime. Hope you have a good Summer,” has the same level of value as if you as an Agent walk up to my house and bring me some home-made chocolate chip cookies and say, “I was just thinking about you and wanted to drop these off.” See, touches are not all equal. Does that make sense? Are you all following with me?

Robert: Yeah.

Beatty: Okay. So the most important thing when you do touches is you have to understand that what you’re looking for is those touches that will add value to your clients, to your past clients, to your sphere of influence and not just any touch. What usually happens in this day and age is most Agents they say, “Okay. I want to stay in front of someone so I’m just going to go and get an email campaign and I’m going to send them automatic emails.” And I had this client, a loan officer. I recently bought a house and so I get these emails from him and he’s trying to do the touch system with me and they are so stupid and such a nuisance. I actually created a folder on my computer called Stupid Email Campaigns and every time I get one of his emails I slide it over in that folder because let me see if this makes sense. Robert and Jonathan, do you all get a lot of emails every day or just a few?

Jonathan: Loads.

Beatty: A lot, right?

Robert: More than I can count.
Beatty: More than you can count and more than any of us really want and most of them are junk. So, what happens is when you send an email, like this loan officer does to me and I get that email, if it doesn’t add value to me, then it’s not positive, it’s neutral at best or negative at worst and for him, they’re negative. So every time I get an email I refuse to even open it because I’m so offended by it. Think about that when you’re targeting your personal clients and your past clients and your sphere of influence and others. Are they going to be offended because it adds no value to their life? And if that’s the case, you’re potentially hurting yourself. What you want to do is look for those type of touches that will add value. And this is where we were talking after the podcast.

A client of ours, he sends out 52 emails a year, every single week to his database of about 350 or 500 folks. And what’s interesting is when he misses a week, he gets emails from his clients saying, “Hey, Stewart, I didn’t get the email. Would you send it?” They love it so much. What this is showing is it adds value. And so, what he’s doing is real simple. He’s taking, what I call a human interest story. For example, one of the ones that I remember, it goes like this. It’s written in the first person and the person says, “My father was a merchant. We lived on top of the store and as I was growing up I loved Mathematics.

And then, my father introduced me, suggests I go to a music studio and learn music. And so, I did that and I really enjoyed it. And when it came time to go to College, I didn’t know whether I wanted to pursue Mathematics or music.” He said, “I went to my father and my father gave me some wise advice. He said, “Son, you can only sit in one chair.” In other words, don’t be a Jack of many, be a master of one. So, he said, “I choose music. And within 8 years, I was playing in Carnegie Hall. A few years after that, I was playing in front of the Queen of England. I was playing in front of the Pope.” And he goes on and you’re just reading this thing and going, “My gosh, who is this?” And it was signed, “Pavarotti“.

So what happens is these human type of interest stories, and that’s just one concept. There are other things you can do that create value. But what happens is people are drawn into it because they like the story because it adds value, it’s encouraging. And so, when you focus on item number three to double sales and referrals, you have to focus on top of mind items that add value. So, a Drip email campaign that adds value is one thing you can do. But there are other things you can do too.

One is going to be, if you’re in a sports area, those magnets that go on the refrigerator that show off the sports schedule of the local teams, you put your name and face on it because now what happens is every day, multiple times a day, you’re in front of the housewife, you’re in front of the husband or the wife and the husband and you’re in front of the kids, they see your name and the face all the time and so you’re constantly top of mind. You can do magazines. So I think there’s something called believe it or not, what is it? Have you all heard of this? Called like Guns and Flowers. Do you know the magazine I’m talking about? It’s really a rage that I’ve heard from a lot of Agents.

Robert: No. But it sounded like you were headed in the direction of Guns N’ Roses.

Beatty: Almost Guns N’ Roses but it’s not Guns N’ Roses. But it’s really interesting because it has something for the guys, the guns.

Jonathan: That would be an interesting magazine, wouldn’t it?

Beatty: It would be. But there are all kinds of magazines that you can send out, maybe six magazines a year. The coffee top magazines that you’re branded on the front and the back. But these are the things you want to look at. What type of touches can you do that add value? Another type of touch is that personal touch of just making a list and systematically going through your list and dropping off a gift once or twice a year and just saying, “I really enjoy our relationship and thanks for being such a great friend.” So that’s how you do number three.

Robert: Okay. Just give me a second though.

Beatty: Yeah.

Robert: That’s item number three? That’s step number three or item number three?

Beatty: Okay. So, step number three.

Robert: Your five-step process. I haven’t had my coffee. My brain is still on getting us back to where we stopped.

Beatty: Okay great. So first step is understanding that is trust and top of mind.

Robert: Got you.

Beatty: That drives everything.

Robert: That’s step 1.

Beatty: That’s step 1. Step 2 is how do you build trust. That’s what we talked about last week or a couple weeks ago on inside reality versus outside perception.

Robert: Got you.

Beatty: The step is how do you build top of mind.

Robert: That’s what we’re talking about right now?

Beatty: All of these things that we’re talking about right now that add value but they’re typically low cost.

Robert: Okay.

Beatty: All it is, is that value touch.

Robert: Got you, got you. So that’s step three and then we have step four and five. Right?

Beatty: Yeah.

Robert: Okay.

Beatty: That’s right. So step four is, if you think about this, when you look at those people, if you were to make a list, let’s say of the people that you’re touching, your past clients, your sphere of influence, other people that you’ve met, somewhere within that list, there are people that are going on the market every year. On average there’s about a 5 percent turnover rate, plus or minus, in the United States. So you have a list of 200 people, that means that probably 10 of them are actually going to sell their home this year. Think for a moment, if you could wave a magic wand over that list and identify which of those 10 they were. If you knew who was thinking about selling before any other Agent knew, then it would ensure that you got that sale before they went to someone else. Makes sense?

The question then is how do you do that? Now, in Email Marketing, we find it all the time. You send out an email with an offer, they click on the offer, they come back to a website and you track who clicks. It’s called a click-through rate. How do you do the same thing with your personal client list? Well, number one, if you’re sending out emails, you can send out an offer that only someone who’s thinking about selling would be interested in, that someone who’s not thinking about selling would not be interested in. This is where you find most Agents gravitate towards the what’s your home worth. But what’s your home worth concept has pluses and minuses. So, let me ask you guys. Are either one of you thinking about selling your home in the next 12 months?

Robert: No.

Jonathan: No.

Beatty: No? Okay. So if I came up to your door and I said, “I’m in the neighborhood and I’m telling people exactly what their home is worth. Would you like to know what your home is worth? Would you want to know what your home is worth?

Robert: No.

Jonathan: No.

Beatty: No? Okay. I would. It’s my most valuable asset or second most valuable. So what happens though is if you’re simply asking, “Do you want to know what your home is worth?” You’ll get some people that say no but you’ll get a lot of people that say yes. The challenge is just because they say yes doesn’t mean they’re most likely thinking about selling because they’re just curious. And so, what you do is if you want to identify who is thinking about selling, you have to narrow your offer down more specifically so that it only appeals to the person who’s actually thinking about selling.

Robert: Sure.

Beatty: What we’ve started to do in this realm is we started testing different messages and here’s the basic message that starts to work “If you’re thinking about selling your home in the next 12 months, then …” whatever your offer is. So, in this case, it might be “If you’re thinking about selling your home in the next 6 to 12 months, your first step is to figure out how much you could probably get for your home so you know how much money you have for the next house. I’ve made it real easy. Click the link below to go to my website to find out approximately what your home could be selling for right now.” So you can do that with an email campaign. You can do that with a postcard. So a lot of times you’re sending out postcards as part of your touches as well. And so, you can send them either to a trackable website. What we do is we actually use a link very similar to a link in an email, so when they go to that website that we put on the postcard, it pinpoints specifically which address they’re responding from.

So now we know exactly which homeowner is responding. But even if you don’t have the technology like that, you can use something like a call capture number. “If you’re thinking about selling your home, you want to find out exactly what it’s worth, call this number right now.” So they pick up the phone and they call a call capture number, a toll-free number and it captures the caller ID. The key with all of these processes is you have to have a way to identify the person who responds. But here’s something interesting. When I ask our clients, “What is it that homeowners want to know before they sell?” They say, “There’s only one thing.

How much can I get for my home?” Well, we’ve tested that and that’s not the only thing. In fact, that’s actually item number two. There’s one more item more responsive, far more responsive than we found from that offer. And it’s the simple offer, the curiosity of being able to get the home sold immediately and it comes out in different venues. But the simple way to understand this approach is what I call the I have a client approach and let me give you the backstory on this.

One of my friends here in town was telling me the story of a buyer client he had that wanted to buy on this particular street. And for about a year or so, he couldn’t find a home and there weren’t many homes coming on the market. So my friend, Rob, the Real Estate Agent, said, “Well, let me see if I can help.” So he wrote up a letter and said, “Dear Homeowner. My name is Rob. I’m a Real Estate Agent.

I have a client who is wanting to buy on this street and he hasn’t been able to find the right now. If you’re thinking about selling this year, would you please contact me and let’s see if your home is a fit.” So he puts it out on all these homes. He picks up a listing or two right off the bat just from that. They may not have been the right match for his client but it got him a listing. And so, we started to take this concept I call the I have a client and we started to modify it and this is what you can do on your own as well. The whole idea behind this is that homeowner having the expectation that they can sell their home immediately.

So here’s two ways that you can set this up for your past clients’ list, sphere of influence or even just a generic list. One is your buyer database. Most Agents have a database of active buyers. So maybe that database is 153 active buyers that you have. So, now you can go to your list of people and let’s say you group them by suburban area. Vestavia, Homewood, Mountain Brook.

Those are the suburban areas in my area or even more narrow and then you can send those clients a personal letter or a postcard or even just an email that says, “Hey, Jon. I’ve got a153 active buyers on my list who cannot find the right home right now and I was wondering if you’re thinking about selling your home in the next 6 to 12 months because if you are, I might be able to get it sold immediately, even before you put it on the market at whatever point you want. Can you contact me and let me know?” So, now all this is doing is just shaking the bushes to see who’s going to respond. You can do the same thing in a postcard. You can do it in an email. You can do it in text message. But now, you can take that list of people you know and start to identify who is thinking about selling. Those who respond, then you start to follow-up and you’re assured at that point of more than likely getting the deal because now you can engage relationally with them. So those are two ways to identify sellers.

Let me share one last thing that we found. In our testing, we’ve done about 21 split A/B marketing tests trying to identify what makes this work and we found one of the things that causes a homeowner who’s thinking about selling to respond and that is what I call the free report. So, let me see if this makes sense. I’m thinking about selling. I’ve planned this sale for probably 3 to 6 months. I’m starting to fix up the home. We’re looking at other homes. But it’s not until I’m actually ready to put the home on the market that I call the Agent. But in this time, we call it in the marketing world, we call this the Educational Spectrum where they’re educating themselves. During this period of time, if I offer information to this homeowner that the homeowner is interested in, I can get that homeowner to respond. So, for example, here’s a simple headline concept.

“If you’re thinking about selling your home, here are four secrets that practically guarantee buyers will pay up to $27,000 more for your home.” And then, the body copy would explain. “It’s a free report. It takes 5 minutes to read and it will get you more money above the current value of your home right now. Visit my website. Click on this link. Call this toll-free number,” whatever your call to action is. And so now, when you come up with those type of things, again, only the person thinking about selling will respond. Those people who are not thinking about selling will typically ignore. So this allows you to start to identify sellers within that list and then your follow-up is real easy. You pick up the phone, “Hey Jon, this is Beatty.” “Hey, Beatty.” “Hey, I see that you requested my free report. Are you guys thinking about selling anytime soon?” Hey, they’re your friend. You can be right up front and now you’re engaging in a conversation. So that’s number four step on how to double sales and referrals from past clients.

Robert: Hey Jon, should we cut to break?

Jonathan: Yeah. Sounds good a space. We’re going for our break and then Beatty’s going to tell us step five.

Robert: Five.

Jonathan: Be back in a few moments folks.

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Jonathan: We’re coming back. It’s been a magical discussion again. Beatty’s on form again. So, Beatty, we’ve covered from one to four. We’re on to step five. Would you like to go into that?

Beatty: I would. And by the way, this whole of concept of seller leads, before I forget, if you want more information, on my website, you can’t buy anything on my website, GetSellersCallingYou.net, but there’s a search bar and if you went to GetSellersCallingYou.net and type in the search bar “Seller leads”, then it will give you all the different trainings that we have out there on things that you can do, things that we have learned and things that will increase your overall conversion rate. So, the fifth thing in doubling sales and referrals, especially from your personal list, is you have to stay personal. And so, this is where additional personal touches come in.

Whether it’s a hand-written note or a personal phone call or dropping off a gift. Anyone who has referred you business at any time, you need to be, at least once if not twice a year, dropping off some cookies or just something that keeps that relationship warm and alive. In between there a quick phone call and it’s a self-serving phone call, “Hey. This is Beatty. How are you doing? Hey, are you thinking about selling? Do you know anyone who is?” Stay away from that stuff. What you want to do is simply be a friend. “Hey. I know you’re interested in flowers. I was just going through this magazine and I wanted to send you this clipping on how to do flower arranging because I think you’d really enjoy it.”

Do something that’s personal, that just adds value to them, that keeps you in front of them, a hand-written note. And it’s one of those things that I recommend at least twice a year if not three or four times a year. Just a phone call, a hand-written note. So, now you have all of these things combined in this great big cauldron. I’ve got the marketing I do that educates them why they should choose me, my inside reality, I’m doing a number of things that are just keeping me always in front and on top of mind, I am using good marketing to identify those people thinking about selling before they come on the market, and then, I’m doing personal touches. And when you put it all together, you’ll find that your sales and referrals will start to double and triple to as many as at least 17 sales a year from every 100 of your personal contacts that you’re focused on because that statistically is what’s out there. So that’s the five steps on how to do it.

Jonathan: That’s amazing. Got any comments, Robert?

Robert: I do. So one of the things I wanted to comment because and Jon, you’ll love this, because you’ve done a deep dive into how to work a list and I really appreciate that Beatty. I just want to add for a lot of our clients that part of doing this, in general, is number one, you have to develop an Email Marketing list and then you have to segment your list. Because I noticed in your comments Beatty, you were basically referencing segments of a marketplace.

In other words, there is a difference between somebody you’ve shaken hands with and done some business with or driven around in your car for 3 hours showing homes but they didn’t buy from you versus a Facebook lead that just barely even saw one of your landing pages and input their name. So you should have two separate parts of your Email Marketing list. One that are people that you really know, that you’ve actually contacted and at least spoken to and then another one where it’s just all the people that have been caught in your marketing net through all your various methods that have some point or another sent you an email list. I feel like your strategy that you’re outlining here is going to be really, really effective for bucket number two, the people that you know, that you’ve contacted and that you have a relationship with versus people number one. Not to say that they can’t be valuable too, but I would say that targeting your efforts would be very helpful.

Beatty: You’re very correct. So, if you were to take that segmented, I would segment it in the following three. You have two segments of the people that you’ve met and when we talk about someone that you’ve met, if they were to see you on the street, they would call you by name, “Hey Beatty.” “Hey, Joe. How are you? How are the kids?” That type. So when you have that group of people, I would then group them into two groups, those who are past clients and have referred you or very close to you. The second group would be those that don’t fit in this group. And then, you have that third group you’re talking about. Maybe they’ve seen you on Facebook but they don’t really know you.

Well, the concepts work across the board because this is the process of how does someone make a decision. The real focus and the effort is more profitable when you focus it on those people who already trust you. And here’s one other study. I’ve actually seen this in three different data points and they all point in the same direction and we talked about this after the call last time and that is someone who has met you is 8 to 10 times more likely to do business with you than someone who has never met you. And so, that’s where you want to focus your effort in this realm of past clients and sphere of influence is to focus in that group because of the high likely hood of repeat business and referred business.

Jonathan: That’s great. We’re going to wrap it up for the podcast. It’s quite amazing. A half hour goes quick. But hopefully, Beatty will be able to stay on for 10, 12 minutes and we continue the discussion which you’ll be able to watch on the Mail-Right website with a full set of show notes and on the Mail-Right YouTube channel. Beatty, how can people, oh, he’s gone. He’s disappeared. Oh, he’s back again.

Beatty: I’m right here.

Jonathan: You scared me there. Beatty, how can people find out more information about you?

Beatty: Best way to find out more about me if our website GetSellersCallingYou.net. By the way, when you go there, you’ll land on a page where you can actually request a free training that we do, so a training series, on how to double sales and referrals from your past clients and sphere of influence. And if you spend time on that website, you’ll also see a lot of information about geographic farming and other stuff. So that’s really it. We do have a service. You can find us at agentdominator.net if you like to see what we actually provide on a paid service and guarantee your sales.

Jonathan: You scared me there Beatty. I thought you had done a runner.

Robert: That would be funny.

Jonathan: Robert, how can people find out more about you?

Robert: They can go to InboundREM.com and guys, for my audiences, as we were discussing privately before we started the show, I have all of my information, case studies, videos on how to, they’re all online. You don’t really need to speak to me. You can set an appointment if you want through my calendar. But if you just have questions about Real Estate Marketing or if you’re curious to know what we do, please just go to my website, look at my portfolio. My case study is incredibly detailed. I just spent the entire last 3 days building up the detail on them. They talk about price, results and I do a video that does a really, really deep dive. So if anybody’s curious, they can go there or they can check out my blog and they’ve got all sorts of great content on how to do Real Estate Marketing in general.

Jonathan: And if you’re looking to help the show, you’ve found these interviews and our internal discussions useful, give us some feedback. I just love feedback, good, bad or indifferent. You can do that through iTunes, you can email me, on the Facebook page. It’s really easy to give feedback to the show. And I’d love to know some subjects you would like us to cover in the coming months. That would be great. We’re going to end the show now but like I say, Beatty, hopefully, is going to stay on and we’ll continue the discussion for a little while. And we’ll see you next week where we will be covering a subject that will hopefully open your eyes and make you a more effective Real Estate Agent. We’ll see you next week