TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to the High Performance Agent Podcast. I'm your host, Tina Beliveau, and I'm an expert in real estate, marketing, social media, technology and systems. I'm here to teach you how to build a sustainable and consistent business that supports your dream life. Through my repeat referral and relationship driven systems, I've built a team that sold nearly 2000 homes over my 20 years in the industry.
In this podcast, I keep it real and share exactly what I do, and more importantly, how you can do it too. If you're ready to scale faster, work smarter, and generate more leads from your sphere, please check out High Performance Agent Academy, my 12 month course packed with plug and place systems, done for you marketing, and step-by-step strategies. You get my entire business in a box, plus coaching and personalized support from me every step of the way. Get all the details at tinabeliveau.com/academy.
Hey, welcome back to the High Performance Agent Podcast. I am your host, Tina Beliveau.
I recently unveiled a new system called Ask Me Anything. It's a simple Google form that you can fill out and ask me anything, and if the question is juicy enough, I will record a podcast episode in response.
I got two really good questions the minute I rolled the form out. I'm going to answer the first one in this episode and then look for another coming soon. This question is from Gercia and I'm gonna read you exactly what she wrote. I've been doing home buyer webinars, but not attracting enough participants.
I just went through a buyer webinar training that would require a $95 per month software to manage it all and a 300 to $500 per month ad spend. Is there a less expensive way to get one to two buyers per month? Okay, obviously all answers I give are opinions of my own. I would just say it's a great question and your hesitation that I sense in the question is telling you something important.
I don't know much about what you've been doing with your webinars. I assume you're doing them online. From what you're saying. I don't know where you have created traffic so far. I don't know if you've been just organically creating traffic.
The first thing I would do is look for ways that you can create traffic for free. I am curious if you have exploited all different kinds of online communities where you might be able to get people to come to your webinar without being kicked out of the group. Are there Facebook groups you could be creating or posting in? One of the things I haven't paid as much attention to, but it's now officially on my radar, is Reddit, Nextdoor, LinkedIn.
There are a lot of places to network on the internet for free if you're willing to spend the time. I will say this is just my experience and the person who asked this question, she's experienced. I know she's looking to grow her business, but she is someone who I would imagine prefers to work with sellers.
I will just say this. Every time that I've experimented with online leads, I'm always reminded of a couple truths. Number one, they have a very low conversion rate. It totally depends on the lead source and the system and how good of a converter you are and so many things. But generally you're gonna see a 1% conversion rate.
You might get a hundred registrations for your webinar, maybe 20 show up, and maybe one of them eventually turns into a buyer and it might be an 18-month window. Generally online leads—Facebook ads, Zillow, and realtor.com are probably actually the best sources out there for people who are most likely ready to transact in the near future.
It's also the most expensive. They don't tend to need as much as buying online leads in mass, which is how I would perceive this to be, unless the buyers are being sourced from somewhere that they’re more targeted to truly be in the market in the near future. Generally, I would just say online leads have a low conversion rate.
And then as the person who needs to convert them, you need all this stuff. You need a CRM that is designed to convert that kind of business, that has campaigns and drips and a lot of automations because it's very hard to keep up with all of that yourself. On top of that, you basically need to be your own inside sales agent.
You've got to call, you've got to text, you've got to do it for a long time for it to turn into anything meaningful. You've got to be patient, you've got to be committed, you have to have the time. In my experience, this is not a magical time-saver to create business from online leads. It's actually a big time suck.
You tend to need to spend several hours a day, five days a week, staying on it. Ask me how I know. In 2020 I rebooted my team and I was trying all kinds of new things. Demoing software, not throwing money at stuff, but trying different things. I had basically gone through something in my business where I had a team member leave who'd been with me a long time, and she took a lot of my clients with her even though that wasn't the deal.
It took a huge bite out of my database and I was, how am I going to recover from this? I tried an online lead service called Ylopo, which is a good tool. A lot of top agents and teams use it. It's Facebook ads that lead into the software. Then there's AI that'll text them and drips that happen.
But I ended up being an inside sales agent chasing these people, and I was quickly reminded that that is not for me at all. I am spoiled. I've been now doing this 20 years this summer. I have an amazing repeat/referral/sphere/organic thing going with my business, and there's, for me, no need to work with leads that are 10 times harder.
By the way, the agents on my team do not want to work with business like that. When you're used to working with referrals... I hope this doesn't sound snobby or uppity because that is not the place I'm coming from. It's more just being practical.
If I am not going to enjoy doing something, I can promise you I’m at a point in my life where I will not follow through. In fact, I would say that is my biggest challenge. To pontificate for a minute here, one of the biggest challenges to my motivation these days is that my business is stable and reliable.
And my life is good. I'm not as motivated as I used to be because I'm not feeling the pain, I'm not feeling the burn the way I used to.
For me, being comfortable enough makes it hard to feel motivated to do things that take a huge push. If I have a very clear reason for why I'm doing something... I remember when I was pregnant with my daughter, I wanted to launch this podcast. I just made up my mind that I wanted an episode to go out every single week.
I was trying to sort of follow the algorithm of podcasting, which was its own learning curve by the way. I wanted an episode to come out every week during my maternity leave, and I was taking three months off. I needed to launch it and have three episodes ready and several over the first few weeks before I had the baby. I recorded 20 podcast episodes in two and a half weeks.
I laugh—I remember I stopped working out because I didn't want to go into labor. Then as soon as I was done recording, she was born three days later.
Anyway, my point is I have to be very motivated to do things that are high energy and take a lot of my life force. If you are not in that place—whoever you are listening to this—just be thoughtful before you take something on. For me, lazy lead gen is where it's at, and it's making sure I've maximized my foundation.
Just to answer this question, I also want to say the thing that worries me about buyer webinars—and I feel like this could sound bad, but I'm just going to say it—online lead gen to first-time buyers tends to attract the lowest quality leads.
First of all, they're buyers. They're not sellers. For me right now, it's harder to get my preferred commission rate with a buyer versus a seller because we have such a good seller value proposition. We get a lot more commission on the listing side. It's lower pay, it's more time, it's more nights and weekends, it's driving around...
It's very noble to help people become homeowners, and I think there are ways to do it that don't burn you out as a person and as an agent. But you probably are going to attract a lot of buyers who aren't qualified yet. Maybe they're not ever going to be qualified financially, or they're going to need years and need credit advice and all of that.
There's nothing wrong with that, but it becomes for you as the agent a recipe for frustration, low return on your investment, and bad quality of life.
There are a few things I would focus on.
If you're saying, “Okay, Tina, well what do I do? What do I do?” First of all, I would encourage you to shift your mindset to a filter of “how do I find listing leads and listing leads only?”
Sure, you'll work with buyers. My team loves buyers. But we don't look for them. I focus on how can I bring in listings. That’s really what has driven a lot of my success because I made a very conscious mindset shift about that in 2014.
It changed the trajectory of my business when I was, listings are where it's at for me. By the way, I enjoy them so much more. You may not, so you may take something totally different from this podcast. But that's my experience.
The second thing I would have you take a look at is, is your business foundation already solid?
I want you to go listen to the other podcast that I think will be released before this about what type of lead gen is working for me right now. I'm going to expand on that, but I feel very strongly that before you add new lead pillars—especially paid ones—you should have a solid foundation.
That includes:
1. A CRM that's up and running, functional, and has all of your past clients and sphere in it.
2. Strong email marketing to everyone in your CRM.
3. At least one client appreciation event a year where you invite everyone or a lot of people to get that contact.
4. A really strong plan for touching your past clients, retaining them, and turning them into repeat customers.
5. A consistent system for rewarding, thanking, acknowledging, and incentivizing any referrals you get—including anyone tagging you on social media, shouting you out, making the effort.
6. An active, organic social media presence.
By the way, that doesn't need to be complicated or graphically designed or managed by a social media manager. I'm talking about sharing pictures of your personal life—your house, vacations, where you're eating lunch, your family if you're comfortable, your pets, what you're doing—and maybe 20% business.
If you can check off everything on that list, one through six, then sure—add something paid if you have the money. Make sure that whatever you're investing in makes sense, will have the return, and what it requires of you as far as your activities and time are things you actually want to do and can commit to for at least a year.
If you don’t have the money—say you’ve done all of that, but you’re like, “Tina, it’s just not enough business for me. I have a small database. I do a decent job with what you’ve outlined—it’s just not enough business”—I know a lot of people who are in that place right now because of the market.
What’s happening is fewer people in our spheres are moving than normal. A sphere that used to maybe kick off, in my case, 100 deals a year maybe is only kicking off 60 to 70. And it’s like, “Okay, well, what do I do to offset that?”
If you don’t have the money, and you don’t want to spend the money you don’t have yet—and sometimes there’s a place for that—but in my experience, I don’t like how that feels most of the time. In fact, I experimented with that in the last six to eight months with the Academy and doing a lot of Facebook advertising, and it was yet another reminder. I just don’t like spending on something before I even know if it works.
Then I encourage you to find lead gen sources that require your time and not money, to grow your business without spending money you don’t have.
I can give you a huge list of time ideas:
Create a free Facebook group.
Hang out in Facebook groups that other people have, that have your target audience in them, where you can make friends.
Network for agent referrals anywhere you can—Facebook groups, conferences, your brokerage, any niche networks you’re part of.
Anything where you can meet more agents and grow a database of agents. We have a very strong agent referral arm to our business.
Number three: consider building relationships with attorneys, especially estate attorneys. Power referral sources—not just anyone and everyone.
Number four: start attending more networking events. Attend every party you’re invited to. Attend things that are happening around you and just start meeting new people.
I think it’s uninteresting to say, but generally the key to being a successful agent is to be a social butterfly. That doesn’t mean you need to be super extroverted, but you need to be constantly meeting people and forming new friendships and relationships. Eventually those people will become clients—as long as you’re adding them to your database and marketing on social media so they have a clue about what you do and start to know, like, and trust you.
Some other ideas:
Join new social groups. Join a book club. Join a meetup. Find something to do that you really love. I love doing lead gen that I actually enjoy.
Consider getting more involved in communities you’re already a part of, where maybe you’ve been sort of on the fringes or haven’t been all in—your church, something with a kid’s school, an alumni association, something with your neighborhood. Just get more involved. You need to meet more people.
If your business is not where you want it to be, I can guarantee that if you’re a people person—and I think it’s hard to be in real estate long-term if you’re not a people person—not only does it help your business to grow your database and get more deals, but interacting with people is what gives us energy and inspiration and motivation and all those good things.
Maybe consider doing something unique that you don’t hear of people doing as much. This comes back to what I said earlier: maybe there’s a niche you can get involved in. Get really involved in a Reddit subreddit about something you care about that’s local. Maybe get more involved on Nextdoor or LinkedIn.
Those things are not really my area, but I do feel like there are places where people are there and they are conversing and they are in community. Most real estate agents are not working in those spaces to my knowledge.
Another idea: put together a charitable drive to engage your database without actually spending any of your own money. Or host easy social gatherings, like book clubs or things you can put together to engage your sphere. Get them in your house—or if you don’t want them in your house, fine—tell everyone you’re going to do a happy hour tour and try a new restaurant or bar every month throughout the area you live in. Or share the best spots.
Organize, engage, talk to people, get them in your database, and document what you’re doing on social media.
Or if your business is really stalled, you might want to consider joining a team and letting them solve a lot of these problems for you. There’s no shame in it. I think teams have come a long way in the last 20 years. There are a lot of teams where you still have a lot of autonomy and can maintain your personal brand—and really let them be the wind beneath your wings.
So in summary, if you’re going to do paid lead gen, be prepared for what that entails—which will be:
* Lots of money
* Lots of time (your time, and then giving it time to work)
* A low conversion rate
* And you need to be prepared to do inside sales agent-type activities—pinging people, getting rejected, getting ignored.
Again, it’s not that bad. It’s just hard for me to do that week after week, month after month.
The last thing I’ll say is: it can be tough to find paid listing leads. I feel like that’s the holy grail. And that’s just why I don’t do it that way.
I focus on my sphere, my digital geographic farm, and also being very visible with agents and just trying to make new friends as best as I can manage with everything else in my life.
Those are my three big sources.
So that is my answer to this question.
Go listen to my other episode where I talk about what type of lead gen is working for me right now—if you’re like, “You know what, I don’t want to do this workshop thing. I don’t want to do the online stuff that is paid. What else can I do?”—go listen to that other episode.
If you have questions, come find me. I have a brand new Instagram account at @highperformanceagent, just like the name of the podcast. DM me. I’m happy to chat with you. I’m always happy to point people in the right direction.
Sometimes that’s my Academy—where, by the way, I help you get this entire foundation in order. If you want to read more about that, go to tinabeliveau.com/academy or check the show notes for more info. And I will be very candid with you if it’s the right thing for you or not.
But most importantly, I just want you to do lead gen that you’ve thought about, that makes sense for you, and that you know you can actually keep up with.
Thank you again, Gercia, for this question, and I look forward to hearing more of your questions. Check the show notes for the link to ask me more.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the High Performance Agent Podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. Check the show notes for links to all of my resources, including my course, High Performance Agent Academy. And please come say hi on Instagram—you can find me @tinabeliveau
Talk to you soon.
