TRANSCRIPT:
SLOPER: I told you the other day in conversation that I was worrying more about my numbers the last two years and I feel like now when I stop worrying as much about the numbers and more about the relationships, the numbers are taking care of themselves. And I really truly do mean that.
I think that next month could be one of our bigger months. It could end up being somewhere around 5 ½ to $6 million depending on how things shape out. And for my team to basically be able to have a month like that in one month, I know that in the beginning, that’s what I made if I was lucky in one year.
FLETCHER: And so real quick, let’s talk about numbers because you have seen impressive growth over the last say 2 ½ years; and so your transition from loan officer to real estate agent. It’s hard fought, tough struggle but you are outgoing, you are a hustler, you get to six, 8 million and then the next year, you double to 16, the next year you go to 25 and this year you could be on pace to close to 40 in production with the record month that you have coming up. So we’re talking about $40 million production from literally in about three year span.
What do you credit that to? And I want to talk about conversions specifically. And so talk about a couple of the authority symbols that you have in your business now, that… And I always say this, is that you can go out and generate 1 million leads and it won’t make a shit bit of difference unless the people who you generate the leads from, they look back at you and say, “That’s a someone, that’s the guy on the radio. That’s the guy who has written the book. That’s the guy who is the leader in the community, that’s the guy who is a philanthropist, that’s the guy who will protect my best interest.” [The Guru Party wants to preach “lead generation”, because “the numbers” are something they can hold you accountable to, but conversion is about your perceived authority and reputation, which requires that you be a writer and storyteller. i.e. Publish or Perish.]
SLOPER: Right.
FLETCHER: And so you have built up a reputation. And so talk a little bit about how you’ve done that.
SLOPER: Yeah, so over time, obviously I had the radio show. Had the radio show and it really started to realize that people really looked and talked about me differently when I had the radio show on. And I was that, “Okay, how can I continue on this?” And I really became a student of direct response marketing. I found Dan Kennedy which obviously is… Those of you who don’t know him could look up his name immediately GKIC.
That was my first touch with direct response marketing was Dan Kennedy. And then from there, that was my first introduction to direct response marketing and then I believe it was in probably what, 2012 Ryan? Is when I came across probably one of your webinars that you did with Josh Henley. That was my next kind of big introduction.
I was always looking for somebody that was in real estate that was focusing direct response marketing in the real estate. I could never really find it right? I could finally examples through Dan Kennedy and GKIC but you were really the first person that I came across that really like took it to light the next level. You had created programs and basically positioning and authority and all these different terms that I always heard about but I actually saw you physically doing it in the real estate space.
So I was completely intrigued by that, dove a pretty deep into direct response marketing. Still to this day, that is the only thing that matters, if you are creating marketing that’s generating response then what the hell are you marketing for?
Then I started two websites in addition to my radio show which is now a podcast, it’s Real Estate 360 so I do a real estate podcast that can be found in iTunes [inaudible 25:21] podcast can. I have two other main websites Bristol Daily Homes and Gainsville Homes Daily for those of you that want to check those out.
Those are basically two lead generation websites. So I finally said to myself, “I don’t necessarily want to be the guy that’s known to go all over Northern Virginia because Northern Virginia is to be for me to handle and I live in Bristol Virginia. I really wanted to kind of focus on Bristol and Gainsville which is the neighboring city. What better way to do that and to start to do videos?”
Once again, this was a positioning thing for me. I committed that I was going to do these videos for a minimum of one year every day I was going to get up, I was going to shoot a video of all the new listings that came on the market.
Painful is the word that comes to mind when I think about when I started doing that because nobody really wants to get up in the morning at 5:30, 6:00 in the morning, shoot a video or two reviewing these listings ever single day but I did that. I committed to that. We had an opt in page, landing page through Google Ad Words where basically I was driving traffic; for anybody that was looking for homes in Bristol homes, in Gainesville, we had certain keywords that we were targeting and we had them driven to a landing page where they would opt in; name and email.
Once they opted in, that starts the conversation Ryan. So we had to continue that conversation. My plan was to continue that conversation for a minimum of one year with these people.
So positioning was huge for me so it created these websites Bristol Daily Homes and Gainsville Homes Daily along with podcasts. I had all of this going, I was generating good lead flow through these two sites then created the book which was just a recent rollout obviously. Now became a published author. Now actually I am a twice published author because I had one in the mortgage business.
So now everyone wants to know not only – you’ve done our radio show, now you are doing… Then a podcast, now you have a book. What in the hell is going on here? How do you have time to do all of this stuff? And really, I think I credit most of the jump in business to just continuing to further my positioning and my authority in the marketplace.
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