Every marketing opportunity seems to go through the following stages:
- Novelty
- Skepticism
- Early Adoption
- Late Adoption
- Maturity
Take social media as a recent example.
- Twitter and Facebook see rapid growth
- Business are skeptical that 140 characters, pictures of cats, and a young demographic can produce any business for the effort
- Early adopters see massive growth
- Late adopters want some of the action but don’t know how the early adopters did it
- It takes more and more effort for subsequent adopters to get business out social media
I was listening to the Super Agents Live podcast hosted by Toby Selgado, specifically the episode about “How to buy Facebook ads” in which Toby interviews guest Chris Smith, co-founder of Curaytor – a lead generation service – and has spent millions of dollars running Facebook ads for real estate agents, and they start the podcast by talking about how if you are good at marketing you do not need to be good at sales.
What the continue to talk about is about a Sales Funnel. If you don’t know what a sales funnel is, is basically a process of converting a person into a buyer.
In the interview, they talk about “boiler room” sales tactics. You call 100 people everyday and see how many sales you make. Want to make more sales. You call 200 people everyday.
But a sales funnel pushes the sale to the end. Instead of converting a person into a buyer, you first convert them into a subscriber, or listener, or reader.
Eventually some of those subscribers will convert into leads by calling, or emailing, or messaging. That’s when you go for the sale.
At that point, the lead is a warm or hot lead and the sale happens so much easier than when selling directly.
A sales funnel is basically a scalable sales tactic. You let your writing, podcasts, and video warm up people into becoming leads who are easier to turn into a buyers as opposed to going through many hundrends of one-on-one rejections to close a few.
At this point you might be asking yourself, OK, but who has the time to do all this and build a real estate team?
The answer is, you don’t.
The way I see it is you had an opportunity back at the novelty stage. Right now you either have to wait for the next new thing and hope that it pans out for you to be an early adopter, or use modern digital marketing by hiring a professional or a team of professionals depending on the scale of your agency.
Modern digital marketing is not easy. If it was everyone would be doing it. But it has a snowball effect. Modern digital marketing is expensive because the devil is in the details, what works for one agency may not work as effective with another agency.
But what is the ultimate cost really? Eventually closing your agency because you cannot scale? Spending less and less time with those you love to hustle more and more?
My advise, don’t go another year husltling like a maniac without building a sales funnel to do the hustling for you.
