Transcript:
Kevin: Right on guys, okay so we’re going to jump right in here, we’ve got a very special call today with two awesome guests David Tal from agent Agentology and Long Doan from Minnesota runs an amazing brokerage in Minnesota over 200 agents, one of the top brokerages in the country. And what we’re going to do today is we’re going to talk with David Tal from Agentology, just kind of get digging deep with David for the first 20 minutes or so learn all about his business, learn all about some of the amazing things that they’re doing over in San Diego with Agentology. We’re using Agentology as a brokerage and a company and then Long as a guest for us from 920-940 but we thought we figure Long will be on with us too, we can all have a conversation Long is working on systems and conversion and stuff like that too.
So let’s jump right in man, I want to get dig deep with you David learn about what you guys are doing, first of all your company is like on fire right now there’s so much buzz about Agentology, you guys are doing some really great things with leads, converting leads at a high level, you’re calling and texting and following up with them. You guys came out with a very interesting report today that I’d love to get into as well, so let’s just dig right in man so tell us what are you seeing out there in terms of leads, like the best sources of leads, how are you getting leads to reply, what are you guys doing and tell us what you guys are seeing out there man.
David: Yes, so as you mentioned we are an ISA company, we help agents engage and qualify their internet leads and so we are working with thousands of agents now around the country and have all this data that we’re gathering and things that we’re always testing to see what works best. And the report you mentioned and feel free to share a link to that with your team, it is our way of kind of sharing what we’re learning with the industry and we’re going to be releasing that every quarter. Regarding lead sources here’s some info I could share, so you have to kind of bucket out the difference between like portal leads and CRM IDX type leads, there are two different levels of quality but also of cost. So if I was just to answer the question what are the highest converting lead sources hands-down its Zillow and it’s Realtor.com and Trulia, those are obviously the three big portals as well and they’re also the most expensive CPL or cost per lead, however they’re also the highest converting.[00:03:00.22]
That being said now we’re seeing a huge rise in leads coming from CRM, Facebook, IDX type sites, those are typically lower quality however they’re cheaper to generate as well. And so one of the most important things that agents need to factor in and we’re building this into Agentology over the next couple of months so that agents don’t have to do the math and just will show it to you, is what is your true cost per qualified lead right, not just what your cost per lead and what’s your conversion rate definitely none of them matter, only together do they really matter and you can normalize how things are working for you. So let me just give you a quick example of that just to put a real example in numbers in place for that, so let’s just say you’re paying Zillow and on average let’s just say each lead costs you $50 okay, and now let’s say that 50% of the leads are qualified, really high qualification rate 50% and by the way we’re seeing numbers in the 40s and 50s with Zillow and realtor.
So your cost per qualified lead on a $50 lead where half of the leads are qualified would be $100 per qualified lead, that’s what matters. Now let’s say you’re generating a ton of Facebook leads and you’re getting them for 10 bucks, but only 10% of them are qualified right you’re still getting $100 per qualified lead, that is the only way to truly measure success across these different portals, is to understand those numbers. Now you may get $10 leads on your Facebook or on your website whatever and 20% of them are qualified, and you might be like those are qualified far less than my Zillow leads, but if you’re paying 10 bucks per lead and 20% are qualified you’re really paying $50 per qualified lead, and so if that example held that would be a better strategy.
Now we always tell agents to have a blend, you kind of have to diversify just like if you are investing in stocks, in stocks you’re diversifying because you’re betting that you’ll have a few losers you’ll have a few winners, overall you’re trying to hedge your bets and have an overall win. It’s the same with leads, you have to really balance out and diversify higher-quality more expensive leads versus lower quality more volume of leads, and see how it goes for you, there’s no right answer, it’s what works for you.
Kevin: Question for you, so two things one is what is your definition of a qualified lead, number two is so we’re talking about all these sources some are higher than others right? So at the end of the day I care about for the money I spend what’s going to give me the best return on my money. [00:06:00.18] So if I get 10 leads that are Facebook at $10 vs. 5 leads at Zillow at $50 at the end of the day which ones are going to be, like which one’s going to give me a better return on my money.
David: Sure, so I’ll answer the first question which first which is what do we consider as a qualified lead. So at Agentology we have to set some kind of a bar because we’re processing all of these leads nationwide from all of the different sources, every type of lead buyer, seller, general, home evaluation all sorts, and we have to normalize what we consider a minimum standard for qualified lead. So what we consider a qualified lead is someone that we are actually able to engage in and have a conversation with, whether it be by phone or SMS or even by email if they’re actually communicating back and forth that way, although the majority communicate via SMS followed by phone. That’s step one and two is that they express interest in actually connecting with the agent on the team, that is the minimum bar where if that’s all the information we get we will qualify it and send it over to you.
Now that being said let me just be clear, we try to gather far more info than that, leads usually come in with just very basic contact information, maybe a property they were inquiring about specifically on Zillow or wherever or just a general form they filled out with just their contact info. Well when we’re having conversations with them and we call your leads right away, we call them first and we call them again within another minute of that. So within the first five minutes or so we’ve made two attempts by phone, because we have the best conversations via phone, if it’s in the middle of the night well obviously we can’t call legally so we’ll text first, but we actually offered a call so even at 2:00 in the morning if someone fills out a form we’ll text them and if they want a call we will call them.
When we’re having conversations with your leads we’re trying to gather much more information like what’s your time frame, are you pre-approved for a mortgage, what’s your price range, are you already working with another agent, what other things are important to you, what other neighborhoods are you interested in. We’re trying to have a humanized, authentic, personalized conversation with every single one of these leads, because we know that is the most effective way of winning them over and building the trust so that when we hand it off to you we can really be teeing you up for success with that lead, and you have much more information packaged by the time you actually receive that qualified lead, so that’s step one. To answer your second question, it really is difficult to say because first of all Zillow varies dramatically by zip code, and qualified rates are fairly consistent but levels of intent motivation timeframe vary dramatically across every single market in zip code, it depends if you’re getting leads exclusively or not I mean there’s so many factors there. Same with Facebook right, Facebook are we talking about driving leads to your website, [00:09:00.25] are we just having them fill out a lead form which has no information really that you’re providing, is it just driving traffic to a specific listing or an open house lists, it vary so dramatically.
So as much as I want to answer that for you, it’d be irresponsible for me to do so because an answer that I give you may be wrong for somebody else, and so what we’re doing and this is not me being a politician, this is me trying to be honest with you and say it really varies. However with Agentology you do find that out for you specifically, so for example you and I Kevin can dive into your account and really figure out across the different lead sources we are managing for you which ones are giving you the best results. One other thing you’ll be able to do soon with Agentology is for every lead source we’re providing, you’ll be able to put in how much you’re spending on that source so that we can actually deliver to you what are your costs for qualified leads by source, that should be the first part of the funnel that normalizes it, being on that you need to track and we don’t have this tracking yet, what leads to a listing, what leads to showings, what leads to a closing of escrow so you can actually get a true ROI metric. That’s kind of phase two and we hope to move into that but we’re going to need participation from you guys to actually keep those leads statuses updated so we can provide that information.
Kevin: And it’s so important and thinking about tracking and measuring and Long feel free to jump in on this, but we’re going to talk about tracking and measuring afterwards but I’m going to try to put you on the spot okay David and you don’t have to answer it, I totally understand if you don’t answer but let’s say you were an agent in California okay and you had to decide what lead source to choose, what lead source would that be?
David: If I had to choose one source I would go with, that’s a tough one, I would probably go with Facebook to start and I’ll tell you why, however I would quickly add Zillow or Realtor.com either one I mean they’re pretty much about the same. The reason if I was going to only start with one I would go with those is with Facebook you can really have control over your budget on a monthly basis, you’re going to get leads quicker and more often because they are going to be cheaper to generate in California than Zillow would. So I would start off by getting a little more volume going [00:12:01.04] and kind of more at-bats in that way right, more practice with it, it’s easier to start to set up your systems and your follow up systems for a long-term nurture if you have kind of more volume to start to work with and because you could start with a hundred dollars a month, I don’t know of any leads you can get on Zillow for a hundred bucks a month.
Kevin: More like a hundred dollars a lead.
David: Exactly right. So as you start to get a return, I would absolutely invest in Zillow, Realtor.com and the big portals because one of the things that we have found is they are the highest converting and in terms of time frame they are the closest to transacting.
Kevin: The Zillow leads?
David: Yes, they’re the closest to transacting, how do I word that differently, their timeframes are the shortest.
Kevin: Yes, they’re the lowest in the funnel out of all.
David: Yes exactly. So a lot of people and here’s why it makes sense here’s why, these are people who are actively saying I’m looking and I’m searching and I’m going to go on this site and I’m ready to start showing or looking at properties, when you’re advertising on Zillow it’s kind of like a billboard you’re just kind of flashing yourself in front of them, I mean flashing yourself appropriately, in front of an audience. They’re not there to like find a realtor; they’re there to see where their friends went last night and why they didn’t get invited.
Kevin: You mean on Facebook right, you’re talking about Facebook?
David: On Facebook.
Kevin: Okay yes.
David: So the intention is not as high necessarily, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing because you can pull them in before they even start to go to sites like Zillow down the road.
Kevin: Right and that makes total sense, I mean I talk about that all the time with Facebook or with Realtor.com, Zillow and the portals people are actively going and they’re looking for property, looking for an agent on Facebook it’s more of an inactive, it’s like they’re being approached right so they’re being sought. Do you have a question Long?
Long: Yes for David, so what type of lead would you accept in with Agentology, for example did you say the only people who raise their hand and expressed interest or can we down low like a lead buyer or database and think we have, who will you accept in to make call for us?
David: I mean so we work with any fresh leads, we don’t do any older database elites anything like that yet; right now we’re focusing on our fresh inbound leads. So we do have some workarounds as Z buyer I know that’s a tricky one, but we have some workarounds and we have a ton of Z buyer clients like a ton of them and we’re always begging them to create some kind of a freaking email or something that we could parse so that we can get it in real time, because it’s really a disservice to everyone involved where [00:15:00.17] there’s time delay in getting to that lead information, putting it into your CRM or into us directly for us to pick it up. There’s delay in every minute obviously delays us from being able to do what we want to do, so we just know that if we can get it instantly obviously we would perform better on Z buyer, but we perform pretty well I would say given that everyone has that same experience with Z buyer and we are actively pushing, we’re making a total of 10 attempts with every single lead phone calls, texts, emails 10 to 11 attempts over a five day period so we are very effective with those.
But yes we take leaps from anywhere we have hundreds of sink users, we are actually, I know everyone said it’ll never be done, that they will never integrate with anybody but we are making progress. The CEO of Sync was here in our office great guy Alvaro, really great super smart guy is recognizing that we have a lot of common customers and we are in conversations to figure out how we can create the first integration ever that sync does outside of their of their ecosystem, so we are excited about that.
Long: So right now if I understand correctly, just incoming leads right now that’s what you are saying?
David: Exactly.
Kevin: I have a question for you and we don’t have a lot of time and you’re taking time out of your day so thank you for doing that David. So real quick on the report you came out with, there were some really interesting statistics that I read in that report, one of which includes information on text messaging and how 41% of text messages come in from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. in the morning, so tell us a little bit about that and that’s big.
David: So I’ll explain the context there, so we initiate every attempt by a phone call if it’s during working hours, but if they don’t answer we call again if they don’t answer we start sending text like hey is there a better time to connect etc. what that statistic shows you is when they text us back and it makes sense, people are at work, people are busy, someone was probably literally in line at Taco Bell and they filled something out and we call them and they don’t answer and later we send them a text and then hours after that they text us back when they’re home they’re sitting in bed after dinner that’s when they decided to text back. It’s extremely common, there’s another statistic that over 50% of your leads come in after hours and weekends, so that’s wild.
We have a lot of clients that have ISA in-house so we think that’s great, but they use us, many times they use us on top to do it 24/7 anyway that way their ISA can really focus on setting up [00:18:00.23] actual clients on MLS search, a lot of people who are really confident in their in-house ISA they use us for nights and nights and weekends, and you can set those settings with us not on your dashboard currently but you can do it with us, you just let us know the hours you want and we set that up for you so we can say hey we’ll do these for you from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. every day. There’s a tremendous amount of volume there that agents are absolutely just wasting and missing, because they can’t respond to those leads we’re 24/7 you’ve seen our office, we’re here 24/7 you should come after you go clubbing one night there are people here, bring them a burrito they’ll appreciate it.
Kevin: I might do that.
David: They’re here they’re working it; we get a tremendous amount of volume overnight. It just is what it is, people are busy during the day they may have filled out a form or you may have got their attention on Facebook during the day when they were not focusing on work and you captured them, but they’re not going to really engage back until after dinner and now they’re in bed with their spouse or whatever and that those leads all around a clock we’re never letting them wait, because we know that when they’re engaging and we engage back quickly we create trust, we create rapport, we make you guys look really good because we’re representing you guys right, this is David on behalf of the Kevin Markarian marker real estate team, this isn’t from Agentology responding, we’re representing you and we want to make sure we put you in the best light possible.
Kevin: And I’ll tell you we’ve been using you guys for a long time Agentology and we’ve been using your services and I mean I couldn’t be happier, I mean really you guys do a great job and the things you do in terms of follow-up and also the live call transfers that you guys just recently implemented which is really great, but we’re almost pretty much out of time and I don’t want to take up many more of your time David, we’re going to jump over and start talking and chatting with Long and feel free to hang out, I know you’re super busy if you have to go that’s totally fine, but I want to ask you one last question. If we want to find out more about Agentology like what do you recommend, how do we do it and what are some last things that we should know about Agentology?
David: So I would have anyone scheduled a demo and I will give, this is not public on our website but we do have a 30-day free trial for any lab coat agents and so use that link if you can share that link with them, happy to share that as much as possible. So it’s just Agentology.com/labcoatagents and by the way the reason we did that is because Tristan and Nick use us genuinely use us, and so we said hey if you guys believe in us we want to make sure that your constituents on your group have access to try us out [00:21:00.16] even before they ever pay anything and see how it works for them, that’s how confident we are in it. And so send in to everyone so we can also configure your account accordingly, so it’s a very kind of consultative approach to figure out what’s right for you [Inaudible 00:21:44.03] and how we can set that up to be as effective, you froze up there Kevin.
Kevin: I know we’re getting some static here.
David: Did I leave you speechless is that what it was?
Kevin: Content so good I just don’t know what to do, I’m like frozen. Well I posted the link we’ll share it within our own group and well thank you very much for your time and I really appreciate CEO of Agentology David Tal thank you so much man.
David: Thank you as well so much, and just the last thing I’ll mention is you guys can also look up our Agentology mastermind community, I invite anyone to join because then you kind of see how other agents are using it, other kind of things they talk about their experiences and I’m always available as you know, I’m pretty responsive and reactive because I try to really be in there in the weeds with everybody and that’s how we learn how to make the product better. So I’m available for anyone anytime and best of luck, I do have to run but I appreciate you having me and Long come visit again soon.
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