How Investors Use AI To Double Their Lead Flow

I'm really not cool with my agencies don't give access to the accounts. It's like you telling me that you're going to do like an outsourced sales product for me, like, oh, just give me all of your leads and I'll do the sales. Except, no, you're not allowed in your CRM. And if you ever leave me, I'm going to take your CRM and all the data with me and you're going to be left with nothing. If you got me just to like agree to that because I'm stupid, you would have me basically in like a chokehold to continue working with your company to do the sales because. Welcome and thank you for joining us for today's episode of Disruptors, where millionaires are made. Today we got Brandon Bateman with Bateman Collective and Brandon Fluent from Salt Lake. Let's talk about how investors are using AI to double their deal flow. Now guys, I want to miss you create a hundred millionaires. The information on the show alone is enough to help you become a millionaire in the next five to seven years. If you'll take consistent action, you will become one. If you're already a millionaire, we want to recognize you. So please scan the QR code on that screen to let us know so that we can highlight you. And if you want more help to become a millionaire faster, you can scan that same QR code as well. Before we jump in, if you're here to learn how real entrepreneurs are building real empires, hit that subscribe button because every week we're dropping lessons that can create your first or your next million. And today's show is brought to you by Objection Proof AI. If you're ready to turn your existing sales team into a self-managing sales team, go to objectionproof.ai. Ready? Ready. All right. So it's been a little bit since you've been on. You were here and you generously provided. I want to say a four or five episodes series. Talking about really how to nerd out and geek out and like get really good at PPC. Yeah, you were you were patient. I think we recorded for like three or four hours. Like this is this is not like what we did like a podcast that's basically like a course on on PPC. More of a training, right? Talking about like the why behind it. Not just like press this button press that button. So yeah, that was cool. So if anybody's listening, you haven't seen that in your nerd, you might like it. If you're not a nerd, it might sound like four hours of nerdy stuff that you're not very interested in. But I think it's you know, if nothing else, like it helps to become a savvy, educated buyer, right? Like if you want to be like quiz someone to see it like they actually know what they're talking about. Like that's the one to to to check out. I mean, again, like I said this before I'll say it again. Like the reason why I've trusted you is that you could answer my questions after I. Did my own PPC for years. And then I actually have we held an interview with a candidate a couple weeks back who was the sales director of that company that I interviewed back in the day. I was like, hey, as long as you know, I was already in willing buyer. I needed to find a company that I could pay, right? To do my PPC and your sales guys couldn't answer a single question of mine. To what you said, yeah, unfortunately at that company, our owner did not want our salespeople to know things because they thought it would hinder the sales like old. Ender that sale. Sure. So I know it's pros and cons, right? Anyway, so again, the reason why I have you here and the reason why we're recommending that that old series is that lots of good stuff to do down on. But at the same time, there are some changes. Sure. And we'll talk about it later on, but you know, one of the things that I'm hearing more and more, you know, you go to this masterminds hearing more people saying like, I got this deal because someone went to chat, eBT and asked a question. And then my company came up and it wasn't, you know, the 70 year old person in the other house. Sure. It was their grand kid. I was helping grandma sell their house. Right. So we'll dive into that later on. Well, let's talk about like what are some of the things that we've seen in the last year or so. You've seen as far as like PPC and marketing and what's going on. It's been an interesting year like every year is and I was reflecting a little bit on this just coming to. Just on the plane right here. It's been five years, I want to say, since we did our first podcast episode together and we've done, I think this is our fifth. With the exceptional last year, which was like four and one, right. Right. So I thought a lot about all the things that have changed and it's funny because a lot of things are different and a lot of things are just like the same thing that's happening. I mean, for me, it's been a massive change because my business has just grown over those years. Right. Like have like my life looks completely different now than it did when we first met. But as far as as far as marketing goes, there's some things that have been really consistent and others that have changed. One of the things that's been really consistent over those years is that SEO and PPC are pretty good channels. There's something pretty interesting though that I've noticed. So back then when you and I first met a lot of our clients would come to us saying, like, look, I just want to do like online marketing because they weren't like super savvy about like the different channels and how they work. Right. So we would do like SEO and we would do PPC and we would do ads on social for them. And then over time, we became kind of known as like the company that does PPC, PPC, PPC, right. And we have more and more clients doing that. But we still have so many of these clients that we've worked with for now, five years or more that we did SEO for and we've done some SEO along the years too. And what's what's been especially apparent to me recently is how powerful it is to have that strategy on multiple of those channels. We did a survey across the industry recently and we asked every real estate investor in every market to complete this to the best that we could we got a lot of people responding to to the survey and they gave us all the data of how much money are you spending on these different marketing channels. What kind of returns are you getting even stuff like what's the profitability of your company and what kind of spreads do you make from different exits. And something that I found that was really interesting is as of right now, the number one marketing channel, according to our survey of real estate investors is Google PPC and it's like 30 something percent of the of the total marketing budget. Well, also really interesting way at the bottom of the list that people are investing in. So there's an average, the average investor that filled out our survey, they're spending about $28,000 a month on marketing. And so about 2% of that is going towards SEO in the industry. And Steve, you're a pretty smart guy, right. I'm assuming you know that when somebody searches on Google, it's not that for every 35 leads that click on the paydads, there's two that go to the organic results. There's a lot more than that they go to the organic results. Right. So if I were to talk about like a trend that I'm seeing, PPC is good. It's been consistently good over the years. And down for every client, but we look at our macro level numbers, they're good. And actually now there's a lowest they've like the cost per contract is the lowest spend all year this year, which is, which is good. It's a positive trend. And SEO is continued to be a really strong performer over all this time. And our clients have been doing that consistently for a long time. Are grateful for it too. And what I'm seeing is the number of leads available in the industry from that channel compared to the amount of money being spent on them is really, really high. So it's more people spending right now on PPC than ever before. There's. So so the data that I pulled, we just have one snapshot. Right. We just did the survey this one time. I wish I've done the survey for the past five years. Right. So I can see how it's changing over time. But what I can tell you is anecdotally, I believe that there's more spend on PPC now than there, there was before. Even based on like cold call, I don't know what percentage of marketing spent today. Do you think is going towards cold call for investors? Yeah. And that a whole lot of less than on average, probably less than 10% maybe less than 5%. Yeah, 3%. Yeah. So you're not far off at all. And that actually was surprising to me because I bet you that statistic as of years ago would have been a significantly higher number, a higher percentage. And people are really dying down the cold call and it's inbound channels that are taking it up. Right. So the number one or the top four channels right now are PPC, PPL TV and direct mail. Yeah. Well, I guess for me, the reason why it doesn't surprise me is because you can't spend that much money on co calling. That's fair. The nasty goes a little bit like that too. Yeah, like with co calling like you pull a list, right. You get it monthly, weekly, quarterly, whatever. And it's good amount of money. Right. Yeah. But you take that and you co call and then I guess you spend money on like co callers and phone systems and this and that. But like it adds up because what I will tell you though is like you would assume it's just cheap and you get a great return. Cold call returns came in lower than any inbound channel that we measured over the past year. Interest despite it being really cheap. Cold text actually was doing well, but I don't know if lawsuits are factored in to the total margin spending. I'm surprised though because like co calling the reason why you do is this is the highest ROI is just the labor is hidden. Right. Like the actual managing co callers making sure they're on the phones making sure they're having the conversations and then making sure to lead managers are working because you lead manage that the work at least twice is hard. Sure. On co calling businesses and they do in any other inbound channel. Yeah. The whole idea is it's a huge pain in the butt, but it's cheap. So it's worth it. And like I used to so we have people calling us that are just like not quite ready for PPC yet. Right. If they just want to spend like like a few thousand dollars a month on marketing and all day average send those people to cold call just just go do this and and you'll get some deals, get some cash flow and then and then you can level up. You can move into channels like this and and when I saw that day that kind of shook me a little bit because that's not true anymore like actually cold call on average is producing a lower return on investment than our channels are ROI. I can I can pull it up. Yeah. Like let me let me see what the exact numbers are. And as we're going through this right like just for reference, like how many people fill out this survey. 70, 70 investors. Yeah. So, I have the data here. So, one thing I will tell you before we get into like the specific numbers is another thing I shocked me is that these numbers in general from return investment are just lower than I have what I thought. Because you hear people all the time talking about the 5x return, the 8x return, the 10x return. And what I learned is that the average real estate investor is spending about 35% of their revenue on marketing right now. Which to me was a shock because of like how many clients come into us with this standard of like I must get seven or eight X or whatever it is. And in general it's not quite that high. So, 3x. 3x is about is about the average right. And if you're going to hit 3x on average sometimes like your best channels are going to have to perform better than that. And your worst channels are going to have to perform worse than that right. You can't have like your peak performance be 3x because then all the channels you test that don't work and everything will drag it down. But cold call is about a 2.25x. This is like the people you have reach might be further along their journey. And so like if you were to ask the doctor's you know what kind of card you drive. There's not going to be a lot of like Hyundai's in there. Sure. Right. Like you're going to hear like Lexus BMW Mercedes kind of. Right. So I'm wondering like it was skewed a little bit only because of the people you attract. Right. Because the people that you attract are going to be larger deal volume, larger budgets. And if that's the case you're probably not good at cold calling. Like it's just being good at imbound getting getting good outbound or two different avatars. That's a super fair fair point that there could be some skew in like where the data came from. And some of its our clients most of it's not our clients, but they're in our sphere somewhere right. And the fact that they're in our sphere somewhere. Sure. And we were able to reach them. Many of them through partners and stuff like that that like maybe they they don't work with us or something. But that it could skew towards people who are more more inbound. Right. And it's not a discount. Really. I'm just trying to make sense of it. One possible explanation because I I'm shocked by the 3%. Yeah. No, it's like if you really really low if you're going to do it, you got to get five X at least. Oh yeah. Right. And I think that's why it could be worth the labor involved because like it's brain damage managing the cold callers and then the lead managers on top of the cold callers. Yeah. And I could tell you the business for me has changed a lot over the years too because at the beginning it felt like everybody we talked to was like I'm sick of cold calling. I'm sick of the brain damage. Please get me some better leads. And and now everybody we talked to is like I'm sick of paper lead. Please give me some more leads. It's interesting because we like like our messaging used to be like don't call call like do PPC instead and now we're like don't call call in everybody's like we don't actually call call by even saying that because they're doing much less of the nowadays too. But the you know the game is just shifted right because now paper lead there's a lot more of that. Now paper lead companies. Yeah and now there's a lot of people we work with that have been through like five PPC agencies and they're sick of PPC but they're hoping to find a way to do it better. So it's not just like moving from cold call to inbound. And they are. And you see models interesting. Yeah. So like we'll talk about later on but like you know we had Drew Carroll here with Lee Zolo cool. And before Lee Zolo he ran a marketing agency like just like information marketers right. And I have to do a little rant you know towards the end. All right let's pretend we're able to transport you back into those days but you know they're not your clients anymore like what would you say it was a fantastic ran. That's funny. I'm so curious what he said. Yeah. But basically it's like you know it's not the marketing right like you actually need to make a good product. Sure. Right because like most marketing agencies like you know in the information space they don't really sell products because they have great products. You don't spend as much on marketing to get it out there. Sure. So and to that point like we have a guy in our team who prior working for us sold visas to go from Africa to Europe because the way it works is once you get in Europe like they don't kick you out. Oh interesting. So like that's what he said was like I don't feel good selling this. Right. So it's like anyway. So yeah agency it's just it's just a tough model because it's your fault no matter what. No matter what happens. It's yeah it's the agency that's true. Yeah. So it's a tough tough business like true or not it feels true to the client. Sure. Yeah. So it's to you know because like well while we could all every day we could say it's never our fault like we try to have a culture of ownership too where every single thing we look at maybe there's factors outside of our control that you know just like Stephen Kovie says you have your circle of influence and you have your circle of control and you just focus on that circle of control and the circle of influence will will come around. But there are a lot. Sometimes it feels like the circle of control is a little smaller and the circle of influence is really really big right. So that's the that's a battle of an agency for sure. Right. So anyway going back to you you're saying like so the complete as though there's just more and more people looking at PPL now so your competition is not necessarily a co-calling with more PPL. Yeah. Yeah. What are you going to combat that? Well it's it's interesting because the industry goes through waves right like something something that we saw. We've actually done some pretty in-depth studies and in one way that we do this is we measure how many people are searching for different things on Google over time to measure product interest. Right. So I can I can show you like like no I don't think I don't think there are a lot of people that do that. That's no it's like a weird like PPC nerd kind of perspective on market share right because the idea is when something's more popular there's more people searching for it on Google that's a reflection of like the brand awareness or the number of people they use it. Yeah. So I made a word where the attention is going and if you you know where the it's I mean it's a way in gritsky's core right like don't tell me where the pocket is tell me where the puck's going. Yeah. I know where the puck's going. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So what we did is we we like mapped out on there how I think it's changing over time like investors looking for PPC services investors looking for PPL specific PPL companies all that stuff. And what we saw is last year we started losing a lot more deals to PPL and PPL was booming. And then this year the sentiment. This is another side of this is like AI insights from from all of our sales calls that are recorded is everybody like they boomed on it and everybody was excited about it and what happens to PPL when supply their supply of leads stays relatively static but the demand for leads goes up while they either have to get expensive or they have to get bad. There's kind of no no other way to deal with that problem unless you can just create more supply on demand which usually people can't do at least linearly right. So so yeah we there was a big boom in paper lead last year and now the general sentiment is a lot of people feel pretty pretty like burned from paper lead. And they're shifting more towards PPC for sure. It goes back and forth like everybody low right. I mean you talk about like is it lossy fair right like the free the market is free hand something like that I'm totally butchering it but like the money will go where it's supposed to go. Yeah. So if all the money's going there now it's a problem well the money will go away. Sure capitalism is is a not perfect but it's the best we got and it's definitely good at that right people will spend the money where it's good. The thing that's crazy about real estate investment is because like people have so much influence in the real estate investment game it feels like more so than other markets everybody follows one thing and then everybody follows the other thing and in some ways they get burned by it because the thing gets worse when they all go there and then it's it's kind of like you know the concept with the stock market of when everybody's getting out. Stock picker. When everybody's leaving that's when you go in and when everybody's going in that's when you might want to leave. Yeah. It's it's very it's very normal but you know we're not wired like that. We're not we're wired to follow for safety. Yeah. But yeah like if you were to buy everything warm buffet buys like three months later and sell everything he sells three months later you're kind of screwed. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Like he did it when he did it for a reason and it doesn't mean you can just copy him later. Yeah. Yeah. Totally agreed. So it ebbed out like the water kind of float out and now it's flowing back in so you're getting more and more interested now in PPC. Yeah and it never like went down necessarily like we've never had like a down year as a company or anything like that. But yeah we definitely see see the amount of interest for one thing versus the next changing. Yeah it changes right sometimes the game gets a little harder for us sometimes it gets a little easier for us in the problems change right if everybody goes towards PPC then PPC gets more expensive and now it's hard for it's harder to get results and in this stuff even happens on like a per market basis right. So there's it's like it's a wild world of real estate like everything's always changing out there and I'm a firm believer that consistent people create consistent businesses right. So that's what I've always done is just stay really consistent with what we're doing. Like things are good okay we're working hard to get better things are bad okay we're working hard to get better like there's no metric you can show me my business that changes what I'm going to do I'm just going to keep on getting better every single day and that's that's the strategy. And at top of that I'm seeing more and more PPC providers out there. Sure. There's always there's always been a lot but it feels like there's even more recently. Well I have definitely more reaching out to me like hey you want to fill it as well as like well it's kind of complicated. Yeah. So what's going on there like what are you doing to prepare for what it seems like this study onslaught of more people like wanting to jump in there. Yeah and it's still like say the same thing I said like 20 seconds ago like okay things are tough we'll just get better things are good we'll just get better like we've always seen like so my focus for especially like the past two years is going to sound like super cheesy. Oh, it's like one of those those things that you like reading a book and you're like okay, if whatever that's not your life and then and then you actually do it, but the huge focus is the thing that we push internally is we're just looking for win-win-win-win-win. win. Right? What that means is first a win for the client. Second, a win for the employee, third a win for the company. Right? And if we can find those things that we can do that produce all of those, then all parties are benefiting. And through focusing on that, like now my employees are paid more than ever. My clients are getting better results than ever. The company is doing better than ever. And it's just because like the same thing. It's like if you're just, if you're just always training harder than anyone else, then they can't in theory catch up to you. Right? It's if we start to rest, if we start to lose our focus on being obsessed with getting really great results for our clients, that's where that's why I would be concerned. So let's talk about the last year. What you say, all right, just get better. Right? And it's kind of like, uh, John Gollum has this great video, right? Good. Something bad happens. Good. Now we can do this. So what are those things you're saying to get better, which is a great motto. What are what have you done to get better in the last year? There's, I mean, there's so many things and some of them are like internal stuff that probably nobody here, like cares about. And others of those are really important. Let me start from a leadership standpoint. Yeah. And then we can talk like more specific ads and stuff. I can tell you a really big shift that we've had from the standpoint of leadership is for a while, I was just scared to really build out the team that you need in the company. And I think a lot of it came down to the fact that I, like, we never had like a CFO. We never had somebody who like understands financial models, understands how like these different things benefit. So, so what's been happening like so many over times, we've just been leveling up the leadership team. And I can tell you from from my experience, it's been really, really impactful to bring in people who have historically done what we want to accomplish and have them do it for us. And like I don't know why I didn't do that before. Mostly because those people are just really, really expensive. And now we've learned that like, oh, but they only have to do this much better for them to pay for themselves. And it's, right. And it's super worth it. So, so I'd say just like leveling up the team is really important. Like just little examples of this is like on a quarterly basis, we, we will rank everybody on the team as an A player, B player, C player, D player, E player. I'm sorry, F player, right. And S and Ds are easy. Like you just move them out. Cs are where it's really tough, right. And when I first started doing this, I realized like we have more Cs than we want to have on the team. And we just have to move them up or out really quick, right. So we start this role. We're like, you can't report that someone's a C player like two times in a row. Like they either, you're going to level them up, which that's the preferred thing, right. That's better for the employees, better for the company, or they have to move out of the company. And those are, those are the only options, right. So we've been kind of like, we've been focusing a lot more on that and bringing even better people in. And it's just, it's kind of blown my mind in terms of like the kind of, the kind of people we can have in the company, the kind of culture we can have in the company. So that's, that's one thing. As far as ads go and SEO and all that kind of stuff, it's really just this game of always testing. Like I feel like marketers are generally pretty reactive. The way that they work is they say, Oh, you know what, we got, we got 15 leads this week. Mr. Client, and then next week the client says, Oh, no, we got, we got 10 leads this week. What happened? Oh, our conversion rate went down. What are we going to do? Okay, that's that's the launch of landing page test, right. And they keep on playing this game just over and over again, where they're just reacting to the data instead of saying like, Oh, our conversion rates 35% great. It's launch landing page test. Our conversion rates 2% great. The launch of landing page test. That's kind of been our strategy is just always being proving all the time. It doesn't matter what the matter what the metrics say necessarily. That could be indicative of a constraint, but just being really objective. And this is something that we've done pretty well over. I can tell you, it's been more than five years Steve since we spent a dollar that wasn't on some type of split test. Like you'll talk to agencies that are like, Oh, we don't test for our clients because let me give them unproven things. But what they don't realize is like, that's that's the game. It's just always be testing. Always being living. You don't spend all your budget on it. And you can also test a month's multiple things that are good, right? Multiple things that are working across markets to see what's going to work best in that market. But that's that's like our KPI, like that data that you get from those tests is like the currency of getting better. And we're just we had constantly doing it. We had an osmanager. We let go. And we have a guy in marketing. It's complaining about a marketing guy who's internal is he's constantly testing. Like we can't have this many tests going on the same time. Like what point do we settle? I was like, all right, we're good. Like I was just complaint. I was like, you usually the challenge to get the guys to test more. Sure. And you got to be careful about what you test and stuff. I can tell you a lot of our clients want to test more than you probably should in the sense that they'll launch a landing page test and we'll look at it and we'll be like, okay, this is probably going to take like nine months to get enough data to know that like version A works better than version B. And then a month later, they're like, I forget it. I want to do this different thing. And they just start a bunch of tests that they never actually finish. Definitely. We don't want to do that. That's bad, right? But if you do it right, there's like a, and if you don't know how to do it right, like just take like a statistics 101 course. Like it's not that hard. However, people just violate the rules of statistics like every day. And that's why they don't, they aren't good at testing. So yeah, I would say like Ben and our team, he's consistently testing these. So we have like 60 to 100% of like, all right, this is like the, what do you call it? The control case. Sure. Right? And then 30 to 40% new ads, right? Let's see, let's 30% of our budget test new ads see if we can be the control 30% of budget test. So you can be the control control doesn't change until it's beaten. Sure. Then that's a new control. And then you have the, yeah, then you have a new control. Exactly. And that's, that's the game. And it's a, it's a pretty simple concept. But it's one of those things. It's just, it's just like the discipline to action of just doing that. Seriously, and it's hard. Like it's completely reasonable and rational. Sure. And normal, right? We're world. We don't see this in the real estate investing world. Yeah. I have hypothesis for why go for it. I could tell you testing in real estate investment is really, really hard. The reason it's hard, how many businesses do you know out there that could have like five customers a month and be killing it? There's not. Yeah. Very many. But like five customers a month is like a pretty decent real estate investment business. Like that's a seven figure real estate investment business with the average deal spreads. And so what, what happens is you just don't have that much data flowing through the business and the markets always shifting and stuff like that. So it's, I think just a really hard business to do tests in because you don't have enough data to see it. Yeah. I hate. Sorry, this depends on anybody. I hate the advertising in our business in the real estate business. Sure. Like we talk about all the time. Like, you know, the, and I'm definitely, you know, what's the word I'm looking for? I run counter. What's the word I'm looking for? Like I'm very different in philosophies as far as like how to have a conversation. Like, you know, a lot of business owners like how many offers to make how many offers to make how many offers to make. That's one of the key parts. How many offers you can make? And I don't know what like, don't make any offers. Right? Either they were selling their house to us or they're not. Right. And so the, and I share this with you before, right? The problem that is that the advertising says we'll give you a cash offer in seven hours less, 24 hours less. But whatever is like, we'll stop saying we'll make offers. Like, you know, we can pay a fair price. We can pay cash. I'll say things like we can put cash in your hands. And as little as 24 hours. Sure. Like, because what do they want to cash? Like we'll give you cash. That's not an issue. Yeah. It's not going to be all the cash. But we'll put cash in your hands, right? Which is like, solves a lot of their problems. And so like, the message of like, get a cash offer for me doesn't solve their problem. It's like the, it's the in between. It's the thing that in theory could get them there. But you're, you're telling them right. We'll give you food instead of we'll, we'll make sure you're full. Yeah. It's like, you know, we wouldn't measure someone's golf game by like, how many times did they get, uh, uh, drove it and land it in their very way? Sure. We wouldn't like, how many fairway shots did you hit today? It's like, no, what was your score? Yeah. Right. So like, why is it? Yeah, it's fair point. We only measure this thing, which the homeowner doesn't care about. They don't want to cash off, or they want you to solve their problem. Yeah. That's a super fair point. And I want to say we tested that too, because you and I had a conversation. We had a conversation, but I don't know if you tested it. Yeah. We had a conversation about it. Probably. We probably did. We have so many tests. I just don't remember like the outcome of I could look it up in our system because we like log all of them and what the outcome was. But that's, uh, that's an interesting, interesting concept for sure. I mean, like, uh, I helped the client, uh, we read a commercial, um, using a VSL format, our VOSL's letter format, right? Hitting the points of like, you know, like talking about, uh, you know, when we come over, we can, we can share with you how you can, you know, A, B and C, like, talk about the outcome that they want. Right? And we can figure out how to do that in our meeting versus like, we're gonna make a cash offer. So, uh, we wrote a whole, uh, 30 second commercial or 60 second commercial. You never ran it, right? Because like, he was afraid. Like, if I do this other ad and I'm spending $15,000, like, what's gonna happen? Yeah. All right. There's a fear component behind it. There is and, and part of it, I mean, that that's part of why I like what we do. Cause like the, the fact that there's not that much data in the industry, you can get past that if you can test things and bulk across a bunch of different markets, which is what we do mostly. Yeah. So instead of saying, like, Mr. Client, here's your landing page and we're gonna test this instead. And here's like, the typical way an agency would work is you say, you know, here's the wireframe for the new one. How do you like this. Okay. That's that's that's like Now do the design. How do you like that? OK, now that's run a side by side in the test and like nine months later, you finally know what works better, what doesn't. We just changed stuff across all of our clients' landing pages at once. And I can press a button, change one thing across 200 landing pages. And then in two days get enough split test data to know, does version A or does version B work better? And I much prefer that form of testing because I can do like 50 split tests. By the time you can do one split test, and we just move forward way faster. But if you're just taking-- if you're alone, and you just have all your budget that you're putting towards this thing, it's a harder position to be actually. You have to be crazy like me, because that's what I would do. Yeah. And if any industry has a few reckless people in it, let it be real estate investing. Yeah. You guys are a little bit crazy. I've never seen a group of people so willing to just start over at any given moment, over and over again. Yeah, over and over again. It's actually like, if I was going to go on my like, my rant about the industry and like Drew Carroll style, it's like, you know what, consistent people produce consistent businesses. If your business is inconsistent, look in the mirror, and maybe if you're more consistent with what you do in the business, then the business would be more consistent. Right. That's it. Not wrong. Not wrong. OK, what else are you doing? Or is anything else that you can think of that jumps out at you that you guys got done to get better, right? Good, because you have-- what do you call it at the wall? It's not that any of you at the wall. But there are people coming for you at all times. What else have you done to get better? If you're a real estate investor, tied up using a clunky CRM, check out Carat CRM. Previously, known as investor views, Carat CRM's action basis and makes it super easy to use, and it works especially well for acquisition teams, with features like weighted lead routing and advanced KPIs. Or if you're a newer investor, they also have a lightweight version that's still powerful and doesn't break the bank. Plus, they roll out new powerful AI tools like the autonomous lead manager that follows up for you. The Carat team makes switching super easy and it plays well with all your other tools, whether you're running solo or have a large team, check it out, and schedule a demo at carat.com/tranck. That's TR-A-N-G. I think one thing that we've really doubled down on is the AI side of Google ads. And this is something where if anybody here is listening to this, and is also listened to all of our previous podcasts, which if you have, I'm sorry, because you've listened to me for like probably at least six hours in your life. And that's just too much. But anyways, if you've listened to all that, then you'll know this sounds similar to what I've said in previous episodes. And it's this idea that where a lot of people are going wrong with Google ads is their targeting. They're not finding the right to remotivate sellers. And what it comes down to is Google doesn't understand the difference between a seller and a motivated seller. And you and I know that 98% of sellers are just sellers, right? And 2% of sellers are motivated sellers. And the problem is that motivated seller to Google might look basically the same as the seller. And those 2% get grouped in with the 98% then you start to generate leads and you're just going to end up with the 98% and the 2% kind of mixed in there instead of just the 2% which is what you care about. So that's the problem. And how do you get past that problem? Well, Google, it's kind of evolved over time, right? At the beginning, you probably remember this is back when you were running PPC. Like the old manual CPC days when you would say like picking stocks manually, you basically say like, I think this one's going to be good. I'm going to go after this keyword and I'm going to be more there. And that worked to some extent. The problem is I actually have like a full database showing everything. So we generated this point over $200 million in revenue for our clients. I have a list of what did the person type into Google and then was it a part of that revenue or not? How big was the deal spread from that? And what's the likelihood that it turned into a deal? And you'd be surprised. Some of the things that we think is marketers, because the standard way that people would set it up is like, well, sell my house. That's more retail. I'm going to bid less on that. Sell my house fast. Well, that's good. Let me bid more on that because the word fast means it's a better lead, which it's actually not, by the way, based on our data. And you could do that for every little keyword everything you could do. And then we kind of set up this like this ivory tower marketing campaign where like I'm the marketer and I know everything about what's good. And I've decided to target like this. And then over time, Google's shifted. So they release these bid strategies called automated bid strategies. People don't like them because the word automated is in them. And automated implies my agency's not working hard on my behalf. They like manual. They want to pay the portfolio manager who's picking stocks for your money. Yeah, exactly. And at the beginning, these strategies were really bad. These are AI strategies, by the way. And Google has been at this for, I don't even know how many years they've had the automated strategies. I know they only really started to get good around 2020. Prior to that, they were not quite as good. And what the difference is, as the manual strategies are basically me saying, as my self and ivory tower marketer saying, this is what I think is good, the automated strategies start to include a lot more data points because Google has all this data on individual users that we just don't have otherwise. They know the little things. And they don't tell you everything they know. And the big things. They know all the things. I'll give you a classic example. Something you don't target by in Google. But Google knows this is, did they visit you hall.com yesterday? Are they more likely or not to be a motivated seller if they visit you hall.com? Maybe. Maybe a little bit more likely. And Google knows all of that stuff. So these automated bid strategies, they're AI based strategies that look at tens of thousands of data points that Google has on each user. And it predicts the likelihood of this person completing a conversion event in your add account. And basically what happened with those is at first they were really bad. And then some of the biggest advertisers out there started to realize, wait, these things actually work really well. Or as they start to tell people, these bid strategies are actually working really well. And then the standard people out there are all saying, I don't know what those people are talking about. It's not working well for me. And the difference was these machine learning algorithms, picture, open AI's model. If open AI's model is the exact same model it is, but it didn't have all the training data that it has, how smart would it be? That's smart at all. It would be just a really dumb algorithm. That has so much potential. But it's just dumb, because it hasn't learned everything yet. Not a training data. No training data, right? So these automated bid strategies, they're really smart. They have all those data points that are predictive, but if they don't know the outcome that you're carrying, that you care about, then they don't have to connect it. They don't have to connect it. And if they don't have a lot of that data. So what we've been leaning into-- and you heard me say this five years ago, what we've been leaning into is there's this concept. Everybody knows this is true. If you have more spend, you get better results on Google PPC, right? Everybody knows that's true. But what people get at wrong is they misunderstand why that's true. They assume that more spend equals-- I get maybe like a book discount with Google, maybe with more spend, they value me more. They give the good leads to the people who spend more. And then they give the bad leads to the people who spend less. Interesting. This is the kind of stuff that people assume. But the reality is more spend equals more data, more data equals better results. Right. And then what we've been doing for five years is trying to figure out how can we make-- if we know that more data equals more better results, how can we make it true that even if somebody's not the biggest investor in their market, not the biggest investor in the United States, how can they have more data than their competition, even if they don't have more spend than their competition? So it can still be true that more data equals better results. So that's basically the game of what we do. It's better quality data and more data. The more data is we're aggregating this data across all of our clients and we're training this really advanced AI algorithm that Google has based on all this data so it can get smarter and smarter. No, it's interesting. And I don't mean to hijack your conversation here. But like, you know, we're building our own AI tool out. I was looking at it as of yesterday. I think that's a yesterday. It crossed the barrier of 100,000 call reviews. That's a lot of call reviews. That's the same. A lot of call reviews. Yeah. So data, better data, more stuff to train the data, find out what works, what doesn't work. Yeah, that's the big thing. And then the other big thing is better quality data there. And that just comes down to the discipline that we've had for years of just tracking for each and every lead. What ends up happening with that lead? And then we're optimizing campaigns for what's generating deals and what's generating revenue, not just what's generating leads. And that's the disconnection point where most agencies can't make it work. So there's two different things. And we talked about this before. Well, we're going to reach through hash real quick. So there's the automated bid strategy, right? So using all the data points about the human being, right? Because they're watching what website you're visiting. They're watching what YouTube videos you're watching. And they're watching your emails. Yeah. Yeah. If you doubt me, there's a Chrome extension you can get that will check what scripts are on different websites. And you go to almost any website in the world. And what are you going to find? You're going to find Google Analytics. And that's where Google gets so much data from. Yeah. So Google knows everything about you. And then top of that, you also feed it like what a win looks like. Yes. So we can differentiate that 2% of the market from that 98%. Right. We talked about lead sculpting before. But you want to just highlight real quick what lead sculpting is, kind of how the mob lines together. Yeah. So there's different techniques for this, right? This is where actually the way we're doing this has evolved a ton in the past year. But probably not-- like if anybody listened to me a year ago, they might not actually recognize how it's changed. Because it's like something like nitty-gritty of how these concepts are applied that has changed. But the idea of lead sculpting is, again, it's this concept of we want to get better quality feedback to Google. So where someone would typically say, I'm getting the lead on my website when somebody Thank you for watching. the form, what we like to do is we look at how they fill out the form and there's different things we're looking for, like even down to the level of what we'll like to scrub the phone number, make sure it's valid. We'll look at the IP address, see if it's out of country. We'll look at how they answer the question, is your house listed on the market or is it not? And based on that, we know something about is it more likely to be a motivated seller or not. And then we conditionally report to Google that a lead happened. If somebody fills those things out wrong, to the client, they still get the lead, right? It's still a lead generated because you know, those still can have value in some way or another, but we wouldn't tell Google that it's a qualified. We will give Google the thumbs up. Right. There's no, there's no thumbs up. Right. I got a boy. Like give me more of these. No, we don't do that. Yeah, Google's just like Pavlov's dog, you know, you give him a, you give him a treat eventually like, you know, you're in the bell and it's going to, it's going to salivate. And you spank it after it gets you a bad lead and it might stop getting your bad leads, right? Like I know it's, I know it's technically like a technology company, but it, it behaves, behaves like I give it carrot and stick. Yeah. Like, hey, it's a carrot. Good job. It's a stick. Bad job. Over and over again, eventually it only gives you the what you want. Yeah. What most people end up doing is kind of analogous to having a cold collar. And just every time you get a lead from the cold collar, just brawling with it, whatever it is. Instead of the idea of going back to the cold collar and saying like, and I said, this is a lead, but this one really wasn't a lead like for this reason. Or this, this other one that, this call that I heard you just like drop the, the phone on and say, like, I don't want to pursue this person. That was actually a really good lead. Why'd you do that? Right? It's giving that, giving that feels a little stressful. Yeah. Yeah, seriously. It's giving a bad lead. Okay. Fine. Yeah. Like, hey, why'd you hang up on that guy? Well, I feel the same way about like people, investors focus so much on like the leads and how bad they are, but they focus so little on all the leads they should have gotten that they didn't get. I feel the same way for like landing page conversion rates. It's like no investor that we work with seems to care about the landing page conversion rate. Meanwhile, I'm like, you realize like for the clicks that you pay for, don't turn into anything. And then one in one in five of them that actually turns into a lead. I'm more concerned about the four that didn't turn into a lead than I am with the fact that this one, one in five was, was retail or something, but it's a marketing perspective. Sure. Right. That's something that I have my own marketing coach and that's one of the things that I was like, you guys are so focused on like how to get this from like 70% to 19%. What happened to another 80%? Sure. Sure. You know, never be 100% like 100. You can't, but, but there's, you know, there's links in the bucket some are bigger than than others, right? Yeah, but we're so focused like we said this word instead of that word, we're going to use this color and say that color, but like psychologically, what's missing from this page that got five or 10% not to opt in. Yeah. Right. So like what's missing versus like how can we change this? Yeah, it totally makes sense. Yeah, by doing, by doing all these things I'm talking about, we just, we did this industry survey. And probably the thing I'm most proud about is the average baitman collective client that filled out the survey had half the number of leads per contract in PPC compared to the average company in their PPC campus. Let's talk about that. Yeah. All right. So what prompted you to do this industry survey? So, so honestly, I'll use this as an illustration for what I talked about before about the good people. I, you know, Mark Stubler. I think he was on the podcast. So Mark Stubler and I went down to Puerto Rico and we were helping out Jerry Norton with something he had an event down there. We were recording some content. And if you've ever been there and Jerry's like sketchy hotel, like we were sitting in that sketchy hotel lobby at the end of this thing. And it's like 11 o'clock at night and we're just kind of talking about nerd stuff because Mark and I are like that, right? And I'm like, Mark, you should see this from this data. I got this is such cool data. So I start pulling this stuff up. And he sees like some of these insights that were able to drive from this. And he's so, so he looks at me and he's like, Brandon, I want you to tell me exactly what you were doing when you thought about this, when you got this idea. And I thought about it for a second. I was like, Mark, this isn't my idea. I didn't think about this. I actually had nothing to do with it actually even happening. Someone else had the idea. Someone like, this is the marketing person on my team. He had the idea. He pulled together all the resources to make it happen. We built the software to deliver it. And now we're at a point where somebody can go onto this website. They can fill out some information about their business and we'll deliver a full customized report to them showing how their business differs from the average business that felt out the survey. And it's really, really powerful. But the spirit of it, like why he wanted to do this, it comes down to a couple things. One, the data that we got through that survey is strategically collected so that we can do better marketing for our clients. So we learned a lot of things, this data, which helps us optimize. So that's one thing. And then two, it's just a good value ad for the industry. We're like the data people in the industry. So it's a good way for us to like on brand provide value to more investors. And for me, the reason I'm passionate about it is because the way that most investors know how their performance is is based on somebody that they talk to at a bar at a mastermind. And they're like, oh, your PPC cost per lead is 200 bucks. Well, mine's 400 bucks. I must be really bad at PPC. That's probably what's going on. And they don't see the whole picture. They don't understand it. And they get one data point and they like offer leverage on that data point versus what we're doing here is we're aggregating a lot of that data so we can kind of smooth it out and get a good picture and just a glance of a lot of investors and what's going on with them. It's kind of like if you think about it, it's a lot of the benefit that people get from a mastermind, but it's just delivered in a completely different way. Now, I'm a huge proponent of masterminds. I'll support them because there's lots of other great things that you get from masterminds. But a huge piece of it is understanding where you stand compared to the average company that's something like you because where your numbers look different than everybody else's numbers might be evidence of where you're weak or where you're strong. Let's say, yeah, or vice versa. Yeah. Okay. So someone from your team came up with the idea. Still with you? Yeah. Well, actually soon. No. Hopefully, this will find out from this. Okay. All right. So we have the idea is not ever enough just to have the idea right? We got to execute it. Sure. How difficult was it to execute this plan? I mean, it's pretty difficult because the objective that we had was that the data is actually really clean. And I found 101 ways to do this with AI where the numbers just don't add up at the end of the day. And like the end of the mess, by the way, I don't know if you saw me post about that. I did actually. Yeah. Sometimes it's sometimes a little bit rough. And analysis and data. It drives me crazy that it who lives in addition? Yeah. Moving on. Yeah. So it's not AI. It's like all just like built in the software, but the software we ended up using causes like an extreme amount of like painstaking man will work to make it work. So it was a heavy lift, but I think it's worth it in the end. Or because it's it's one of those things. I don't know if you believe me. It's a fact. If you don't believe in it, then that's on you. The theory of constraints for business, which is the idea that like we all have a bottleneck in our business, which by the way is usually you. But numerically, there's also this bottleneck. And if you solve that one bottleneck, then the business will grow until it reaches its new bottleneck. It's a new bottleneck. Yeah. You will find a new bottleneck as you grow. But turns out, no matter who you are, no matter how good you think you're doing, there's some reason your business isn't performing at double the rate that it is right now. And whatever that reason is, that's your bottleneck, right? So that's kind of what this was built around is I personally believe that entrepreneurs are really, really good problem solvers. I think you're a good problem solver. I think I'm a pretty good problem solver. You give me a problem. I will like beat that problem to death and I will find a way to fix it. The problem, ironically, is that sometimes we don't solve the right problem. Sometimes we don't solve the root of the problem, right? So what happens is not usually that an entrepreneur is just trying to solve a problem over and over and over again, and they just keep on failing. It's usually that they think they solve the problem and then that doesn't actually solve the root problem and then the problem comes back, right? So that's the incremental gain or it's an incremental gain, right? So that's the theory, the concept behind this is that's identified the biggest constraint in the business. We can do that through comparison of numbers. And then we have a better idea of what the actual problem to solve is and then we can unlock more growth than we would with just focusing on whatever we want to focus on, which I'm guilty of or whatever you're excited about. I'm guilty of that, but there's a better way. Yeah. And I'm asking this selfishly because I'm planning on doing the same exact thing, right? Just in our own tool, right? We have the data in there. Here's people here to lead. Here's the follow-up, here's the sales calls, what's the conversion rate? We're going to start tracking conversion ratios all across the board where everyone we can just have it done automatically on a monthly basis or daily basis in our system. So everyone can see how they compare. Sure. Yeah, that's awesome. Like a ranking. Yeah. So that's cool. The best way to get investors to compete is let them know they're not first. Sure. Sure, super fair. Yeah. And so, okay. So you reach out. This is like an email campaign. You just text your clients. Like how do you get people to volunteer their data? Like, you know, best I've seen in this is like Robert Wensley. You got everyone to agree to just upload their buyers list. Yeah, which is pretty impressive. I wouldn't admit. Yeah. It was just a game of us promoting it in super, super simple thing where I basically explain. And you can see this. We'll throw a link in the description where someone can go and fill this out for themselves. But you'll see a video on the page. It just kind of explains like what this is. And really at the end of the day, I mean, it's Simon. I think it's Simon Sinek who basically says that people above anything else they will do business with people that believe the same things as them. Yeah. Even more important than the other aspects of your business. So that's like, that's what we've always been big about. Like, just to see the video, it's all just talking about like, why do we believe this is important? And you know what, if you don't see the value in that, then it's like, it's pretty quick. And if you do, then you probably really do, right? And you could be someone that's really resistant where it resonates and you totally get it. And if so, like you're the kind of person we want as a client. So that's why we do this kind of thing for you. And if not, then that's okay too. So we talked about things that surprise you. You know, for example, co-calling, very low on the budget and very low in ROI. So what was the top three, five takeaways after completing this industry report? Oh, top three to five takeaways. There's a number of takeaways that are pretty interesting. We basically got the P&L numbers for each of the investors, which was just fascinating to see how it breaks out. I already told you the fact that on average, investors are spending 35% of their budget on marketing. And wholesalers, 39% even higher. It surprises me. It doesn't surprise me. It's a lot larger than it's supposed to be. Yeah, because everybody talks about four or five Xs is kind of what they're targeting. And it's they're not quite there on average. Depending on what you look at, which philosophy, which book you read, right? 15 to 25%. Typically marketing should be 15 to 25% of your budget. But not investors. I don't know a lot of investors where it's 25. It's usually 30, 35%. Percent. Yeah. Yeah, that totally makes sense. But here's the difference between a typical business and investors is normally you have a cost of goods sold. And investors don't really have a cost of goods sold. You looking at me, funky. Well, let's just say you make a whole selfie. So normally, let's just say investing was like a bit of a different business. Well, normally you would make that 22,000 on average fee. And then you would have to spend like some portion of that on delivering the product. Just like I have to do. I have to have my team that's actually like, out there delivering the product. And I would take off that 22 grand, a good chunk of it for that. And which means the amount that I can put towards the marketing is less. Versus wholesalers, basically, your cost of goods sold is essentially like transaction coordination. Well, I have a commission. I always count a commission as cogs. Sure. Okay. And you could say that. But to that point, I would like in my business, I would also pay commission. Like most businesses would also pay commissions. Right. But I always put commissioners in cogs. Sure. And you can like, you could build the financial models. Like that. I guess what I'm, I guess what I'm saying is it's not that you don't have costs to goods sold because you could you could say those things are cost to goods sold. It's that at least at the very least, the cost to goods sold is significantly lower than the average business. Right. Because you don't actually have to deliver a product. Right. There's no physical warehousing. There's no accounts receivables. It's just straight money came in. That's it. There's no money came in. And then we had to pay for the delivery. We had to pay the contractor. No, that's not. It's just money came in. Yeah, exactly. And that's just naturally going to because you look at a typical business, they're going to spend 20% on that cost to goods sold. And they're going to spend 10% on marketing. Right. And you look for an investor, they might spend the 20% from cost to goods sold and the 10% of marketing just on marketing. Right. And that's where you get your 30% from. Because the other interesting thing is the margins in the industry were decent. Very high. Yeah, they ended up above 30% on average across the survey. That's not fully right based on the idea that there's also a lot of like owner operator acquisitions, dispositions, like everything imaginable in the business. What are you planning for? I don't think like I tell you I had a time in my business where my margins looked fantastic because you were on pay self on the books. Yeah, or I wasn't paying myself. Or I wasn't paying myself what I should have been paying myself on the books. And if the IRS is listening to this, then I'll ignore that. Like an owner operator, you don't pay yourself the 10% acquisition in the 5% disposition, whatever your figures are. Right. You just say, oh man, I made this much for a deal. And that's the reason why like your profitability always goes down. Sure. Yeah. Because now you actually have to pay people. Yeah, yeah. And one of these times was after I went on your podcast for the first time. And I got so many leads. It was ridiculous. And my company was so small like it wasn't really built to handle it. So I'd have people showing up on my calendar and they'd be showing up to this meeting at like 930 at night that they booked six weeks in advance. And they're like, I thought your calendar was just broken. It's like no, no, it's actually just booked out six weeks. And I actually just meet with people at 930 at night. Because that's what I did. Now, what would I have to pay someone to do that? Probably a lot of money. I ended up replacing myself like with probably nine or 10 people in that thing. Like right now we're at a point where we have like the number of client facing people we have on the team is like seven or eight. And when we had half the number of clients we had now, it was just me doing that job. So we literally have hired like four people for me. And I was also running the rest of the business at the same time. So my margins were fantastic. And also I wasn't doing as good of a job as we can do when we actually have the right people in the right seats and stuff like that. And that I like, if you look at my replacement cost there is probably like over a million dollars a year to like push myself out of like the seats. But it was worth it for our clients and it was worth it for us as a company. Absolutely. So that's like the asterisk with the margins. But as the company's got larger, the margins shrink down a little bit. Sure. But overall margins were good. Another thing that was really insightful is deal spreads by exit. So I ended up doing this analysis of looking at how deal spreads change based on the median home price in the market. And what I found is that the average wholesale fee in a market is roughly 6% of the median home price in that market minus 2700 dollars. So there's like just simple, this back-and-backed math that you could do kind of comparing your fee to what's what what fits the line best across our clients. The other thing that was really interesting is that the elasticity of the spread based on home prices was higher for wholesale than it was for flips. So what I mean by that is with wholesale, if you're in a market that has a low median home price, your wholesale fee was small. As you got to these markets that had really high median home prices, the whole stuff you got larger, larger, larger. I see. For flips, it was basically in those small markets still pretty large fees. In those bigger markets, actually similar. It was not super elastic based on the home price. I see. Whole tail actually ended up getting between those two lines where it was a little elastic but not nearly as elastic as wholesale. So the inside I took from that is at least based on that data seems to suggest that if you're in a market where the median home price is higher, you can get away with wholesale. But when you get into these low median home price markets, sometimes there's a lot more money in other exits compared to what there is in wholesale. So I thought that was fascinating too. It's very fascinating. It's a no. Yeah. That's good information. No. And then the last thing I would say that was really insightful is just comparing all the marketing channels. And I can tell you, I generally compare marketing channels. I think there's four things that matter about a marketing channel. But there's two that are maybe a little bit more important than the other ones. And those two are what kind of lead quality does it get you? And what kind of ROI does it get you? Because as you and I talked about with Cold Call, it better be cheap because the lead quality is really bad. So are we willing to accept a bad lead quality if the ROI is really high? Yeah. Are we willing to accept bad lead quality if the ROI is really low? Probably not. Right? Or a channel that has killer lead quality. Like I'll give you an extreme example. Let's just say like I give you leads and I promise you 100% of them convert. Like they're already converted. Maybe I already talked to them. They already it's already a dangerous. Go in and get the contract signed. Yeah. What percentage of that revenue you will pay for that lead? Like probably really, really high. 80% if I know like this is going to close. Like this guaranteed revenue. Yeah. Yeah. You'd pay like 80%. What is it 80% like a one point something return? Like one to quarter ROI. Yeah. Point 25%. Yeah. One point 25. Yeah. Yeah. One point 25x, right? If I told you you can get 1.25x on your Cold Call or would you say like that's going to put me out of business. Right? So so if the lead quality is better, we're willing to pay more. We're willing to accept a lower return on investment. And actually I was able to model across the company. So I modeled out their profit margin compared to their average leads per contract across their marketing channels and found that correlation absolutely true. That companies that have more inbound channels are able to operate at a higher at a higher margin with ultimately a lower return on investment in the marketing because their operational expense was smaller. Right. So so anyways, that's that's kind of the two ways I would compare it. And and it was interesting to see how the different channels played out. TV was actually one of our lower return on investment in bound channels, but it was the best lead quality. Ironically, which sort of makes sense because it's a lot of friction for someone to get from a TV commercial to actually calling you like they have to remember that phone number, write it down or they got like Google you or something. It's not like a super easy call to action. Yeah. After TV was PPC with payment collective. It was the next highest the next highest lead quality. After that was PPC in general, which was actually significantly worse, paper lead and direct mail all had about a similar number of leads per contract. The thing is PPC was actually a low performing channel from an ROI standpoint. It was like one point something return on investment on average for the industry across people who who reported it versus direct mail and PPL were higher. And then as we go towards the lower lead quality channels cold call antext were both in the like 50 plus leads per contract range. Cold call was that 2.25x that I talked about. Cold text was like 4x. So significantly better than cold call was. Again, I don't know if lawsuits are part of their marketing spend or not. Or the risk that they're taking the life. ability, it's not super scale-bony more. All kinds of reasons not to love ColtX, despite how it did pretty well in the survey. But that's what we learned generally about marketing channels, which I thought was pretty fascinating overall, just to see how they're comparing for it. >> Yeah, it is interesting. Very interesting information, or at least for you and me. >> Yeah. >> Again, if you're not nerd, maybe this is just really boring stuff for you. >> But yeah, so we'll put a link in the description for you guys to go click on it so that you guys can get access to it. You're going to have to participate, right? >> Yep. You participate. >> You submit your numbers, and then we will send you a personalized report that shows your numbers next to other companies. Numbers, so it's easy for you to identify where you're doing well and where you get poorly. >> Yeah, and there's no such thing as bad information. It's just information, which you do with it. >> 100%. >> Yeah. >> It's like I had a number of situations recently in my business where I like heard some bad news. And then I think about it after. I'm like, I feel bad about this bad news. And then I realized before I heard it, it was still true. Usually it's like been a problem for a year and I just found out about it. >> Right. >> And now that I know about it, that's actually the good news. Now I can actually fix this problem when I didn't know about this problem before. But for some reason, finding out about it feels like the painful part. >> Well, I mean, I think of a worst case scenario, right? You were to find out your spouse has been cheating on you. Like, do you rather not have known? >> Sure, sure. >> That's a very fair point, right? Like, it's an awful, awful scenario. But like-- >> Yeah, that Andy guy that got caught in the jumbo tron, I think-- >> Are you trying to say that his wife should be grateful, Steve? >> Ignorance is not bliss. I don't believe in those situations. I think ignorance is bliss. Should it be or not? Is a different question. But I think it often is. >> Okay, fine. Ignorance is bliss. But would you choose that? Would you will for like, you give him the choice? >> It's interesting when you even think about that. Because there's like, there were some like thought experiments done where I can't remember where this came from, but they basically, someone would ask people, like, they've done this in monkeys. Like, they can actually like trigger like the bliss part of the brain, like make someone like feel bliss. And so they ask like, humans, like, what will do you on me to do that? And it's such an interesting thing because like, most of what we do is like, we're just kind of chasing this like, this good feeling. But if you ask somebody, like, okay, so I could just hook you up to this machine for the rest of your life and you'll just feel blissful forever. Do you want that? And the answer is generally, no. >> Yeah. >> I don't want that. It's not actually what you're talking about. >> All suffocating. >> Part of the journey. And then even like, what is it? You know, that is not a documentary, right? I mean, the matrix is like, really fiction, but like they talked about like, the humans rejected it because like, they were always happy. They couldn't stay in that machine. >> Yeah, that's interesting. >> Okay, so then, we talked about the data. And let's talk about, did we miss anything as far as like using AI to WLE flow? I've got some big news. And you'll want to hear all of this because I'm going to give you the best spawn is ever at the end of this video. You all know that I've been providing sales training for six years now and I've had the opportunity to train hundreds of the best teams in the country in thousands of individuals as well. And they've all had wild success along the way. Some of which you've even seen on this podcast. You also know Ian Ross, who has been coaching alongside me now for over two years. He's the biggest sales geek ever and he's been training business owners and individual contributors ever since he started working here. He even runs the Close Myself podcast, but we had a problem. There was a lot of confusion. What is it exactly that we sell here? Is it disruptors training? Is it Steve Train training? Or is it Close Myself training? It's none of those. It is objection proof selling. Ian runs objection proof selling for business owners and individuals. I run objection proof selling for teams where I coach their entire team and it's to celebrate the rebrand. I want to give you something that I never would have thought been possible until recently. We've been training this AI bot for over a year now to score all of our sales calls internally. Every call we run, we have the bot review, the call to Ian and mine exact standards for sales. We run every one of our team members calls through the same exact AI bot. And now we're giving it to you for free. This bot will review your calls based on dozens and dozens of metrics. It will tell you what you did well, what you could do better, again, by the standards of the objection proof selling formula. And if you want to use our bot, for free, this head over to our website, objectionproof.ai. Again, objectionproof.ai. I want to emphasize here, you're getting access to our bot which allows you to get better in sales for free so that you can make even more money now without having to spend another dollar. Go check it out now. Really the, yeah, what I said about more data using it better is the big thing. And I feel like I've been standing on top of this giant soapbox with a megaphone about this for like five years and still nobody does it except for us. We see our competitors try to do it sometimes and then they just miss critical pieces that make it work. But it's, I mean, it's not a PPC company. I do exactly what you said. It makes total sense to me. It does make sense. And here's the thing. So Google's actually, like I already told you like that the background of big strategies and how that all went. Google's moving more this direction. If you're following PPC news, you probably know that they announced AI Max recently. AI Max is a new type of campaign where they're moving towards keyword list campaigns. What to think about like what the, what the concept of keyword list campaigns means. It means you have this machine where it's trying to generate leads for you that are the 2% of sellers that are actually motivated sellers. Yet you can't tell it what you want to target and what you don't want to target. How are you going to work in those, in that kind of game? And then you just have to have that modern strategy of elaborate on that. Like I don't understand what that means. So like key worthless advertising or like, so just like so keyword list, right? For me, it's just like here are the keywords that we want. Right? Like here's a campaign here are the keywords I want that can. Right. So but like for them to do it, what does it mean for Google to pick the keyword list? So it means that their system decides what you target based on what you say. So here's what, here's what I want. And they're going to come with a keyword list. Yeah, it doesn't even function based on keywords. It just functions based on intent, intent, which is actually really important piece of it when Google's moving more towards AI as well. And search queries don't look like they used to, right? I think of how different you use like a large language model compared to how you use a search engine. I do search engine. Yeah. I still like fact check with Google because I'm a little scared of, you know, the crazy stuff that that chat GPT comes up with. But the, I guess what I'm saying is the way that you search there is really different. Like you're not going to type into Google like, like please, please tell me this or something, right? You're just going to search the way you interface with it interact with it. Yeah, it's way different, right? So because the way that people are searching is changing, keywords get even harder because now we're going to have prompts that are significantly more words. And like your, your keyword could fall in someone's thousand word prompt and not actually be super relevant just because like they had data somewhere that said that. So the idea is that Google's getting better at predicting who's your customer, who's not your customer. And in order for that to work, you have to feed at that data about who your customer is and who your customer is. Right. And then for, to get it to work really, really well, you need to have more data than everybody else does about those things. And this is where the gap between the companies that are doing this on the highest level and the companies that are doing this on the lower level is kind of widening as Google going more and more that direction. And now you still can do it the other way, but I can tell you the strategy that we're using is already working better today and it's future proof. So that's the biggest difference. So are you seeing benefits right now with AI Max? So AI Max itself is pretty new in testing. I think it was like less than a month ago that it tested or that Google launched it. And we have to get like, we have to like use our relationship with Google to get beta tests for our clients individually. So to say that it's good or not would be hard, we have some tests going on. I've seen some early data. The data I've seen has been negative, but it's been the kind of thing that is like fixable in early stage. Right. So I can't comment on it too much, except all I can say is that we have to zoom out and look beyond just today and what's happening right now and realize like the agenda that Google has and AI Max is like a really, really clear sign of where they're wanting to go. And right now it's like, oh, you know what? You can use this if you want to opt into this and eventually it'll be, give me your website and we'll send you traffic and that's it. I use Google suite. That's the word or split workplace one. And they keep upgrading it. And like do you want Gemini? I like, no, I don't want Gemini. Do you want Gemini? No, you want Gemini? No. And then at the end, it's like, hey, you're taking Gemini and you're paying more per user. Yeah, they're going to have their way. Yeah, eventually. I think when I started using Google suite, it was like 750 per user per month. Right. And then I know it was five bucks for me. I don't even want to know what it is now. Yeah. So, well, I'm telling you, it's 16 and change per user. Yeah, it's more. It's a lot more per month. And that we get to use their AI tool, which I don't want. Yeah. Right. Like, I haven't used in Google docs. I haven't used in email. Right. I Google something and now it's like giving me like whatever, you know, I was like, I didn't want that. Right. Yeah. It's just, it's in your face. And I'm talking about the Google and like restaurants. This is not like using Google. I was like, I don't use Google anymore. Yeah. And the other thing too is like the Facebook, like Zuckerberg said the same thing. Right. It's like, we don't want you to go in there and like create your own campaigns in this and that we want you to just tell us what's your goal and then we'll create the for you. Yeah, it's a different game. Yeah, I saw a commercial from Salesforce where it said, if AI is the Wild West, does that mean that data is the new gold? And I thought it was insightful, yes, yes, I think is the answer to that. That's what it comes down to. If you have more data to find the right people, then you could win that game. Right. So yeah, I think that's the suggestion we're going. And another thing is again, like we hear more and more people talking about so and so is looking to sell their, like grandma's looking to sell their house. And then Suzy, Suzy's not a modern name. It was a modern name, you know, whatever. Like something spelled really weird with like multiple, well, Sophia Olivia, that seems to be the most common name of all my kids friends. All right. So Sophia jumps on a computer and goes to chat GBT, sell my house for cash or whatever. And then they get some information and then they pass it along. Like they call it and then like my grandma wants to sell house for cash. But more and more is coming through large language models, whether it's chat GBT or Claude or Groc or whatever. Yeah. Isn't, and I don't know, I haven't done any research in this. For me, that just seems like it's just SEO. That's just in chat GBT. Like chat GBT is not creating its own thing. It's just scraping with on the internet. Sure. Yeah. So it's just search engine optimization showing up in chat GBT. That's I'm crazy. You're you're like 90% right. Okay. There's there's like some things that are a little different. Like an example is YouTube's pretty important if you want to show up in a language model because YouTube's like the place where a lot of language models are getting like the training data. Right. Because it's like one of the biggest open source, not really like owned by anyone, sources of information about things. Right. So, so like there's little things like that where like maybe a language model wouldn't find you somewhere else. But you're absolutely right. A lot of the same signals that are that are giving trust for SEO are going right into language models. Like we have a fair number of leads that come to us and say, well, I chat GBT said you're the best. It's like, okay. I don't know where exactly you got that from, but like it sure knows a lot about my company. When I like ask you to kind of like, if you remember Siri, right, he's a script from Yelp. Right. If you want to do wall and Siri, we just have to do wall and Yelp. Yeah. And a lot of the signals are the same because you think what is Google trying to do when it gives information? It wants to find the most authoritative result used to. It's still still care. Do you think Google doesn't care about that anymore? I don't think it's a good. I don't think it's a crap. I'll use experience anymore. Right. Like because I think they're just they are the, okay. So you look at our space. So, so promotes this company. So, so promotes that company. Are they promoting that company? Because I think it's the best company. Because they get paid by affiliates. Sure. Right. Like this influencer actually care about me, the user or does influencer care about the affiliate revenue? Yeah. And that's, that's always. Yeah. You don't know. You don't know. It's like I pride myself on only promoting products that I use, right? To my detriment. Yeah. You could make more money if you wanted to do it. The other way. Yeah. If I just completely sold my soul, I'd make a way more money in the affiliates. Right. Yeah. And so with Google, I don't think they care about the user experience. I think they used to care about the user experience. I think now they care about like plugging you into this Google tool or that Google tool or this or that, right? Like PPC used to be three on the top. 10 on the side. They were all yellow backgrounds. Yeah. You knew it was paid at now. You need like a magnifying glass to figure out if it's a paid ad or not. Yeah. So, so I'm with you although I don't think it's 100% that way, right? Because if that was true, then Google would say, well, you get better SEO results if you spend with us on paid ads. And it's not, it's not really true. It doesn't work that way. That's not true. Correct. But do they do they care about the money? Yeah. I mean, a good example of this is in PPC. They care about quality score. So quality score is. Well, do they care about the quality score because of the user experience? Or because they want you to spend as much money as possible. It's, it's, I think, I think quality score is them showing that they care equally about the things. So, so I recently did a, did a study across a bunch of data that we had. And we broke out our clients results by quality score, which is interesting analysis that I've never done before. And what we found is the higher the quality score, actually, the cheaper the cost per contract across those clients, mostly because cost per click went, went significantly down. And if you think of, like how Google does that, they're basically saying if you have a higher quality score, that to us means that there's a better user experience, right? Because they're looking at the landing page experience, they're looking at the ad relevance, they're looking at the expected CTR. The expected CTR is kind of one that they care about, right? More for them than the user. But the other two are super for the user. So what they do is they will actually charge. So if, if you advertise on Google and you have a bad user experience that you're creating for somebody on Google, they will prioritize getting money over that. So they will say, you know, what if you're willing to pay us enough money, we'll still, we'll still show your ad. Well, they will though, right? Like if I have a five quality score and you have an A quality score, they'll show my ad I'm willing to spend enough. Yeah, exactly. So that's where like, do they prioritize the money? Yes. Because if your quality score is lower, well, they still show your ad. Absolutely. But you've got to pay more money than I do. Right. So my, the fact that they actually make you pay more money than I do and, or that they, they'll make, they allow me to pay less money because my quality score is better means that like they're actually accepting less revenue for you. They're rewarding you because I create a better user experience. Right. So that you can spend more money there profitably. Oh, sure. Yeah. That, that'll definitely, right? And the long run is like, Brandon will spend more money because he gets a better R. 100%. He goes, it goes to their bottom line eventually, right? Yeah. Even user experience goes to the bottom line eventually where like if they're, if they're prioritizing user experience at least a little bit, then hopefully people don't stop using Google. Yeah. That's the goal. Yeah. Like, as long as you can spend whatever they can do to get you spend more money, I think is their priority. Yeah. They used to have like, they started with their motto or whatever they don't be like, don't be evil. And then they took that away. Yeah. Yeah. They just got rid of the first word because it was restraining the, the, the, it's hard to put on a bumper sticker on if it's don't be evil. But be evil is just easier. It's easier. It's only some six characters in the space in between. Yeah. So, all right. So then we talked about that. Let's see what else was there. Anything else we haven't touched on? Because like I wanted to really hit on like what's changed? And what people need to pay attention to, right? And as far as digital marketing goes, have we covered everything? We've covered a lot of stuff. I mean, we can go, we can always go super deep. Yeah. Honestly, everybody's always pretending like everything's changing super fast. I'd say the stuff, the content we recorded a year ago about all the nitty gritty at PPC, I think it's all still really true. The only thing I'd add some additional information on is I spent a little time like on my way here kind of thinking about like how I feel empathy for the average investor who doesn't know what to do about their PPC. And it's not working for whatever reason. I mean, how many people do you know who you've heard say like PPC is not working for me? It's spending too much money on it and the cost per deals too high and the ROI is too low and the leads are horrible. And like every possible thing. And it's true for a lot of marketing channels too. And it's hard because you just don't know like everything about the channel. You don't know how it works. And we've created all this content to try to like help bridge that gap a little bit, but the reality is like still if somebody wants to con you, they can con you. More likely than not. Just like I could be conned into a real estate investment probably because even though I'm like in this industry, I still I still might not know like someone who really doesn't talk about some of that doesn't. So so I thought a little bit about like how do you make these kinds of decisions and I came up with what I think is important to me. Sure. So it was important. It's have you ever heard of like the the competence and character mindset for employees? Maybe. Let's go ahead. Let's just go ahead and do it. The idea being competence and character are like the two things you want to look for. Yeah, in an employee. Okay. I think Simon Sinek has a video on this where he talks about like trust for the seal. Yeah. Who do you want? You want the guy that you can trust or the guy is good at the job. Yeah. And I can tell you like in my company, if somebody's not good at their job, we make a plan to get them good at their job. If we can't trust somebody, they're gone immediately. It's the only times that we like fire somebody like this at you really, really quick. Those traumas at you. Oh, sure. Yeah. I think you got fired. Did you resign? Yeah. Who knows if you would have stuck around if he didn't resign, but he resigned. Yeah. Yeah. Safe face. So it's certainly both those things are really important though. So on the idea of competence, right? I feel like this is what most people are just looking for. But they get misled a lot. So what we started using internally is we have this idea of like we're looking for level three marketers. So to explain to you what level three marketers are. Level one marketer basically assesses up like this. Like I don't know everything. I am a student of marketing everywhere around me are opportunities to learn. And I'm going to become the best in the world at this. Right? That's like that's how people start. Right? A level two marketer says like I get the best results. I get consistent results. I get better results than everybody else. And then a level three marketer says I am a student of marketing all around me are opportunities to learn. I'm going to be the best marketer in the world. And if you think, like, what's the difference between a level one and a level three marketer? It's just track record. But who's the person that convinces people to work with them? It's level two marketer, usually, right? Because there's like, I don't know if you I mean, you know the concept of like the more you know, the more you know, you don't know. And if that's not true, then something might be really grown. Right. There's a there's this quote from Henry Ford that I like. He says, many a man who's supposed to have 10 years experience really has one years experience repeated 10 times. Right. And I think that's the level two marketer. So what is the level two marketer saying again? I get the best results. I get the most consistent results. I know exactly what I'm doing. Okay. So this is a this is the Denning Krueger. Krueger, right? Tell me more about that. I've heard the I've heard like the phrase before, but I couldn't tell you exactly what it is. So Denning Krueger, right? So if you draw a chart, right? Your confidence and skill level, right? Over time is like you I think it's confidence skill, right? So initially you get some results and you get like this confidence. And like you think you're king in the world. And really what happened is you haven't experienced adversity yet. And then this is when you become a guru by the way, right? And you crash, right? Your skill improves where your confidence crashes. And then now after a crash is now it starts to gain somewhat linearly, right? So you have like this exponential growth. And that's when you think you know everything. And that's when you start selling courses, you start, you know, people start paying your money because you're loud about the success you've had. In reality, you don't know anything. You know, you've had some you've had a taste of success. But you haven't had a taste of failure. And you have all this irrational confidence. Which is like a good thing to have to some degree, but you also need to have some humility and you don't have that humility yet. Yeah. I think I think the real difference, like you're you're explaining exactly exactly what I'm getting at. And for another way, the other way we look at the also, just real quick before you transition back, is that the top where you know, like this is where you get the Lambo right and everything else is we call that this. So that's when you're on the top of Mount Stupid. That's that's really funny. I haven't heard that exact exact. Yeah. I think the the way that I think about it is a level one marketer has humility. A level two marketer is confidence. A level three marketer is confidence and humility. And that's the you know, that's the difference. Right. And it's so easy to think that like, you know, one versus like like confidence humility. It's easy to think of them as like like mutually exclusive concepts, but but they're not really like you can you could be really confident and really humble at the same time, right. So that's that's something I really believe. And when I see people like making decisions where they end up coming to us with a ton of wasted money, it's usually the level two marketers. They have to be really worried about right convinced them that convinced them right. So and and sometimes we also see people in our sales process get turned off when they're like, well, what's my cost per lead going to be and we're like, I don't know probably like somewhere in this range. It depends on these different factors and they go to someone else and the other person's like, oh, it'll be this. Does that mean that that person knows more than we do? Yeah. It might just mean that they know less. Right. So so that's that's one one important thing to think about. So it's like, I mean, looking at our lives, right? Like when I was 15, I knew everything. Right. And sure, a lot of 15 year olds know everything. Right. And I got my daughter who was 14 and we had a conversation. I was like, look, I believe that you believe you know everything. I was once like you. That's so funny. You're just going to have to have a little faith that I've been on this planet 30 years longer than you. And I know a few things that you haven't experienced yet. Sure. Sure. Right. Yeah. Level two could just be the teenager. Sure. Absolutely. And there's lots of those like teenage marketers and like, look, the reality is we all act different and every like I have like moments of the day where I'm level two marketer and I have levels moments of the day where I'm level three marketer. But that's the biggest thing I would look for. And then the other part is is character. And you know, we were talking about capitalism before. This wonderful thing in capitalism, which is like not a perfect system, but by far the best we have. Yeah. Yeah. Then the alternative is unless you want to fight me on that, you know, I'm not trying to get too political here, but pretty, pretty decent system, pretty good and visible hand making sure things work out. Yeah. So, so always well capitalism. Here's where it's, it's not always perfect is sometimes businesses can do things that like if capitalism worked perfectly, then everything I can do to be more profitable as a company is also something that benefits my employees and also something I bet that benefits my clients. It doesn't always work that way. Right. And so, so as an agency, just a little bit of insight into like the agency model how it works, agencies grow two ways. Number one, you get more clients. Number two, you keep those clients longer. Those, that's their way. What's that charge them more? Sure. Sure. Okay. So, so yeah, number one, I could say is like get more, get more like revenue. Okay. Well, one's get more clients. Two is charge them more. Sure. Sure. I'm going to say to get more. Yeah. I guess the way we measure it, like how much you charge them as part of the clients because we measure like that. That's the MRO anyways. They're yeah, sorry. Yeah. It's been difficult to super fair. So you could look, you could look at it that way. The, but either way you look at it, there's, there's these different things that you do to create value, right? Yeah. And this is something that I have to be like extremely clear about in our company meetings, where like what they I just shared in our last company meeting is our retention has been awesome recently. Right. Retention's not the goal. Retention is the way that we measure the goal. The goal is that we provide an impact to our clients. Retention is the number that we're going to measure that's going to tell us are we doing a good job of doing that or not? That makes sense. It's it's super basic, right? Because we're trying to get around the idea of capitalism. But where I see things start to go sideways is where companies start to do things that are actually not in the best interest of their clients, but they are in the best interest of the company, right? So if we were to like artificially get better retention through doing something that's not actually better for our clients, that's where things start to go south. And there's all kinds of different examples of that. Like one example is like set it and forget it agencies where you're just kind of like like I can tell you the easiest part of a marketing campaign is getting it set up. The really hard part is doing whatever it takes to make it work after it's set up and all that tweaking and all that stuff. Could could my company be more profitable today if we just like set up all our clients and then we just kind of let them run all the pilot until they eventually leave. Totally, especially with SEO where it's going to take like a year to get a measurable result anyways. We can just do nothing or just collect the revenue for the year. It's not clients feel. And agencies do that. Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes clients feel that way even if we are doing all this stuff. So we're always what you do. It's on us to demonstrate the value, right? That's an us thing. Another example of this is, and I think I've shared this before with you is like I'm really not cool with my agencies don't give access to the accounts to their clients. It's one of those things. It's like it's like you telling me that you're going to do like an outsourced sales product for me like, oh, just give me all of your leads and I'll do the sales. Except no, you're not allowed in your CRM. If you got me just to like agree to that because I'm stupid, you would have me basically in like a chokehold to continue working with your company to do the sales because like over time all that data that you're generating in the CRM is really, really valuable data. And I wouldn't know. So I see people like in those kinds of relationships with agencies where they don't realize like a year down the road, two years down the road, like what they signed and they don't realize they don't actually, they're not allowed to log into their CRM, but not allowed to keep the data in their CRM. So if they ever make a change, then it's going to be really detrimental to them. Yeah. So for a minute, we were doing sales agency stuff. We stopped. But that was our competitive advantage. It was crazy to me. I was like, you and I will be in a CRM together. Transparency. You would have thought everything that we do. You could log in at any time. You could listen to every call. Yeah, because how do I know like, because people say like you'll know by the numbers, but like, okay, if you're closing well, but I see that you know, showed like 50% of the meetings. Still not okay. Right. And I should be able to see that. Well, that guy complains like, hey, like I jumped on a listen to call like this call sucks. Sorry. Like let's, well, we'll listen to the call now and then we'll make sure whatever, right? But like, it was crazy to me that when I did my tone as well, and it's not online as well anymore, was that nobody else believed in transparency. Like sales agencies was just like, eating this CRM, like the jet black box, put the lead in, we'll let you know the revenue. Yeah. Absolutely insane. That's actually crazy because I've never worked with a company like that. So I use that example as like an outlandish thing that like probably nobody does this, but like, it would be as bad as this, but that's crazy. That's actually a thing that happens. We were getting opportunities because people I was like, like, why should we use you? It's like, well, we'll share the CRM logins. It's yours. And there's like multiple elements of it. Like, like one thing is if they were to ever leave, you can't like just hold that over them. Right. Right. Because that's like, you're like, you know, a CRM is like one of the most valuable things that you're generating the data in there. Yeah, it's really, really valuable. The other component is transparency, like you were saying. And I think sometimes people are afraid that they'll be held accountable. But I think when you create that really good transparent relationship, we make mistakes for our clients. And our clients know that we make mistakes for them from time to time. And that's okay because we have an open dialogue. We have an open conversation about it. There's a level of mistakes that's acceptable. I've never been able to remove human error completely from every single thing that we do. And I think that transparency is really important. - Yeah. - So that's like another example. I mean, I could think of infinite examples. Another really big one that we keep on saying pop up for like five years is guarantees. I think you want to be kind of careful about guarantees. It's one of those things where it can go one of two ways. So a lot of the companies, so the reason companies do this is they say, well, Steve, you're worried that you might not get results. So I'm going to guarantee to you that you're going to get this result. The really tough thing is a lot of the things that contribute to that result happening or out of their control, usually, right? So can they even really guarantee that? And it goes one of two ways. The first way is they're like often I'll have like fine print, right? So you'll think like this is solid, right? Like the result is guaranteed. I must get the result. But really there's fine print that like all these things need to happen. Like you have to have it in, so you've done all these things and all this stuff in order for the guarantee to work. So I sell you in on the idea that there's going to be a guarantee and then I never actually fulfill on that thing. Or at most, if I will fill on that thing, you're still going to be at all your ads spend. And you know, I'm basically knocking off 15% of the top if you don't get the results you want. Or the other way that it goes is maybe I do actually honor those guarantees, but you have to think like, okay, so if one agency is actually honoring guarantees and they have these guarantees in another agency isn't how is it possible that that one agency can do that? It's one of those things like have you ever heard somebody say that a listing agent is aligned with the seller because if they sell the house for more, they'll make a bigger commission. I'm filming this video for the amount of self-mistering. So guide cross you, so guys are the best person to sell that other thing. I've invested elsewhere and I haven't got the same results. I've gone from being a seller, making five care months, to being a hybrid role, making 11 care months. To now be four months down the line from 5K to on a closing opportunity inbound full calendar with the best opportunity, the best offer in my space. OTE is around 20 care months from month two. So I've gone from 5K to 20K. If that's not a return on your investment, I don't know what it is, man. If you're a salesperson, you don't invest in sales training, you're going to get left behind because your job is to be better sales. And sales training doesn't really make you more money. If you like what you just heard and would like similar types of success, text close to 3, 3, 7, 7, 7. And we'll see if you qualify to join objection proof selling. We're taking good sales reps and we're making them objection proof. - Yeah, it's definitely a misnomer. Or an anti-missomer as major fallacy. - Sure, I expect you to say that. Like 1% of me was like, Steve's gonna think that's true, but no, it's not true. 'Cause I can, like the natural, I might have to work 300% harder to sell your house for 5% more. And am I gonna do that? No, I'm just gonna find like five other houses that I can, I'm just gonna get the commission. - Yeah, I'm just gonna get the commission. I'm gonna 90% of the commission with 20% of the work and I'm just gonna be finally do more. - I've heard Realtor say it is. Like, no, that's not true. Like that has not been my experience. Like get the contract signed, done, move on. - Yeah. - Fighting for that extra $10,000 for the homeowner. - No, no, they're not. But how much does that mean to the homeowner? It could mean a ton, right? That's like, especially compared to their equity, they could double how much they're getting paid out based on the agent working 300% harder, but the agents are not gonna get paid more. So it's one of those kinds of things. Like the guarantee kind of sounds good, but like when you really think about it, how is the company doing that? Well, what happens is usually the way those companies work is they have like a mediocre kind of product and then they sell it at a premium price. So then they can refund a good portion of their clients. - Interesting. - And they can actually make it through that, right? 'Cause that's the only way to make it possible. And the way those performance-based market agencies typically work is kind of like the realtor that promises to you that like, I guarantee you, I'm gonna sell the house. And I mean, think there's a local company here, right? They're like guarantees that it'll be sold in 72 hours. - Well, they're not so big anymore. (laughs) - Now, that's true. - That's true, the market shifts it a little bit, but like how can you do that? You just sell it for less. Is that in the best interest of everybody? - No. - But does it sound better? - Yes. - So it's, I would say like those are the big things you wanna avoid is, and I would add one fourth one. And that is like, again, this is something that sounds one way and is the other way. Just avoid cheap, like at all costs, like the cheap agency. It's just you have to think like how are they going to, I went to an agency mastermind actually last week 'cause the first one I ever been to. You know what I learned is that on average, my team members are paid double what agencies or team members are typically paid across all these different industries, right? And like the level of work we're doing, I learned it's not just like really good in the real estate investment space, like it's really good in like the agency space in general across the verticals. And a lot of that just comes down to like being able to pay people more, right? So if we were charging half as much, could we continue to deliver the same thing? Like we couldn't, right? Like something has to give for that to be true. And it's kind of like if you think of the agency as responsible for managing the ad spend and the management fee, it's a mismanagement of spend to put a lot towards the ad spend but not actually properly manage that. So anyways, I would say cheap guarantees, not having to access to your account and transparency. And what was the other one? Like said, I didn't forget it. Like those are like the big things from a character standpoint. Where if you see an agency that's doing that, it's one of those things where I would say, just be careful about that. And what you want to do is just work with people that you trust. And it's really important that the competent, and all those things could be true, like even if they're not competent. But like those are examples of things that like look better for the agency's bottom line, but they don't actually work better for everybody involved. Yeah. It's funny because you know, I've done a lot of business with the guarantees. You know, your home's little guarantee are all by it. Maybe a lot of money because I bought a lot of houses. And then the other one, in the last few years, I had our coaching programs like, it was just offer guarantee, right? Like Alex from Moses is offer guarantee, they're fine while offer guarantee. Sure. And so we offered a guarantee and then we had a fine print. And what the fine print was on the mentorship, is like, I guarantee you'll make an extra $100,000 in the next six months, right? And it was $25,000 to work with me for the year. And the guarantee and the requirement was you had to make it the 50 out of the 52 scheduled one on once, right? Well, it was the one on once group coaching calls. You had to make it to 50 out of 52. Like you have to be intentional, right? The second thing is the homework that I signed last week, you have to get done by the next one. Those are only two requirements. But if you do everything I tell you to do, for 50 weeks out of the year, sir, there's no way you don't make an extra $100,000 in the next 12 months, right? So like I put that in place and it's like, yeah, if they didn't make an extra $100,000, I'll give them the $25,000 back. If they did everything I told them to do, they didn't work like here, take your money back. Yeah, but that was the guarantee. And to be clear, I'm not like against guarantees in general, I think it's different for a coaching company than it is for an agency. Because the coaching company largely, like you're running those weekly calls anyways, if there's more people showing up, it's not, you're not incurring massive extra costs like per person. Right. If you look at an agency, if they're running right, they actually should be incurring massive costs per client, right? So they should be going out on a limb in order to make that possible. And what you want is not like another way to think of an agency that's running on performance is like, imagine I'm just like a contractor and I come to you and I say, well, Steve, you have your whole setting company, just send me the leads and I'll close them for you. And I just get paid based on what I closed. Are we aligned? Yes, until I find like 20 other companies, I just start cherry picking leads. Right. That's basically what agencies do is they start cherry picking clients. We're like, because sometimes you work for a client and you'll do everything. And you'll go really, really hard on trying to get results. And the results are lackluster. And sometimes with very minimal effort, they take off. And with more effort, they could do better. But it's good enough for the client. So that's where the agencies just usually get in this space of basically being like that sales person who's taking leads from anybody and just cherry picking what he wants to close. And yes, he's only getting paid on performance. Before that company, that's not necessarily the best way to get the highest percentage of your leads closed. Yeah. So we talked about a lot. So I'm hoping everyone here got a ton of value. And then we'll put the link with the industry report in the description. Any last thoughts you want to leave everybody with? Last thoughts. Again, I have tons of empathy for people out there who are struggling with these kinds of things. Definitely reach out to us if you have concerns or if you're just not able to make these channels work for whatever reason. And I can't emphasize enough that we will do whatever we can to help give you clarity and not just be that level 2 marketer, just kind of like, you know, you call PPC company. And you're like, are we-- I feel like my results aren't good. Now they're definitely not good. We definitely would do better. We try not to be that way. We try to be really objective about it. We'll look into your account. We'll help you understand what's going on. We'll be curious about it. We'll be humble about it. That's what's really important to me is that that's the experience that we're providing to people. And if based on that, they choose to work with us. Awesome. And if they don't, then that's fine too. But that's the impact we want to have. Awesome. So what's the connection with Beatman Collective? What's the best way? So we'll throw a link in the description. The easiest way is BeatmanCollective.com/disruptors. If you go there, that's like a direct line to an expert on my team. So you can schedule a call. Usually we'll have availability, like, same week to have a call with you. And we can talk in depth about all your numbers. And I'd love to share here publicly all the fun stuff that we could talk about. But the reality is so much of it is specific to the things that we might know about your markets and to the performance that you've had historically in your campaign. And that type of thing. and that's, it's better if we, if we help you with that directly. So, BAMECollective.com/destructors. It'll be a week, within a week with your team. Not six weeks at 930 with Brandon. Yes, yes. It's a much better experience than it once was. Like, I was, I was like the worst part of the experience for clients. And then the final thing here, if you do want to learn more about, about PPC, we'll throw, we'll throw a link there as well for, we just recently did a training. And this is like, you know, screen sharing, kind of showing some of the stuff that we're doing about what's working for us. Well, well in PPC, if anybody's interested in, in diving into that, and they just, maybe you're doing it yourself or something. Like, I want to give that as a resource too. Awesome. Very cool. Thank you so much. Thank you, Steve. Appreciate it. Thank you guys for watching. We'll see you guys next time.