How Millionaire Real Estate Investors Use PPC Differently

Welcome back everybody to our PPC masterclass of Bateman Collective here Brandon Bateman here and we're talking about how the top teams do acquisitions. This is the fifth of six, fifth of six in the series. We were to want through YPPC, how Google works and bidding strategies, how to make sure you do proper locations and budgets. We talked about how to ensure you have high lead quality on your PPC leads and today we're talking about how the top teams perform acquisitions on PPC leads. So spill the speakers Brandon, what do we got here? I'm excited to talk about this. Let's just start with an example. I have this client that I worked with. They were really excited about PPC because they heard PPC leads are great. They closed at a high is great and this company at the time they just a little bit of background. They were doing mostly cold calling at this point and they were doing each month somewhere between three and five hundred thousand dollars a month of revenue from the court. Which is pretty impressive in a pretty major market. So you could say they knew how to close. And that was about a ten extra turn on their cold call that's I'm going to this is a couple years ago where that was more possible. But they were they were killing it right. So they're like well if we could do that PPC must be easier. They spend ten thousand dollars a month on PPC for four months and got zero deals. So right now they're forty grand in the whole from from PPC. So they came to me and basically said like what the heck I thought I thought this is supposed to work. So we visit things and we talked about some of the stuff that we're going to talk about in this episode today. They go back to their team to implement those things. Once again they spend forty thousand dollars on PPC over four months. But this time they got the same number leads they got last time and give it take ten percent. But they close seventeen deals out of it for about five hundred thousand dollars in revenue. Wow. Which is over a ten extra turn. Pretty happy at this point. From the PPC. Yeah. Very happy at this point. And I share that story to say like like do you think they didn't know how to close leads before like they know how to do sales. But people get caught off guard from this all the time. Like different types of leads require very different types of acquisitions processes. And it happens all the time like to me it's a red flag when we work at the client that has like a really strong primary marketing channel. And then they're switching to this. And they're not ready to kind of deal with the difficulties that are going to come in an acquisitions process from this. So I'm excited to have this conversation with you because I know acquisitions is kind of your thing. And like I want to be really transparent with this like I've never been in a motivated sellers living room trying to like negotiate with them. But let me tell you like what I do have and what it is helpful and then you can like mesh this information with all the information you get from other people that might fill in some of the gaps. And here's what I did. So one advantage that we have as a company is we're able to see the close rates that our clients have. So here's what I've noticed the close rates that people say they have. And the close rates they actually have are very, very different things. Shocker. Yeah, I know. And sometimes we're better sometimes for worse like sometimes people are like all these leads are horrible and they're like eight leads per contract. And so if people are like, yeah, they think they think like, oh, I'm the best. We close like 50% of our leads. Everything's amazing. You realize it's 50% out of the leads that they decided were quote unquote real leads. And you know, basically if if the lead doesn't get closed, it's because it was bad is the common way of measuring data. Yeah, it's one way of measuring data. It's common with sales people. And you kind of have to be that way to be a good salesperson. So like I'm not kind of sounds like I'm just like bagging on everybody in this industry, but I'm not like I get it like you're never going to have the best sales team in the world, unless you think you have the best sales team in the world. Absolutely true. That's step one. So like, so I'm not saying that's a problem, but it's cool to have like actual objective data that shows who's doing really well and who's not right. So what we did is I took our clients that have the best close rates. Top 10%. I interviewed the entrepreneur. I interviewed multiple members or in some case, the single member of the acquisitions team that worked there and just gathered list of like everything that they do. And then I took some clients that we have that are kind of some of our worst. And I interviewed them and figured out like what exactly do they do? So that's the gym column thing like let's measure what the good people do. Yeah, let's measure what the less good people do. Yeah, and this is what separates them. We have to have both if you're thinking about like a good, a good data, different way to do this. Because if I just took like a bunch of things that the good people do, it's not really useful if the people who suck are also doing those things. Right. Absolutely. It's not a differentiator. Right. So what I looked for is not just like what are things that like some good people do. I'm looking for things like what's a common thread amongst all those that are doing really well. That is not a common thread amongst all those that are doing really poorly. Right. And then we distill it into three principles. And that's what I'll be sharing. So again, like never been in the motivated sellers living room. Negotiated with them, all that kind of stuff. Well, we do have his data of like people saying this is my process. So before we continue there, though, you do have experience being in people's living room selling the mother stuff. Do I? Oh, you're talking about religion. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Right. I mean, you have two years of door knocking experience selling religion. That's fair. Yeah. Right. So you do have some sales comprehension. Well, yeah. And I've been I mean, every every founder of a company's selling constantly. I'm like, what do you think I'm doing right now? Right. Right. So like, yeah, I know a thing or two about sales. Probably one or two of those things I learned from you. Right. But but I know it's like, I know it's different. I just I don't want to be the guy. Like people sometimes say like, you really sound like you know what you're talking about. And I've always thought my secret to that is just not talking about things that I don't know about. Yeah. That's how you always know what you're talking about. That is true. So yeah, this this one's like we get a little bit more in the border of like I kind of know some stuff from a data driven standpoint. But like I don't like I don't deeply understand this whole process. But but I have it from a lot of exposure and I have like the outside view of it and I have a lot of data. And that's what's really helpful. Yeah. And before you continue to start, you keep interrupting you. You know, you're talking about like you don't talk about things you don't talk about. Right. conversation with somebody. There's like the reason why I listen to you, Steve, is because if you don't know, you'll just tell me you don't know. Right? It's helpful because like otherwise you just kind of have to try to see like what's what's really what's theoretical. Is this experience talking right? So like if I don't know, I just I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. There's definitely some unknowns here and some things that are kind of peculiar. So yeah, let's just talk through the through the principles. And I'm actually really curious to hear like your standpoint on some of these things from your like we have different perspectives on this obviously. The marketer's perspective is always that sales just needs to do everything possible to make me look good, right? Yeah, that's right. And then we'll say on our side, give us better leads. That's that's exactly like the dynamic that exists in every company and I kind of hate it, but it is what it is. It's just it's sales a lot. It goes even deeper. So the lead managers might get frustrated with the co-collers. Give us better people. Right. Acquisition people get frustrated with lead manager. Why would you send me up on that crappy appointment? Yeah. And in this position manager is like, why would you give me these crappy deals that I cancel? Yeah. It's that dynamic happens all the way through. Yep. It absolutely does. And that's where it's like my favorite. So here's like my favorite ways of tackling this because we deal with this like internally too. I mean, I have a sales team and I have account managers that then get the client where they're like, why'd you sell that guy? And like that stuff happens. But what I try to do is like culture of ownership. Doesn't matter if it's a bad appointment. It's your job to close it. That's literally sales. And like you try to hold the team accountable to the team beyond them's metrics in the funnel. So we don't hold marketing accountable to leads. We hold marketing accountable to sales qualified leads. And we don't hold sales people. We do hold sales people accountable to close deals. We also hold them accountable to retained clients from their deals. Right. So you just kind of like you hold the people accountable to the thing that happens one step lower, which I think naturally happens from in the traditional real estate company where like acquisitions manager gets paid not on contracts, but on deals. Right. So that's the way you deal with it. Or lead manager could get paid on like contract or health appointments is another one. Yeah. But anyways, putting that to the side. So there's three principles here. The first one is actually fairly well known, although not always succeeded with and that's urgency. So here's the deal. Basically, like these these leads, if they're searching right now, they have a problem right now. That means that they're likely to act really fast. I hear stories from our clients all the time that like got a lead scheduled an appointment for the next day. They went on that appointment. They got there and the person was like, Oh, sorry, I just saw the house. Yeah. It happens all the time. I even had someone tell me just recently I did I recently did another content series with I recently did a content series with Jerry Norton where we kind of went over some of these same principles and somebody was listening to that. And like they they had just before had one of our PPC leads where they got the lead in and they called it and they scheduled the appointment for the next day. They went on the appointment and they just missed it, right? It was just sold. So then they were listening to this. This is like a week later or something and then another lead comes in like while they're listening to me talking about this topic. And then they think, I'm going to put this in action right now. So they call the person, there's like, I'm on my way to your house. And they get there and they got the contract. And as they were leaving the house, the next person was coming up for their appointment. And they had beat them to the contract. And like, and I like, I'm hesitant to share this because like sometimes the idea that people get is that PPC leads all close really quick. And it's not worth following up on them. And that's not true at all. Like our best clients will generally get more than half of their contracts, more than 30 days after a lead comes in. But if you do look at how quick leads turn to contracts, it's faster than any other marketing channel. A lot of times people say like, I'm so fast at closing things. I think that just means you're like really bad at follow up. Like, let me tell you a stat that as a sales trainer is going to make you feel angry. You know, I told you that we average about 15 leads per contract on PPC. What would you guess the median time between when the lead came in and the contract was signed? Median time. And I'm hoping it's two days. 1.3 days. Yeah. Yeah. Which to me tells me we stuck it follow up as a whole or a really high possibility here is that our clients are actually closing maybe more like one in 12 leads or 11 leads. But when it closes like 90 days later, they're not updating us with that feedback. It's still like an opportunity in our system. Yeah. I mean, I would say if they're not closing it then someone else might be. It's totally possible. Yeah. And I'm actually really curious one thing that I want to do is kind of pull in actual sold data and be able to better understand missed deals and something we're working on. But the yeah, because there could be a lot that we could learn from that. But the principle of urgency is really important and it applies in a few things. So like one, I've had conversations with people where I'm like, okay, how quickly are you going to do these leads? And they're like, I'm super fast like always within the hour. It's like like chuckle in my head because like when it comes to this industry with the BBC lead, our gold standard is about 60 seconds. So it's pretty much immediate. And it's just it's genuinely hard to do. But even after you do that, then you want to have urgency with the appointment too. It's the kind of thing where the seller tells you like can you come by the house tomorrow and you say, I'm actually in the neighborhood now or you free in 20 minutes. That's the you know, the kind of urgency that people like some of our best clients really apply to these leads. It makes a big big difference because you the first person to really have that kind of conversation with the seller is likely to be the person who gets the deal. Yeah. Or there are at least the person who can like imprint on the seller like really well. Like if this if this series is the first time you're ever hearing about PPC, it's pretty unlikely that you're going to want to go work with somebody other than Bateman Collective after listening to this because I put this imprint on you right now. Right. And you might talk to the people you're going to talk to the people because the logical mind needs to check things off the list. So you're going to talk to three other companies and then like in your heart, you're just going to know like I want to work at this company and you're just looking at it and support that to the fifth video. If you made it to the fifth. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, that's a good point. I'm curious your thoughts on urgency. Like is there anything you've learned? I mean, we had that experience. We had it when we transitioned from co-call and PPC our guys struggled. And I was like flabbergasted. I was like, why are you bound lead? How could you do worse? Yeah, right. And they were saying these are harder. Like what are you talking about? And I was so excited. Hey guys, you don't have to co-call anymore. You don't have to do all this stuff. Like we're going to get the hottest of the hot leads. And we got a major pushback. And I just did not understand it as a business owner. And I think it could just be like, you know, I'm coming up now. I started actively in real estate in 2007. Right. Like I've seen everything anything and everything. That's great timing, by the way. Yeah. Horrific. Perfect timing. Right. So I've seen anything and everything. And I've done these things. Yeah. Right. I've done my own Google. Right. I've done my own follow ups. And so I was so excited to bring it back to co-call. And because like, or to do a PPC because co-calling was becoming less and less effective. Mm-hmm. And that's going to push back from my guys. They're like, yeah, co-calling is usually like, what are you talking about? Yeah. But really they just came down to they were just more comfortable. We'll co-call these even though PPC is easier, maybe just easier from my perspective. That was something like that that really caught me off guard. And into the urgency. Yeah, we had the urgency. You know, lead comes in and they were jumping at it. But it was inconsistent. Yeah. Right. Like sometimes right then and there. Other times is be more a day. And I was like, what is the consistency is a huge one. And that's what I see is people though, it's not like they can't be urgent. It's that I can tell you the most common scenario. And you're just going to laugh and you're going to say, well, why go to anybody do this? But like, I've done things just like this in my say in my business. It's one of those things where it's like, it's so easy to be the guy who like pokes at other people and says, well, they couldn't do they could do this better. It's so hard to like actually operate a business. Usually how this works is we tell the client that we're working with this. And then they say, okay, I got it. They go talk to their team. They say, guys, we're going to start PPC. This is really important. Got to be really urgent with these leads. And the team's like, yeah, super excited. Everything's good. And then what happens is three months later, it's just we're not getting like the metrics we need from the sales side from PPC. Right. So business owner talks with salespeople like, how quickly do these leads and salespersons like 60 seconds max? Okay. Couldn't be us. We're going to leads in 60 seconds. And then we just like, it keeps on going and then like six months and we're still not seeing the sales mixers that we need. We go deeper. And I start poking around the CRM and like, well, what about this one that took five days and what about this one that took six hours and we realize like salespeople are like the way the business owners hold the sales team accountable is by asking them what their metrics are. And then their metrics just happens to be whatever the best thing they ever did was. Yeah. Not their average. Right. Oh, yeah, I can think of a lead right now that I did get to within 60 seconds. And that's my average. Yeah. Well, we always measure ourselves against the best. I mean, the joke we always make in wholesale, right? It's like, if someone says they do 10 deals a month, that means that at one point, they might have done 10 deals. At one point, they did seven deals and then they exaggerated it. Like that's or they had 10 under contract. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Right. So I mean, the business owners are just as bad. But yeah, like we had the expectation, we had the conversations, we said the expectations, we explained why it was important. And then we look at the sales force and then you get really sick. You're stomach. Yeah. Well, that's why I can give a few tips on this, like just things I've seen people do really well. I can tell you, most of the companies are really good at this. They have a metric and it's on some type of like daily or weekly scorecard average time to get to a lead. And what you'll notice is like supposedly everything's fine until you start measuring the metric at which point you realize everything is not fine. And then you start to and then you can actually improve it and you can hold people accountable to what gets measured improves improves. Yeah. 100%. So that is that is like rule number one. Like you don't need this metric for a lot of other marketing channels for PPC. You absolutely do. And you'll find for other marketing channels quicker is better. It's just it's like it's non-negotiable for PPC. Well, it goes back to our first episode where we had the chart, right? Like inbound for the outbound. Yeah. Right. You could call them. Maybe they're ready to sell. Probably not ready to sell today. Yeah. Right. TV is like, okay, something happened. And you know, it's that's interesting. Here, they're feeling something viscerally for them to Google something. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's a it's an episodic thing. You don't just you don't just search for no reason. Like you just go and Google. Google in your random thing. I want to go to my house today. Exactly. And I'm sure there's someone like I'm sure one of my clients is listening to this and they're like, I just got to lead like that. Like it happens. That's the other thing that happens is if that's just say that acquisition teams used to getting like leads that are like prevetted. They'll get these would be like PPC leads suck because this one didn't even have the right number or something. Yeah. Because you know, they just don't understand like that's how the game works, but like you're still going to have less leads per contract. And if you're really good, you could get this like they got good goal for most companies is 12 or lower. Mhm. Lades per contract. But it's it's 100% a different game. Rob just told me a story of somebody that that he works with where they had they had all cold call. They switched to all PPC. Couldn't close anything on their team. So the business owner is like freaking out at this point. He's like, I can't like I can't sustain this like not having revenue. I got all this overhead. So so then he started calling some leads trying to do some deals. He calls these people and he like does a lot of deals. He's able to lock up a lot of contracts. What he ends up finding is that the way that his team was managing the leads was just like they were so used to cold call leads. They were just planning on following up. Like they're just like it's not going to close right now. And then what he did is he's like I have to get revenue right now because I don't have any money and my business is going to go under. So I have to close a deal. And he's like I can close leads all day like this. Like if I like call him and I got a close on now then I can do it. And he tried to train his team on it. It couldn't work. So he fired all of them and then he hired a whole new team and then they nailed it because they weren't like tainted with the cold call leads before. So I thought that was a fascinating story. Very unfortunate for that team. Yeah, it's great for the business owner. Yeah, but we're fortunate for the team. Yeah, it's not really great for the business. Well, it's I guess better for the business center than it could have been. - Well, you've got to team now that can close. - Yeah, that's true. But yeah, so the urgency, that's another example of like, if you're just like if you're calling leads and your mindset is leads take three months to close, they're gonna take three months to close, you're not gonna close them fast, just for you. - Yeah, let's see, I heard something great this morning was that your greatest limitation are your expectations. - Yeah, it's a super fair point. - Yeah. - Like if your goal is like I got to close them, like I just talked to a client last week that 40% of their PPC deals are deals that they get from locking up the contract on the very first call that they have with a seller. Like one call closes are a real thing. You know, if you have that mindset of like I can close this on this call, if you're thinking this is gonna take a month to lock up, then it's always gonna be well. I think the best mindset is like I'm gonna close this right now, but then when it, like it seems like people are either in that camp and then they suck it follow up or they only follow up with them, they can actually close when the time's there. It's like you gotta have both, you gotta like believe it can be right now, but when it's not, still believe it can happen. - Yeah. - In one, two, nine months, people get, you know how it is, like you'll get a deal three years later. - Yeah, it's pretty even split. Sometimes it's 30%, sometimes it's 70%. But there's a pretty even split across the board and average, like how much does close on the first appointment and how much does close, like after like whether it's three months later, six months later or like a year and a half later. - Yeah, yeah, 100%. The only other advice I'd really give for urgency is a lot of people like to let their team fight over the leads at the beginning. Like you're, as a salesperson, you're not entitled to a lead like round robin I think is really bad for the urgency. - Oh, right, but it's rocious. - Yeah, so just like a lot of people would just say, the leads out in the open first person to grab it, it's theirs, something like something that Cody's team does, even deeper than that is they'll say basically, it's not yours until you make contact with the seller. So they'll even have like all the different acquisitions and managers calling the seller because they're ideally looking for the commission. And so if you do something like that, you kind of have to make sure you're still like or measuring that you're, 'cause like if nobody owns it, then who do you hold accountable if we didn't follow up right away? But if you form it and you form the culture, right, then it can work really well to have that competitive landscape where like, - I mean, I would say the accountability there, but it's a free for all the accountability there is if you guys aren't gonna do this then, don't know what you're up in or you just hire more salespeople. - Yeah, yeah, that's a fair point. Like it's, if it's not gonna call it an existing. - It's not gonna call it an existing. - Yeah, yeah, in theory until like the, if your culture went really sour or something or-- - Yeah, to like keep them eye on it. But yeah, so urgency is the first one. That's a huge one. That's the one that most people know. But it's like one of those things, it's like so much easier said than done. - Yeah, I just didn't know it doesn't mean you do it. - Yeah, I'm talking here from my ivory tower. Like hey, all salespeople should get to lead super quick, but I mean, it's, this is like, this is legitimately hard to pull off, but-- - Well, that's up there with like answering 100% of your calls. Right, like you know you should answer 100% of your calls, but we don't. - Exactly, but if you can nail that, like that's a priority with PPC, whereas with other marketing channels, you can get away without nailing that. With PPC, you have to nail that. So it's super important. Number two, the second principle that we learned is assuming motivation. And I'll tell you like where I came with the idea of this. After talking to these teams of like some of these winning companies that close at really high percentage of their leads, I literally got the vibe from most of the acquisition managers that I talked to, like the first thing that went through my mind was like, this person is a little bit delusional. And they're probably the person who loses all their money in Vegas. They just think like, all the odds are against me, but this is gonna work somehow. Like it's so not me. It's probably why I wouldn't be a great salesperson. But the point is, if you look from like, let's just say it's cold call. You're looking for needle and haystack. The assumption about everything is this is a piece of hay until I can prove that it's a needle. I assume that a lead is unmotivated until I can prove that it is motivated. Versus with PPC, the mindset generally is, I assume that a lead is motivated until I can prove that it is not motivated. Right. It's just a different mindset. I know it sounds like it sounds a little silly, but it's like a real, real thing that I noticed across these teams. Well, it's really closely correlated with the lack of urgency. Like I assume they're not in a rush. I assume they don't need to sell. Yeah, yeah, 100%. And yeah, there's salespeople like to assume things. I'll just leave it at that. There's things amongst my own team as well as others. It's really easy. Like what Cody would say is like people write their own stories that Jeff's to fight their own actions. Essentially, like if you could think of a story that could possibly justify what you did. That's probably a story that they're writing in their head about the whole situation until it gets proven wrong. Right. So that's the, yeah, the concept is assuming motivation. If we want to look at like how this actually gets implemented, a lot of it has to do with what qualifications does a lead have to hit for you to go on an appointment with it. If you're doing the local model, if you're doing virtual acquisitions, then it's a little bit of a different game. It's more like what does it need for you to go through the whole sales process? This is one thing that virtual teams are a little bit better on because they like they're less to lose. It's like not going to like take three hours to go drive over there and meet with the seller and drive back or something. This, this company that I told you about the very first of this, of this episode that went from zero to 500,000 in revenue over, like the four months, the next four months with PPC. They, this is one of the key things that they changed. They changed their qualification criteria. You're, I'm sure you're familiar with the four pillars of motivation. Yeah. Yeah. So you, I mean, I can't, like we have like urgency, basically, like how quickly do they want to sell the house? What's the condition of the house? Are there any drivers like divorce or probate or whatever the case is? And then I want to say price is the last one. So, and I know you know that is for everybody else. Well, I mean, everyone has kind of different things, right? So you say for color, some people have emota. All right. I'm not familiar with that one. emota is equity motivation, time agency, like authority. And then I think, oh, is ownership? I forget. For me, I don't care about one thing. I don't care about one thing. Are you motivated? Yeah. Yeah. It's a fair, it's a super fair point. The, I don't care about price. I don't care about price. Well, price is a deceiver more often than not. Yeah. The line of the biggest, one of the biggest decisions. I don't believe them when they talk about their price. I don't believe them when they talk about the timeframe. If you need to sell, I'm coming over. Yeah. Oh, and that's a great mindset. In particular, company, the way they did their cold calling, was they told their cold callers, we have to hit two of the four pillars. It doesn't matter which two, two of the four pillars for it to be a lead, and then you pass it along, which I don't think is unusual for a cold call. No, no, no. They did the same thing with their PPC. The number of appointments they had was really small. Yeah, they were just equal. We were not on. No, no, they're not honest at all. So, so we challenged them. I basically told them, I'm like, just, just go on every appointment. Like, yeah. Like, do you want to sell your house? Okay, I'll be over soon. Like, that's all, right? Like zero pillars of motivation. Like, do you have a house to sell? And the immediate pushback was like, we don't have time to do that. Like, our guys need to make like a certain amount of money. Like, they can't just be running all these appointments, wasting their time, but one, I just like, just first 30 days, just do it for 30 days. If it doesn't work, then like, sure, then you can, then you can give up, but like, just try it first. So it might surprise you. So cold call leads that were qualified on two pillars of motivation versus PPC leads qualified on zero pillars of motivation. They're cold call appointments. It took them five appointments to get one contract. They're PPC appointments, five appointments to get one contract. Believe it or not. So, with PPC, with much lighter qualification standards, they actually had the exact same quality of appointment on average to what they had with cold call, which I thought was super fascinating. Because what people are afraid of is they want to waste all my time. And it just doesn't tend to happen that way. Not like, like, you, I mean, you'll definitely go to appointments and think, you know, well, that was a waste of time. Like, that's like, not every, not every appointment is going to be a good one. But at the end of the day, like, I'd rather go on five that don't turn into anything, then miss, you know, one that was going to be good, you know? Yeah. It drives me crazy. So, people like over-qualified appointments drives me absolutely nuts. Yeah. I watched great videos by all of them, I was like, basically, it's like, their job is to say no. Yeah. If their job was to say, yes, I wouldn't need to hire you as a salesperson. That's so funny. Yeah. Like, you have to change, you have to change their mind. Yeah. Their job is to say, they're going to say no. Yeah. Go and talk to them. Yeah. And this is, it's kind of like a tricky dynamic, because I know a way that a lot of people deal with this problem is you have the lead manager set the appointment. And then acquisitions doesn't have a choice. Like, you just go in on the appointment if they set it. So then you give the lead manager the, because acquisitions tends to have like their instinct of like, I just know it's not a good lead or whatever the case is versus lead managers, they're like, okay, you're on the house. Okay, well, it'll be there tomorrow, you know, it's a lot easier. But then there's also some problems with PPC leads of potentially having lead managers manage the appointments. So this is where you get in this tricky game of like, do you have lead managers or do you have acquisitions? And we have clients that do it both ways. But at the end of the day, that's, yeah, that's what I think makes it hard is if you have it. If you have an acquisitions person making their own decisions about if they want to go on the appointment or not, I think it's a tricky game. Well, you know, there's a property that we bought. That I ran it. And I heard the inbound call, right? And the appointment was booked and that I'm going down a Saturday. And I'm like, why am I going to this property? Like I heard the call. The guys that motivated. Right. And it was a text lead. It's like, why am I going? And I was telling myself like, well, we have a new sales guy. He needs to be trained. So I'm going to bring him with me. And we're going to run the appointment together. [BLANK_AUDIO] on a lead that I believe to be in that motivated. - Yeah, it's a training opportunity. - Training opportunity. - About the guys house. - Yeah, right? Like my story was the guys in that motivated. - Yeah, even if you were aware of this, like we're all subject, like I do the same thing. Like so people, after thinking of this, I think I'm just really cynical of like everybody and everything in the world, but like it's just, like I, I just sound that way. - I just sound that way. - I am. You just sound that way. - Yeah, fair enough. Like, but we all do this, right? So yeah, that's a genuinely hard thing to do, but what I would suggest, if you are running PPC, is you need to be running audits of like why are we not going on appointments with our leads? And if we're not going on an appointment, there better be a really good reason that we're not going on the appointment. And just know like a really common situation is that we disqualify the leads. When I've heard from some of our clients, it's harder with PPC leads because they're, they're a little bit more savvy. They're talking to more people. They feel a little bit more in control. So they're like, like the leads don't sound quite as motivated all the time as they are compared to other channels. That might be a little bit. So like some of those instincts that you build up from all the cold calling leads that you've managed where you start to think like I know the difference between a motivated seller and a normal seller, they're not accurate when you switch lead sources, basically. - That's what I'm saying. - And I think potentially it's because they're closer to needing to do something. So I'm going back to POKER else in earlier, right? Like how can I tell when you're bluffing, right? These classic tales, not professional poker players, but like regular poker players, right? - Yeah. - I can tell that you're bluffing when you're staring me down, right? Like you're just looking straight at me, trying to intimidate me. Because if you're trying to intimidate me physically, that means your hands weak. Likewise, if you've got a really strong hand, you're avoiding eye contact. You might be sipping your water, you might be looking over here, right? You give them opposite tell. - That's a good point. It's like the reverse psychology of it. I noticed the same thing like when we're working with people, if we talk to somebody and they're like, okay, I'm going to have to run it by this person. Like the decision's not all in my hands. Like that's the decision maker. Versus somebody who's like, oh, I got this. Like yeah, I could sign today. Like they're not the decision maker. And they're trying to make you feel like they're like more powerful than actually. - Yeah, so that. - So it could just be because of the PPC leads. Potentially that because they're so needing to sell that they're projecting more strength. - Yeah, yeah. And there could be some aspect of like those who go online being a little bit more savvy than those that don't. There's also aspects of that. - I don't know. - Because if you're going online and you're clicking a PPC ad, that tells me you're not savvy. - It could, it could. I mean, like I click PPC ads for things. And I know exactly what I'm doing. But I'm like, okay, well, if it's like, so if it's a product, it advertises on it. Like what's the problem? - I don't know. I guess I will say on average, the more sophisticated clicks on the more data. - You're probably very accurate. I'm like, let's give these advertisers a break. Maybe they got a great product. - And I have done that as well. I have done that as well. But I can't remember actually buying anything of those things. Like I look at it as like, okay, let's see if it's like up to this stuff. - Yeah, yeah. You bring a fairly good point. Let's talk about point number three. - Yeah. - I call it quality first impressions, commonly misunderstood. So I'll explain exactly what this means. Here's the most simple way I can think to explain this. So you've heard, I'm sure the concept of like, there's different dollar per hour activities within a business. - Yeah. - Like for example, admin work, probably like a 10 or 15 dollar per hour activity or like high level vision work is like, it could be a $10,000 per hour activity, right? So there's all these different levels. It's my opinion that when a PPC lead comes in, that initial call that goes to that lead and that communication that happens there is one of the most valuable activities that could happen in a real estate whole-sign business with like the most money on the line. Yeah. So people would literally pay a janitor more money than they would pay the person who makes that phone call. 'Cause they'd have some overseas lead manager to call this person. And I think that's super backwards. - Yeah. - And what we'd notice across our clients are during the best, oftentimes it's true that the person who is calling the leads is really qualified. The specific statistic that started getting me down this rabbit hole was our clients that had lead managers were actually closing worse than our clients that had leads going directly to acquisitions. - Right. - I'm looking into it further. Some of our clients that have lead managers closed really well, but usually they had really, really good lead managers that could probably even do acquisitions if they wanted to. They're able to like to get into motivation and all that kind of stuff. So it's, anyways, any thoughts on that? - Yeah. So Jason Lewis and I, we've talked about this, right? With the investor machine. And basically like, if you fill out my website through PPC and I call you, I am able to convey a certain amount of comfort and confidence for you. Like you've got the right department. I call you and I have an accent that sounds like I'm in India, Philippines or South America. You might go to the next one. Like yeah, I'll see you tomorrow and I'm gonna go check a couple other ones 'cause I don't have full confidence in you. - Yeah, yeah, 100%. Here's like the way that I picture this. So you picture like, you know what's envisioned? Like a graph like showing how a person feels. A lot of people don't realize like we're like doing PPC for just stressed home sellers. - Yeah. - So what's happening? Like I'm cruising in my life, like everything's good and then life event happens. And I just, I'm not feeling good, right? And that's usually my motivation for doing something. Like people are fine and then they start, you start like poking them with something and then they realize I don't like that and then they start to take action to prevent that, right? So I'm down here, I'm not feeling very good at all and that's when I want to like start taking action. So I'm looking for something that makes me feel better. What ends up happening if I call real estate company one, 'cause I'm gonna talk to this one person. I don't really know that I trust, he doesn't seem that knowledgeable and he doesn't solve my problem. He just sets an appointment to solve my problem later. So what happens to my emotions? I don't necessarily feel better. I don't feel confident about this. So I just clicked on the first PPC yet. Now I'm going to like number two. I'm going to number three. So I'm increasing competition for that other company. I'm having an appointment with them or something but now I'm gonna go on four appointments versus, let's just say they talk to Steve first and Steve just makes me feel like Steve's my guy and he gets me and because he like asked all these questions about my situation, he understands the situation super well. He hasn't given me like an offer from my house but I feel like my problem's like well on the way to getting solved. So I don't feel the need to look other places. So it's these little things where it's like, it's hard to prove exactly what happens but it's super plausible to understand. - It was super, I would say it's fairly reasonable. This assumption or conclusion is fairly reasonable because we know people run away from paying that's the reason why they do things. If we can help them feel a little relief, they won't need to check other places. They might still but they don't need to. - Yeah, well let's just say your real estate company won. What experience do you have? What kind of conversations happened internally? Oh that lead, wasn't that good? Like they didn't seem that motivated. I went on the appointment and it was super competitive. They were talking to a lot of other people. They weren't as open with me. Whatever, when if a different situation happened then you could actually control how many competitors are on that lead. - Right. - Just by the way that you have your first conversation with the person. And then people also they make so many decisions based on first impressions. Like I think in most places in business the too much focus is put on the moment when the thing happens. Like I got the contract now. So I did something good now. When you could get the contract right now because of something you did really, really well on the first call that you had with the seller. 'Cause that's when they made the emotional decision in their head. After I have a really good call with Steve, it's hard. I'm gonna talk to other people with inherent skepticism 'cause I'm just putting up against Steve. I'm just seeing do they actually stack up? Are they as good as Steve? And what's gonna end up happening more likely than not is I could even look at other options. But because you've already won me over from the beginning I'm gonna end up signing with you. And you're gonna think this is a motivated lead. And those other people are gonna go back to their sales managers and say that wasn't that good of a lead. - Right, you know? - Yeah, 'cause you set the wrong expectations in the beginning. - Yeah. - Or set the wrong impression in the beginning. - Yeah. So if you're in this situation where you're paying like 300 or 400 dollars for these PPC leads, I guess the advice here is just like make sure that the person talking to the leads is highly qualified. It could be a lead manager, it could be acquisitions, but highly competent. - Yeah, but don't focus on like so many people like if they're not closing while they focus on well what's happening in the appointment and how are we doing the close. And like all those things are super important, but just don't underestimate how much that first thing 'cause the data that I collected on this was like pretty clear that they're closing a lot better if that person who takes the initial phone call is a lot better. Which I just think is a commonly overlooked place. - Yeah, well it makes total sense. - Yeah, very cool. So thank you for for humoring me on this one. And this is actually our last, this is our last like standard episode for this. We're just gonna have the live Q&A. So let me just get the links to everybody so they can go to this. So we're gonna put these in the description. Again, if you wanna talk to my team, we do fully managed for you PPC. So if you want to work at the expert, it's baitmancollective.com/disruptors. If you want to sign up for the Q&A session, so you can attend that live and ask questions, then go to baitmancollective.com/toolkit-disruptors. And there you will get the toolkit that I've talked about. Actually, this particular one reminds me, I have a whole course in there that specifically goes over these acquisitions principles as well as some other marketing principles, just as a piece of that toolkit. So definitely take that, and you can even share that with your team from there. But then on that page, after you sign up for the toolkit, you'll see a way to register for that Q&A session. Yeah, it's very, very, what's the word I'm looking for? Thurro. I mean, it looks like a paid course. Have you been through this course? No, I'm just saying, I'm looking at it on the resources, right? Oh, yeah, you're talking about the toolkit. Yeah, it looks like it paid course for everything you have in there, and you're giving it away free. Yeah, to be completely honest, like I mentioned before I saw it yesterday for the first time. And the first thought that came through my mind and I guarantee it's the guy on my team who made it. I was like, "Care, you serious?" Like, "We can't give all this stuff away." Like, I had this little gut feeling, like, "This is sick to my stomach, are we really going to put all that stuff in there?" And then, and then, I was like, "You know what? I guess it's probably a good thing." Like, "You should feel that way. You should feel sick about how much you give away." Yeah. There's a lot of really cool stuff in there. Well, these are tools that I've seen you use in consoles. Yep. Right? So, you're allowing whether your potential client, a customer, do their evaluations on their own, or even maybe a competitor can start using the tools that you port research into. Yeah, we got to title this something that they just won't watch. Yeah. That's what we need to do. It's kind of funny. Like, I notice every time I come on your podcast and I talk about a certain strategy, we'll notice in our audits that a few of our competitors start picking up those little things. But sometimes they don't always do it, right? Something like I saw one where it's like they, they did a cross-account bidding strategy, but they like missed a setting. I'm not going to mention like this specific thing that makes it completely useless if you don't use the setting, right? So, it's funny. Yeah. But, yeah. It's, I understand that will happen, but like, we're always innovating so much stuff that by, you know, by next quarter, we'll already have a bunch of new stuff. So, being super unique about Bavain Collective is I have a specific team just dedicated to research and development. I have people who wake up and like their job today is like do more experiments, find outside of like no routine management. And it's a really fascinating thing to have like a department where we just focus on like how do we, how do we like get better at our craft? Which is, sort of, it was like a dream of mine to be able to afford that. Well, that sounds awesome, right? Because typically it's, we, the owners have to do that. Right. And we do that. Yeah. If someone else get paid to do that, and IDA, that's awesome. Yeah. No, it's, it's, it's super cool. And, yeah, the, you have to meet some of the people in the department. Yeah. Some point you got some pretty, pretty sharp. Like, honestly, most of this stuff, I like, I come on here and talk like, look, this is what we're doing. And I take credit for a lot of it. Of all the things we talked about, I'm just looking at like the whole, the whole, like, list. Some of these things were my idea and stuff that I implemented. More of it than not is from people in that department. And then they just like, they come up with the ideas and then I just take credit for everything. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's, that's good management. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love to take public credit for other people's doings. Yeah. Absolutely. But anyways. Excellent middleman. That's right. But thank you, Steve, for everything here. For anybody listening, I highly encourage you to check out those links. And if you have any, like, specific questions about your market and stuff, like, I've got people literally waiting around for you to, like, schedule on their calendar so they can, so they can talk to you about some of this stuff and how it could work for your business. I highly recommend it. Yeah. So beatmancollective.com/disruptors. If you guys want to do an audit or a strategy session, where they brand is team can actually look at what your PPC campaign looks like right now. Or if you guys want to jump on our live Q&A, that we're going to have, go to this, go to beatmancollective.com/toolkit-disruptors. Thank you guys for watching. And we'll see you guys on our live Q&A.