Epic Real Estate Investing - Grant Wise - Automated Lead Generation | 416

Episode Date: June 28, 2018

On today's episode of Thought Leader Thursday, Matt is joined by Grant Wise, a serial entrepreneur, founder of Real Estate Marketing University, and innovative marketing strategist. Tune in to learn how Grant went from being a college dropout to a maverick leader, the biggest lead generation mistakes real estate investors should avoid, and how to start generating more leads right away! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is Terio Media. You know, when I started my training company for the agents, I had one campaign that we taught people. And as we look at it now, we have like 16 or 17 campaigns that work really, really well. You've got to consistently evolve your message. Hello, I am Matt Terrio of the Epic Real Estate Investing Show. And this is Thought Leader Thursday. Today I'm joined by a serial entrepreneur and founder of Real Estate Marketing University and online media training company. He is known to be a maverick leader and an innovative marketing strategist,

unafraid to lead companies in new directions. So please help me welcome to Epic Real Estate Investing, Mr. Grant Wise. Grant, welcome to the show. Thanks, man. It's an honor to be here. I appreciate it. Yeah, you've been. I'm excited to have you here as well.

And, you know, we've got a mutual friend that introduced us. And she said, you got to have her on the show. He's a total badass. And I was like, okay, cool, if you say so. And since I've seen some of your ads running on Facebook, of which have me even more excited to talk to you. And we'll get into your business and what you're up to today. But before we do, let's talk about what you were doing just prior to your business of real estate lead generation.

So prior to, man, it's a good story. So I went into business for myself and I was like 19. I never understood the concept of exchanging my time for money, you know, going to a job and getting paid $8 an hour. So I think I had one job my entire life. I was always the guy that was going to go out and figure something out on my own. And when I was 19, I tore my elbow out playing a little college baseball for the second and third surgery. And I kind of decided that baseball had taken a little more for me I was ever going to get back.

And I came home. And my parents, the typical, I think that was right in that perfect time to say, you know, if you don't go to college and get a degree, you're never going to amount to anything, neither of which, neither parent had a college degree. So I didn't understand it. but I played into it for one more semester at least and failed my second consecutive semester of history. I had zero business being in a classroom. And so I jumped out into the entrepreneurial world, bought my father's little construction company from him, and just kind of took off.

And I didn't grow up with a lot of the greatest guidance. I didn't grow up. Nobody taught me how to balance a checkbook. Nobody taught me this from that. And, you know, I slept on a couch in a garage most of my life. And so as this young kid that's now making a ton of money, I thought I had kind of figured life out as most 20, 21 year olds do, I think. And started making a ton of money and started having a lot of fun.

And unfortunately, started making a ton of horrible decisions. And it just led me down a path of some beautiful destruction and gave me a lot of opportunity to learn. And so in all of that, I had, you know, four or five construction businesses at the time. Somebody came to me and said, hey, man, we want you to start a real estate company with us. And I was like, all right, yeah, I'm really good at starting businesses. Let's do this. And started a company.

We launched this real estate brokerage. And our thing was, you know, we pay our agents 100% commission. It was a pretty unique model. And it was a cool model. It was a fun business, dedicated my life to it and burned a couple businesses to the ground because of it. And after about two years, I'm basically giving up everything for this business. The people that we brought in to help fund it, they came to me and they said, man, we think that you're the reason this company is not nearly as successful as it could be.

And we want you to leave. And I'm like, I'm 51% of this business. Why don't you guys leave? Like, I don't want to get out of here. Like, I dedicated my life to this thing. And I sat back for a couple days and I just thought about it. I said, you know what? I'm the youngest person in this business.

by three times my age. Nobody thinks I know that I know what I'm doing. Nobody's listening to me about using social media to grow their business. Everybody's laughing at me. I said, you know what, screw this. I'm going to go where I'm appreciated, not where I'm tolerated. And that's what I did. I took a step back. It was, I'll never forget it. It was August 13, 2014. I was asked to leave. Signed over all the legal rights to everything a week later. And September 1st, 2014, I launched my little social media boot camp program. So I had like 20, five bucks to my name. My then-girlfriend now wife jokes that she's the one that loaned me the money for the day because I was bankrupt, legally bankrupt, and I put out her Facebook ad. And it was pretty

cool. A couple days later, somebody bought my $1,000 boot camp from me. And I learned a ton in a really short time frame. I learned that I was still a valuable person, like even though I'd made mistakes and messed up and people didn't like me. I still hide value. And I learned that I could acquire customers for 25 bucks. So I was like, oh, okay, well, this works. And we launched, you know, kind of that first year, it was so cool because the first person that I ever did business with, she sold 48 houses their first year working with me.

And every agent that we touched just month in, month out, you know, within about six to eight months, they were making six figures in income in real estate and residential sales. And so I was like, man, this is awesome. I got to like take this big. And so December of 2015, we really launched, you know, Modern Agent Mastery, which was a course designed to teach Asians how to use Facebook ads. And we grew to now, we're 1,500 students internationally and have just built a awesome company helping agents understand how to generate leads.

But I kept getting asked, you know, all along the way. Like, can you help real estate investors? Can you help real estate investors? Can you help investors? man, we're getting killed indirect mail. We're getting killed here, killed there. The margins aren't as good as they used to be. I pushed the opportunity off for a long time because I'm a huge proponent of focus. I learned my mistakes in trying to spread myself too thin and grow too fast and do too much and push it off for a long time. But about a year ago, I got into a place where I was like,

you know what, I got the time now. I can focus a little bit more of my attention in doing something different. And that's what I did. We started testing a lot of the different things. that investors could do. And after about two or three months, as cheesy as it sounds, we always say we kind of cracked the code a little bit. And we started generating investor leads, motivated seller leads for around $8 to $12 a lead and started generating pre-booked motivated seller appointments, which is very sexy, obviously, for anywhere from $20 to $60 an appointment. And it was amazing. So we kind of launched it off and really started doing it full stream. helped a ton of investors, but that's kind of how I fell into the world of lead generation

and teaching me how to generate leads and just had a blast and learned a lot and pumped for where it's headed. Got it. Well, gosh, that whole explanation killed about three of my questions. So, I'm sorry. No, that's perfect. We're very efficient around here. Yes.

So I know that you worked primarily, you got started working with real estate agents. and you've made a transition and started to pay attention to real estate investors. You know, one of the misconceptions out there, I think, is people think there's a lot of overlapping responsibility or duties or just, you know, what they do between real estate agents, real estate investors. And, you know, I've been an agent and I'm an investor. And I know that not to be the case by any means. But one place where they do have a lot of similarities is that,

have to go out and generate their own business, right? They have to generate their own leads. Typically, they're looking for two different types of people. So I'm curious with the marketing strategies that you have in place and what you teach and what you do for your clients, what's the nuances there? What makes, what differentiates those two approaches to generating leads? Really, it's the consumer. It's not the investor. It's not the agent. It's, it's the mindset of the consumer. You know, there's three basic consumer levels of awareness when it comes to making those types of decisions. And when you look into the mindset of the consumer, you realize, you know, there's a, there's a huge difference in somebody that's going to sell their house

retail and somebody that's going to sell their house to an investor. And in a lot of cases, it stems from some type of major life events, which is bankruptcy, it's pre-foreclosure, it's divorce, it's parental loss. And so when you dig into that and you really start analyzing the prospect, that's where you kind of visualize and you can see the biggest strategic difference. You know, the things that we would say to somebody that needs to sell their house now for cash is absolutely different than somebody in a market like this that can sell for $60,000, $80,000 over asking on any given day of the week, you know, it's just two completely different messages. There's obviously maybe overlap in the fact that both prospects want to sell,

but there are completely totally night and day when it comes to the reasons that they want to sell or the reasons they must sell. So this is the biggest thing that we've really seen. And I think the biggest mistake that a lot of people make and trying to, you know, market here or market there is not getting to know the consumer. Just trying to throw some stuff out there and hope that it works, you've really got to dive into the mind of the person that you're trying to do business with and you've got to understand everything about them.

And that's what we did. We spent more time analyzing the prospect than we ever did. Once we figured out the prospect, the Facebook ads part of it was very easy. The funnels were easy. The emails were easy. The follow-up, the branding, like everything was simple. But you got to study the mindset of the consumer. Right.

Yeah, it's pretty much marketing 101. You have to know who your customer is and you have to know what they want, right? And then you start crafting a message that gives them what they want. 100%. Right? Marketing is messaging, but you got to know who the hell you're talking to if you just want to and then make any type of difference. So your service, do you guys, you know, you mentioned a course and then you mentioned what you do.

So do you have kind of two levels of service, one where you teach people how to do it and then another portion where you actually do it for them? Yeah, we absolutely do. I'm an educator man. I love self-educated in a lot of ways and love being able to pour back into people and add value and help people understand how to do that. I think there is such a just an insanely cool value to knowing how to do what you need to do to go out and grow to business because you never know what's going to happen, when it's going to

happen. If you're paying rent instead of owning, you know, it's sometimes it's not the best situation. And so, you know, we love to lead with education, but so many investors are like me, they want to exchange their money for money, not their time for money. And so we predominantly in the investment space have more of a service that we offer. that, you know, we generate leads for investors or generate pre-book appointments for investors where they can kind of sit back and stay in their lane and we can stay in ours because, you know, like I was saying earlier, there's so much focus that needs to take place to be a

wholesaler or to be a flipper or to be whatever type of investor you might find yourself being. And so when you when you tack on that, you know, being a Facebook marketer as well, it sometimes it can get busy. I can argue both sides of this because I believe you're a market. or before you're anything because if nobody knows who you are what you do and and why you do it, you're never going to get to do the investing part of the business. But there's a lot of predominantly most of our student-based client bases in a point where they're working to create leverage more than attempting to learn a new skill.

So we absolutely will teach and educate you, but on the flip side of that, we'll generate leads for you. We'll generate appointments for you any day the week. Right. Yeah, I'm all about convenience and leverage. So I'd rather have you to do it for me. So with that said, you can generate an actual appointment with a motivated seller for 60 to 80 bucks. That's raw cost, you know.

And that's not necessarily in every market. Some markets, it's 200 bucks, 300 bucks, raw costs. In some markets, we had somebody get a motivated seller for $34 in New Jersey, right? So it varies from market to market. And I think everybody probably knows the lead in Tulsa, Oklahoma is not nearly as valuable as a lead in San Diego, California. But there's major differences, I think, from market to market. And that's raw costs. That's you doing it yourself.

When it comes to us doing it, obviously there's some service fees that are built into the cost per lead or the cost per appointment. But we are. I mean, we're seeing some insane numbers where most people are trying to get, you know, a lead from a $7,000 mail drop where they're getting less than 1% response rates or they're trying to get a lead from $150 in PPC. we're seeing actual pre-booked name, email phone number, physical address, and a time to meet. All you got to do is pick the phone up and confirm the appointment. It's been pretty powerful to watch for sure. Sure, that's nice. So, I mean, even a 400, 500 bucks, an appointment, that's still a really remarkable deal, right?

Compared to everything else out there. So, I mean, obviously, if that's what you're doing and these are closing, then you're having no shortage of clients and no one's but I but I know that's how that almost came out wrong what I'm trying to say is that you know a lead they they vary in their their intensity and the timing the one it's actually going to close and then there's the other big variable is the investor or the person that's going out on the appointment themselves and what are some of yeah I'm sorry I was just saying in their ability to close that totally totally so I was kind of seeing um what are the the the biggest mistakes you see people making when they say go out on those appointments and they don't

get the deal. It's because you're too obsessed over the deal. I mean, at the end of the day, I think investors especially can get too wrapped up in numbers. It's just the numbers game, numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers, but at the end of the day, you have to realize that people are people. And one of the biggest mistakes that I see is investors picking up the phone trying to close a lead in less than five minutes on an appointment when what you are actually, if you sit back and think about it, forcing someone to do is admit the reality of their situation, which is, damn, I did just get a divorce. I did just go bankrupt. I did just lose my parents. And you got this schmuck sitting here trying to get me to sell them the last part of whatever,

you know, I might be holding on to. And so I think if you sit back and you look at it, the least relevant topic of conversation is the house that you're, you're going to. to be buying. The most relevant topic of conversation is who are you, what are you, why are you, what's going on? Let me tell you my story, man. I've been bankrupt. I know exactly what you're going through. I've lived through this, man, and I want to give you some pointers and teach you how to get through this. And so I think that the biggest pivot that can be made is, you know, stop trying to buy houses and start trying to build relationships. And you will be just absolutely blown away at how many more houses you buy. I never had wholesale a deal in my entire life. But I was getting

a lot of kickback. Obviously, you know, when you sell somebody, you can generate a seller lead for eight bucks. There's a little barrier of BS. Like, no, you can't. You can't do that. It's not possible, whatever. And so I say, you know, I'm going to use my own strategies. I've never wholesale a deal my entire life. I'm going to go buy a house. So put out a Facebook ad. Less than $150 an ad spend. I bought a house for $40,000. I had to call my buddy to tell me how to fill out the contracts. I had no idea what I was doing. Bought the house for $40K, sold it for $502 a week later. Profited $10,800. $102 after expenses, title expenses and marketing expenses. And just prove that you don't need

all the mail campaigns. You don't need to hard sell somebody. I walked in that $40,000 house. Guy was wearing no shirt and his brother and he were fighting and, you know, there had to be a cop there for me to talk to anybody about the property. And you know, at the day, I sat my, I sat myself down on that crusty old couch and I just built a relationship with this guy. We talked about hunting in Iowa. We talked about Harley-Davidson. We talked about anything you wanted to talk about. And it made the sales process, the closing process, really easy to where they, you know, even

admitted what they wanted out of the deal, which was better than I was even, you know, you know, it was less money than I was going to offer. So it's just fascinating what happens when you stop trying to close deals and you start trying to build relationships. You know, people are people, man. And you got to realize when you jump on the phone, you're asking them to, admit that their life's in shambles and that's the fact and so I think that's the biggest strategic mistake that I see for sure that's just good old fashion rapport building

oh 100% it's it's good old stuff that most people have have have lost like you have lost much with yeah I've been on a big push lately it's your people skills is what pays the bills more than anything else in this business so absolutely super so lead generation it's always been a big business people are always willing to pay and looking to pay for convenience and just getting the result. I think with the market moving in the direction, shifting in the way that it's shifting right now, like lead generation is even in greater demand. So there's a lot of competition out there for you and in that circle or that business.

What's one piece of bad lead generation advice you see out there that just kind of drives you crazy? I think that the bad lead generation advice that I'm seeing right now is that you need to dial for dollars and you need to send mail and you need to do that and and usually when somebody says hey man it's not working what's the proverbial response do more of it go knock more doors go not go call more people and even if facebook ads weren't working the way that they were working for us right now it's still horrible advice because when you look at the fact that it's 2018 and if you take a high level investor and somebody knocks on his door, what's he going to do? He's probably not even going to

answer the door, right? You take an investor, he gets cold called every day to sell some product to help his investment business. He's likely not even going to answer the phone. And so you look at the fact that most investors throw away every single shred of junk mail they get in their inbox. Why is my question? Why are you ready? recommending something that you hate, something that you are so inconvenience with, you won't mess with yourself, something that you literally shred up and throw in the trash and telling people to do more of it. Is it because you get compensated more? I don't understand this, this theory any longer. Like, look, it's 2018. People like to be marketed to a different way. So stop trying to fight and

save a traditional form of marketing that is dead. Who on earth can really get that jacked up about a less than 0.00 whatever percent response rate on direct mail. It's just absurd to me that somebody can push that kind of advice knowing how much it works. But I believe, and not to knock any investment guy out there, it's just because there haven't been that many more options. Yeah, PPC's great, but it's a buck 50 to $200 a lead. Yeah, there are other things out there, but there's not necessarily been anything that's come about that has worked that well. And I am in no way, shape, or form saying that I'm the white knight and I'm the guy that's going to save it all because that's, I think that's totally petty. And I don't believe that.

I just, you know, looking at what we've done, we've gotten to another consumer, we've created four or five angles that work very well. And in most any market that we've tested and are running ads for people, we're getting great results. I'm not trying to hype anybody up and then knock anybody down. It's just, you know, stop pushing messaging that. you know doesn't work and that quite frankly if somebody did it to you you wouldn't respond to in your own regard so why you know i think you're certainly onto something i think the the um society just the customer they get a little bit more savvy you know as time goes on and you can even see it just with each little platform or new trick or technology or approach out there

you can see it in copywriting you can see it in even like facebook messenger bots and stuff like the the market or the customer gets smart really really quickly and they're getting smarter faster and faster to where you've got this small little window where this one little thing works right and i think you're you're right with the with direct mail i mean it still works for us but the response rate certainly is nowhere near what it used to be for us right so i can see that's how That's how marketing products work. I mean, direction for really good,

really, really, really good for a long time. But so to TV advertising, right? That's why, you know, so many people have made so much money on Seinfeld. But at the end of the day, the evolution of marketing,

the evolution of sales is that you've just certainly got to be looking and consistently got to be evolving the way that you do things and the way you do business. And you're right. The consumer does wise up real fast, no pun intended to what you're, you're marketing to them. It's just the facts.

And we try to really pay attention to those types of things, which is why we consistently, you know, when I started my training company for the agents, I had one campaign that we taught people. And as we look at it now, we have like 16 or 17 campaigns that work really, really well. You've got to consistently evolve your message. Right. Because people will. I think innovation tracking and measuring and then evolving and innovating is our key to marketing. And it always has been.

That hasn't changed. Always has been. It always will be. That's just 100%. Totally. Cool. Let's get, excuse me,

Grant, let's get really, let's get practical. What's one actionable piece of advice you could give to the audience to start generating more leads for themselves?

I think that you've got to understand if you're going to go off and do this to yourself, you just need to educate yourself more so around the prospect and who it is that you want to do business with. I mean, that's just key. And when you understand the intricacies

of, what somebody's going through their pains, their struggles, and how you can solve those problems. It gets really, really simple to craft a message to market to those people. But if you pay attention to this one distinct thing, and that is that, you know, direct mail campaigns still work to an extent because of the message, because of the offer, because of what you're putting out there. The only thing that's getting hurt in this situation is how many people are actually looking at your direct mail. Okay. One thing I ever did was took what worked offline and brought it online. And so if you look at your direct mail, how can you take what that says and make a Facebook post out of it? I mean, it's just as simple as that. It's not rocket science. It's just, I'm going to take what that postcard says and I'm going to

put that on Facebook and then get really good at targeting. You know, the message is important, but that's been proven time and time again over the last several decades by what's worked offline. Take what you're doing offline and bring it online and then target it to the right type of person, whether that is geo-targeting a specific neighborhood, you know, type it in the address and just targeting the neighborhood, or it's targeting a list of probates, which you can upload a list, you can upload tax records, you can upload all that data into Facebook and they'll build audiences for you based on it, target the right prospect with the right message, and you will get interactions. You'll get leads, you'll get likes, you get comments, you'll get shares.

and, you know, if you're just starting out, you've got to interact with all that. You know, you know, having a good direct marketing campaign in Facebook, great. Having a good dialed in sales process on the back end of that, it's paramount to the success of, you know, lead generation in any capacity. If you're going to be somebody that's going to call you from a direct mail campaign, you've got to know how to handle that lead. It's no different than Facebook ads you. If you get a good lead from Facebook, you still have to know how to handle the situation, what to say and how to build rapport. how to close that person on the relationship and then how to inevitably get that appointment booked. So if you're trying to figure out like how could I go out and take what Grant says and apply it,

take A, what's worked offline? Okay, craft the same message online. And then B, who do I need to target? Pay attention to the types of things that these types of prospects are searching right now and they're talking about bankruptcy, divorce, foreclosure. they're more than likely looking at appraisals. They're looking at Zillow trying to figure out how much their homes worth, what, you know, some estimate sites.

Just pay attention, jump into the mind of the consumer. Stop thinking like an investor. Think like a consumer. And craft a message that you know that would resonate and target it to the right person. Cool. Advice, right on point. I like it. Hey, Grant, we're almost out of time.

If someone wanted to reach out to you, what would be the best way for them to do that? Yeah, best way to do that is just go to my website. like grantwise.com, L-I-K-E-Grantwise.com. You can connect with me there. You can see about our various programs. You know, connect with me on Facebook. I would love to meet with you. We'd love to answer your questions.

We'll love to interact with you, add value any way that I can. Super. All righty. Well, thanks for being here. Let's do it again. Yeah. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

Cool. You bet. All righty. I'm Matt Terrio. God bless to your success. I'll see you next week for another episode of Thought Leader Thursday. Take care. This podcast.

is a part of the C-suite radio network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-sweetradio.com.