Heads In Beds Show - Lifecycle Of Homeowner Marketing That Works

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

In this episode, Conrad and Paul cover homeowner acquisition, building better owner prospect lists, personalized outreach, AI-generated marketing, direct mail, getting homeowners to opt in, building brand credibility, improving your sales and follow-up process, and more! Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteBook A Call With Us🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Bed Show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host, Conrad. And I'm your co-host, Paul. All right, Paul, predicting a good show today. What is going on? Good afternoon. What's happening?

It feels like fall in Minnesota. This is the, as I've been walking with the boys to school in the morning, we've talked about how, hey, this is what the rest of the country who gets just 80 degrees and sunny and bright, shiny weather, they don't get to enjoy kind of these, these cool, multi-color fall fully, just evening afternoon type thing. So I'm embracing that as best I can because I know next is no shoveling, and God, I don't want to do that.

But it's the cycle. We get the third season to get the fourth season. So I guess that's... We'll enjoy three right now and we'll get the last one. But how are you, sir? You don't have to deal with that stuff. Although, fall, what is fall? What do you get for fall?

We just get good weather. Yeah, yeah, not quite. Not right now. It'll get there, certainly, soon enough. But now this is the best month to come to the beach. I always tell people come more so early September, more so than later in September, where you get good weather and everything's wide open. It's not busy.

Things aren't packed out, which I always feel like is a valuable time to come. Things are cooling down a bit here. Maybe it's just like the next week. The weather is a little bit cooler. And it'll be in the 50s, 60s, then it'll warm right back up. And then it'll probably be back in the 80s again. But I think it's great because for me, 80 is delightful compared to 110, which is what we got this summer a little bit.

Yeah, we had snow in January, and then here we are getting 110 degrees in summer. So it's been a little extreme here in South Carolina this year. I would appreciate just a mild, long-lasting fall because, yes, our winter is nothing like your winter in terms of like punishment. But you see, it doesn't get cold enough, though, where here's my thing. Once you move here and you've lived here for X number of years, you get used to, it becomes normal to you until this is the winter. And then when it is 30 or 20 degrees and you think you have enough to be outside and play golf like me, for example. And then you're out there, you're like, ah, this really isn't warm enough, but like I'm convincing myself that it's fine, but it's really not fine. how it all shakes out. Also, I think there's a little bit head cold stuff going around as well,

so perhaps the voice is not as tuned in as it normally is, but that's right. We'll get it going. Yeah. Speaking of things that aren't tuned in, I think most vacation rental managers often aren't very tuned into this idea of like home motor marketing has a cycle or has a bit of a circular appearance a little bit at times. I think what I've seen over and over again in my career, and I suspect you've seen even more of it than I have is this idea that we can fix one part of this cycle or fix one part of this system and then we're good to go. Check the box. We're good to go. We don't even do anything else. And I think what you would I've learned many times now over and over again, is that there's kind of these major checkpoints,

major pieces that you've got to get right. And when one link in that chain is a little bit weak and you pull on it and it's not as strong as the others, your results are generally speaking pretty poor, like they're not very good. And it's hard to go through a system where you get everything right. I'm not saying that it's easy, but that is what you actually require to create excellent results with the homeowner marketing. So not I get a lead here and there, but like I've consistent leads things come in all the time. And I think there are a lot of ways that people think, if I just fix this one thing, I'm good, I've got it checked off. And it's just not the case. So maybe just your high-level thoughts before we dive in,

Paul into this idea of call it life cycle marketing, call it whatever you want to call it, but this idea that there's a connected list of systems and brand standards and your website and your marketing that all has to line up for this stuff to work well. We talk about that for a second before we dive into the specifics. Yeah, I think the way you said it and it rushed down because I wanted to make sure I remembered it.

Cycle. Yeah. I think for a lot of people, property managers, marketers in this space, the owner's side of thing is more linear where we reach a final point, and that final point is closing the deal, where we hand it off to sales.

But that's not where it ends, and I think that's where a lot of people, once they get to that point and have gotten the property and the door, they forget that we're not at the end of it, and there's a whole new cycle that starts. So I do. I like the way you're thinking,

like that we're talking about that, and just the way you were explaining that because I do think that it keeps the concept of homeowner marketing in the same vein as the traveler's side because there it is. It is a cycle.

We are working to get those reviews. We are working to get those rebookings. But again, once we get to that closed or signed contract closed deal, it just kind of peters off for, I would say, a great majority of property managers. So really just focusing on that area and continuing the process,

So it is more cyclical. It is more repeatable. It is more scalable as people try to grow their business. Yeah. Just this idea of seasonality, I think you touched on that, I think is valuable too because I think what people also want to do is they want to, and I understand this line of thinking. I'm not disagreeing with what I'm about to say here, but there's nuance to it, which is I want to put the least amount of effort and money impossible, but I want to get the maximum

output possible. So I want to put, I only want to do one mailer or two mailers, Paul. I don't want to send a mailer all the time. Come on now. That's too much. But I want 20 homeowner leads to talk to it. like, okay, those ideas are incongruent. We're going to talk about concurrency to in a second. We can't put the minimum of effort in on mail, on direct mail, on cold email, on Google advertising,

on meta advertising, on affiliates, on realtor, on all these things, and then say we want the maximum result, right? If you, and one thing that's actually not in our list as I think about that, that maybe we've talked about ad analyzing, but I should have put in her outline that I didn't, is also the idea of time passing. Often, I think a new manager comes in a market and starts to compare themselves to someone that's been around for a long time. And I'm like, we get to realize, right? This guy's been at this for 15 years, or 10, years or seven years. You've been around for a year. So, like, he's had more chance to build up equity at his brand and more people know him because he's just been there longer. It's like,

you can't really manufacture that overnight. Even if someone did give you very high budget for direct mail or very high budget for digital advertising, social advertising, cold email, whatever, like you can't fake time in the market. Like, you can make a splash, but ultimately it's all going to come back to this idea of people know him or her and they trust him or her to manage their property because there's been lots of evidence to suggest that, which is one of our talking points we'll come to in a second. But yeah. Yeah, it's very rare. that a company jumps into a market with 25 properties, if it's not through some type of acquisition.

But when you think about an acquisition, you're acquiring the equity that has been built up by either the previous brand and previous business or if there was some type of... If you're just acquiring 25 somehow individually owned homes, that might be interesting. But for the most part, you're not just going to come in with something built in.

It is the, I think we've talked about it, probably ad nauseum on these owner conversations, is you have to have your branding down. Like the branding is the most important marketing you're really going to do because if people aren't recognizing that brand, they're not going to get into that funnel. That is a big trust verifier. We'll talk about all the USPs. Everybody's got the same USPs. I'm sorry, that's the reality.

Yes, there are some that probably move the needle a little more, but ultimately we're working with the same 12 to 15-ish areas. So it is, like really define. If you're just doing that and you haven't defined your brand, then the leg to stand on is just simply not there, and everything else kind of comes across is lip service. And when it's lip service that several other managers in your market are saying very similar things, again, you can see where it starts to fall flat

and the conversations just become harder. When that handoff between marketing and sales, becomes harder because this warmish lead is cooling by the minute and it's just not helping us like that. Let's build on that one. This idea of maybe this is a good way to think about it too. If you've got someone all the way to pass your direct mail piece of marketing or past your ad that you did online or pass your cold email that you did to email them or reach out to them, and then they get to your website and they're not impressed by what they see, then that's the problem, right? Like you said, brand.

If someone gets there and then they're not excited about working with you, if they don't see, by the way, other properties that are similar to theirs, they're going to bounce, they're going to leave, which is why I think a lot of people do this high volume of outbound marketing messaging on whether it be any of those channels, direct mail, Google advertising, Met Advertising. They get very poor results back or no results back. And they go, like, oh, it was your fault, Mr. Direct Mail guy that sold me the direct mail list or sold me the direct mail idea. Or hey, Mr. Ad Guy, like, your ads didn't work very well. It's like, let's look at the full thing. Let's look at the full picture end to end. Because I believe, and I've always believed this, I can set up the best ads possible. I've always felt this in the guest marketing side of things for a long time. and if we send them to a poor landing page or if we send them to the landing page that doesn't have what they're looking for,

it doesn't matter how well my ads were, quote, unquote, targeted. It doesn't matter how well my copy was written on the actual ad unit itself. None of that matters if once they get there, they don't want to proceed. So it's tough because I think it requires second and third and fourth order of thinking to get through the problems one by one

and say, okay, if the brand is not aware enough, how do we solve that? There's not really a simple solution other than, you have to build a lot more proof points that you're good, which is why honestly, I think the hardest thing to do is to go from, let's say, like, five to 25 to 35 properties. Like that slog is super challenging, so I'm not diminishing it.

Because basically you just have to do whatever you need to get in front of people. And it might mean like doing things you don't want to do in the future or you find distasteful or you don't enjoy doing them or whatever the case may be. I don't know what that is. But like a lot of times it's working with affiliates and referrals and paying them higher than average commissions. Maybe it's doing work for a reduced cost or a lower cost because you've got to figure out a way to make things more economical. There's a lot of layers to that. But it's no one really wants to say that or do that out loud. Like we want it to be easy.

Like everyone wants, like I said earlier, to put in the least. amount of effort, gets the most amount of outcome, and, like, very few people are actually willing to do the work in that period. But once you have some proof, it becomes a lot easier, but it's like getting that proof, I admit is totally the hard part. And I've been that way, like, to reflect in my own business for a second, this past summer is 10 years that I've been a business for myself starting back in July of 2016. It was like, I used to sell ASCR retainers for four or five dollars and do like an obscene amount of work for $400, like absurd, like to the point where I was working with the time were just like, oh, okay, like you're reaching out to me

too much here you do, like you're doing all this stuff for me. But it's because I desperately needed clients. Like I had more time than clients. And now it's the opposite problem. I have more clients than time. That's why you have a team of people to help you do the work. But those things have to evolve themselves over time. And I think that's where a lot of these like missteps occurs that they put very little effort into everything you just described and everything I talked about there with branding and putting a good front on the front of their business. And then they were shocked when they send a postcard and get poor results. It shock them. I do. I think about for example of the comparing top 100, we're doing all those big companies. And you think of like even

the biggest companies. We're talking about thousands. But kind of that secondary list, I think like 50 to 100, it's 100 to 200 rentals. And that's big. I think that we get into this scaling

thing of, it's a race to get inventory. I get that. But racing requires a little, this type of race requires a little bit of pacing. And I do think that that was a conversation than had often is that if you do get four leads in, five leads in, ten closed contracts in the month,

can you actually sustain that if it comes into you? You have the operational efficiencies. Do you have everything in place at 40? That's going to work at 50. That's going to work at 60 over the course of a month or over the course of two months. I think that's where the idea, the concept, the dream, have that B-Hag, have that big, hairy audacious goal. I think that's really important. important land on an area that's sustainable, a growth plan that's sustainable. And if you have opportunities to go beyond that, that's great. But it is. It's the people who do expect 10, not leads a month, 10 closed deals a month or 20 closed deals a month. And I think that the only reason you would need that to sustain your business is if you're losing 10 lead, 10 owners a month. And

That's the tail end of this, is that we talked about a little bit last week, is you have to have that understanding of you're going to lose owners, you're going to lose properties, you're going to lose rentals in your portfolio, and hopefully that's a matter of attrition, of maybe having some homeowners that weren't interested in improving their home and weren't getting the most out of, weren't allowing you to get the most value there. And it's not a matter of, oh, you guys have gotten so big that you can't take care of me anymore and I don't feel like my home's getting taken care of. I don't feel like I'm getting the right reporting.

I don't feel like I'm getting as much money and some of these other homes that just came on are getting a better experience than I am. And I think that again, that's that when we get to that 150, 200, 200, 250 bigger-sized companies, those are the conversations that start happening. And again, those are fun conversations to have, but you have to start thinking about those at 50, 60, and 70 as well

and those scaling mechanisms that are going to allow you to, bring on those homes in places maybe that you haven't managed before or trying to expand yourself there. I think that that's, it's a, it's the conversation, it's the reality of readiness for growth that we, we talk about readiness for growth in a lot of different areas, but operationally, yeah, we're not behind the scenes, so we don't know how your staff is going to take, how your housekeeper is going to take care of maintenance manager, you're going to do this and that. But you have to have those conversations. You have to be thinking about that.

And not just the, how much more booking revenue can I bring in? How many more bookings can I take? How many more guest reviews? How many, all the positive there? But let's think about what happens when I have 10% more work, 10% more everything going on. How does that impact what I'm able to do? with my other marketing as well. It is.

It is where all these conversations do become much more strategic on the owner's side, I think, because it's not just the immediate get the booking in, take care of the guests. It's that shorter cycle. Yeah, you want to have retargeting with guests. That's the dream. We're going to get three, four bookings, a lifetime value over five, ten years. In order for you to maintain your business, need to have a long-term relationship and just with these homes and these homeowners.

So, I don't know, it's just a different way of looking at the whole funnel, I think, sometimes. And it puts a different premium on the value of some of those data points that we talked about. Like it is. Do you, if you can isolate the right homeowner, if you can isolate not just doing it en masse and hitting a thousand people and hoping for the best, if you can, really hit the right units or really identify, do I want homes that sold for a certain amount? Or is it more important that they have the right location? Or is it more important that they have?

What are the actual facets of that home that are going to improve my marketing, improve my sales process, hopefully, and improve my conversion rate, and hopefully get more homes in my portfolio? But that's a lot. We can dovetail in the data. What do you think about that? Yeah. Yeah, I agree.

It's always obvious, right? once you see it happen, but this idea of like increased churn, churn popping up and then you fighting, I call it the churn monster. I've been bit by the churn monster before and it sucks and it's painful. So I think anyone who's not been bit by the churn monster, I guess it's like a cold like I have right now. It's eventually you're just going to catch it. It is what it is what it is what it's often the churn monster is outside your control. Sometimes it is in your control and I've had both happen to me in my career. That's for sure. But working with some of these clients, it's like, sometimes it's, you could have done something in some cases. It's like, who knows what they're

doing in their own life and their own business and you can't really pivot. change out of it. So couldn't agree more. I wouldn't go back maybe because we skipped over one or two things that weren't intentional, but just flowing through the flow of conversation, we skipped back over two things. We'll go back for a second. Because I think at the end of the day, it's like knowing who your ideal homeowner is that you want to work with, being able to deliver for them and then getting the right

data are like your initial starting points. Because if you say, as you said, funny enough, the number one thing that I remember you and I working together in the past C that would like cause our eye to Twitch a little bit was this, what are you looking for? And they'd say, oh, anything in zip code, 295A2, right? Or something like that. And it's like, okay, let's 17,000 second homeowners in that market or whatever. So it's like, let's narrow the down a little bit, right?

So it's funny that the smallest clients think that they need to go after the broadest targeting. Because I think they're just so hungry that they're just like, I'll eat anything. I'll take anything. Which can be a good thing in a way to get you going and you need like to be ramen profitable. That's like a YC thing. Get to where you're making a few great amount of profit. Like we kind of need that to get the business, some health going. But I think once you're a little bit more established than getting the right data,

knowing who you're going after is a thing to match up very importantly. Because then what's funny about all your marketing after that is then you know who's a good fit and who's not a good fit right away. And then you get to say the words that we all like to say as small business owners, which is, no, we are not a good fit for you. No, we are not going to take on your home because we don't service that particular area. We don't service that particular type of property. We don't think it's a good fit because of these five reasons, et cetera.

And maybe it's salvageable. Like I have a client, for example, the other day who told me, got a lead recently. Not recently. Sorry, got a lead a while ago. The home would just went live recently because I had to get renovated. So he's like, I will work with your home. I believe in your home's location. I think it's great.

I think we want something over in this side of the pond, basically, like this lake. You don't have anything over there? I believe in your idea here. But, like, it is not at all ready for what you need to be ready for in order for this thing to work well. So, like, we got to take this thing down, not to the studs, but like, we got to take this thing down and renovate it. He showed him a vision. He showed him his before and after. And then they were like, oh, cool.

We're down for that. They did it. They took it out. It took almost a year. Now it's ready. It got ready a little while ago. They got seven, eight, ten summer weeks booked. They're off to a bang and start.

it's going to do well next year. I'm sure next year will be the best year they've ever had with the property. So it's like that can be something that you have to work on where it's like getting in front of the right homeowner might mean doing a lot more work than normal. But I'll tell you what, that homeowner, barring something weird happening, are they ever going to turn out of this client who gave the right advice, said, hey, this is the property, this way your property needs to be set up. Help them get them set up that way.

You might have charged some V for that, but nothing crazy. Now they're making, let's say, double triple off the home what they were making before. Sure, they invest in the property. But it's like they're going to be with them for the next 10 years, right? because they're like, this guy saved what would have been like a very mediocre result and turned it into an A plus result. And we're very happy with it. So, so again, getting the right data, knowing who you're going after, then getting that right data, which is easier said than done. Paul can tell you some stories about that.

Then I think it's what you did say a minute ago, which is now you have to get in front of them in different ways. Because the truth is that people aren't going to hear about you from one mailer and be like, oh, of course, here's my multimillion dollar home. Thanks, Paul. I'm so glad I got this one mailer. The mailers is great. I'm not saying don't do mailers. Mailers are awesome. Do mailers.

They're great. but they're just one factor amongst, let's say, half a dozen that's going to potentially lead to better outcomes. So I'll tell you what works really well in my experience. You get a mailor in front of them, and they see your Facebook ad, and you have a cold call that goes out to them, and they see that you're active in the community. And they go to your lending page, and it's really good. And then they're like, okay, this is the people that I want to work with, right? You have that aspirational type of lead generation as opposed, I guess I'll respond to you if you just keep bothering me, but that's not really what you're after. So those two things, as simple as they are, getting the right data, getting in front of them in different ways can occupy a lot of time.

but that's almost like the prerequisite in order to get to that like higher level of growth from there. So your thoughts on those two before we can build off those to the next piece. I think that's, I think truly it getting in front of them and getting in front of them in many ways. I think that's so important. It is we talked a lot of omni-channel marketing. And there's probably a discussion to be had about multi-channel versus omnichannel. I think it multi-channel is that you're just marketing on different channels. They're not really saying the same things, but if you're doing it, you're hitting a lot of channels.

that is a way to market. That channel marketing is really bringing all of those channels together, making sure that messaging is unified. And that was something that if you were going to be effective, really effective with these owner campaigns, that's what we focused on. And it does. It helps.

But I think that's kind of the value of getting the right data there, is making sure that so you get this important information for postcards, can you still reach out to these people? via whether that's SMS, whether that's through digital ads, doing things like that. I think that's where the value of that data is so important because how enhanced the data is, can you get first name? The golden seven for me when we were doing Facebook ads for custom audience marketing, first name, last name, city, state, zip, phone, email.

If I can get some combination of those seven, phone email big. That's a really big one because that's going to help our match rate. But if I can pull together those golden seven data points, there's a chance. We might not get a whole lot of delivery, but if we deliver, I don't need to deliver to a thousand people. I need to deliver to the right hundred people. It's the same reason when we did Facebook ads that I was never that keen on expanding to a 1% lookalike or 2% lookalike. Because how is Facebook knowing the data that we're struggling? to get of absentee owners or who's got a vacation rental permit.

Facebook doesn't know that. They're going to try to match people by likes, interests, all these things. Cool. But you're going to spend, you're going to waste a lot more than you're going to make back on some of that. So I do. I think that's, we have conditioned ourselves as an industry to think big numbers. Law of big numbers is going to allow you to grow at the pace you want to grow at. Sure.

That's true. We can buckshot. got it. Or we can be a little more tactical. We can be a little more, I would say, make sure we're grabbing instead of a thousand records, the 200 right records. There's 250 right records. And everybody who sells that is not going to be happy hearing this. I'm sorry, listen away. I hope you're listening. That's great. Leave a review. But that is. I think it's way more important to have, and you, we are, you already said it a couple times in this episode, but way more important to have the right data,

100 records of the right data, as opposed to 1,000 records of data that ultimately isn't going to translate to a better performance on the marketing itself. Yeah, yeah. To build on that, right? I think that we are attracted to big numbers in our dashboard, because to be fair, it's almost like,

that does work, generally speaking, a little bit better on guest marketing. Yes. And the example I've given over my career many times has been like, I'll get you all the followers you want, on the world for a fraction of a penny each, we're going to go target your Facebook page, and we're going to get followers in Pakistan.

And like someone from Pakistan may never come to Destin, Florida or San Diego. I shouldn't say never. But like very rarely will they ever do that versus someone from Scottsdale, Arizona or Charlotte, and North Carolina. But it's going to cost us 10x, 20x, 30x more perils to get that. So which do you want? Do you want 10,000 followers? Because I can get that for you.

Or do you want 2,000, 1,000 of the right followers? Because I can also get that for you, but it's going to be more expensive. So it's the same logic. It's the same thing. It's just we don't like that. We don't like to be told that. I think as in the small business ownership side of things we think, we got to get all the reach we can, we got to get all the things we can and hope to get lucky and find the right person.

So, yeah, couldn't agree more. And then just to build on an opt-in list in general, I think you hinted at that, but just build on that for one more moment, it would be the larger your opt-in list, the more valuable long-term. I think in the short-term, having a list of everyone who is a short-term rental owner, single property host, etc., in your market, you're going to see some, there's a certain percentage of people that are in the market, and they're there right now and they're ready to buy. And if you can get your message in front of them, that's where you're quick leads come from. And gosh, is it great to get a lot of those. But the truth is that a very

small portion of the market is open to changing at any one given moment during the month of, we're recording this in September, during the month of seven, headmer, maybe it's a bit higher than normal versus, let's say, July or August. But still, broadly speaking, there's a very small number of combs are actually going to swap from manager A to manager B or from self-managed to another one. So there is no fast path of success, too, which I think is the other part of it. Whereas you can absolutely get a significant clip of direct bookings pretty quickly or OTA bookings pretty quickly. If the algorithm favors you, you can pick up, I have a client that gets 100 bookings a day from Airbnb, right? So it's like you can feel that kind of quick action happening there. But the truth

is, it just doesn't happen that much or that quickly on the homeowner side of things. If that's the case, you have to realize that it's going to be a slow drip. But again, the slow drip speeds up a little bit when they know about you and you have the ability to contact them. And very few clients that I work with, I say this to everybody and nobody actually wants to do it, which is the more involved you are with your local community group and the more ways that you can put your hand around people and get involved with someone, the easier it is for you to actually do your marketing and advertising those people because they know you, they trust you. So it's like, it's very easy for you to get those things in motion versus you're dead cold. They know nothing

about you, et cetera, et cetera. And what a better hook for I'm local than actually proving it and saying, here's me sitting in the room at the local short-term rental meetup in whatever, Myrtle Beach or Dustin Florida or San Diego or whatever. And here's the five topics that we talked about. Does it matter if it impacts them at all? It's just, oh, this guy knows what's going on. Like, there's that built-in thing. And one more thing I'd add onto that for opt-in lists is that once you have at least a fraction of their attention some of the time, you can talk about your experience. That's one thing that your competitors can't take from you. Your competitors cannot take from you your lived experience with your own project work, with your own things that you've done.

So not to get too meta about like our marketing and what we do, but like I go on LinkedIn and I tell stories about, yes, oftentimes the biggest clients I work with because yes, I learn more from them often. They're spending a lot more on advertising and marketing so I can learn more from that someone who's smaller. But let's be honest, right? Like just laying out the brass tax here. people would trust me more because they're like with a company that does $40 million year in revenue, trust you to run their Google ads. You might be somewhat decent at Google ads. Like I would hope I am.

That's some built-in authority from that. So if you say, hey, here's the year that we had. Let's see you only have one luxury home, but you want 10 of them. Just talk about the one luxury home and what you're doing for that one luxury home. And just say, this is my work with John Doe. John Doe owns 1, 2, 3 Main Street or whatever, 1,23, Oceion Boulevard, blah, blah, blah. And we did these 97 things to the property. And as a result, he was doing 110, you know, a year before.

now he's doing 180. Like that one story, that one case study will bring you a lot of authority in the eyes of someone who's like, oh, I didn't do that. I didn't do an accent wall. I didn't redo photography. I didn't change the interior of the property in this way to make it more appealing. I didn't add a fire pit out back, nor did my manager even suggest that. And then they start questioning it a little bit more.

He's rocking it. He's doing really well at 180. I did 120 this year. I'm not happy with that. I want to do better. Oh, look, here's a guy that's done. So just doing it once and just showing that you can do it once can get you start. It can get you a little bit more down the road versus I've never done it before.

that's where there is this big chasm. But if I'm being honest, you don't have to do it 100 times. You can just prove it that you did it once and then get people to opt in and listen to you and then you talk about it. And not a stales way or it's like sign up with me right now, but just more of like a sharing information way, your results can be significantly better. So yeah, really big believer in that. And I think that people are always just very transactional.

They make a quick pitch and they move on. They pitch their, hey, do you want to list with me? Here's my mailer. Sign up now. It doesn't work. So as a result, they go, whatever, and they just move on. But your goal should be, how can I get everybody who is relevant to be aware of me over the next 24 months, 36 months, five years, et cetera. Because what will happen is the moment they go to

think and raise their hand and say, okay, I do want to switch. I do want to make this change. Then you actually are top of mind versus the 97 postcards they got between whenever they signed up for your list and then are going to wash away because they're like, I know this guy. I don't know these other people. So maybe they're good. Shoot, maybe even somewhere better than you. That may be the case. But if you can prove that you're good enough to and be aware, then like you will win, even if you're not necessarily the best, the absolute top manager of all time. Because let's be honest, inventory kind of gets it skews towards the top, but it is somewhat distributed, right? There's no markets that I've ever seen in my career where it truly is win or take all.

There's like the few, but there's never a market that I've been in where it's like, oh, this one guy has literally every single home. That doesn't really exist. No, I do. I think that's, and maybe in our digital AI world we've gotten away from, like the meetups. Like this is something that I listen to a podcast about like the death of malls, shopping malls. And it's true, like we still value human connection, even though we get less of it, just. by the nature of how we live our lives now. I do.

I think that like being, just being able to sit in front of someone and just talk to them for a little while like we do here. But truly, shaking someone's hand, that makes a huge difference in these owner conversations. There were so many times I can remember getting on with the sales team member, whoever that was with employees clients, and that's what they were talking about.

Yep, they're flying down here to talk. They're flying down here. Like, that is a huge piece. So if you can have those conversations, with people. And again, it doesn't have to be with the owners themselves. It can just be with realtors, could be just with other leaders in your community. That does. That builds up that equity of yourself, your brand personally, whatever it has to be. It makes you, it makes you, plays a little bit, the SEO game, it makes you the expert. It makes you the authority. It gives you

that trustworthiness kind of built in that you can then showcase later on in what you're doing. to market to those people as well. But I think jumping back on the SEO side of things is that if you aren't representing your brand outside of that little space, outside of those little meetups, outside of your website, and when people are doing research, they're seeing something that profile that looks very different than the postcard or the email or the digital ad that just saw, they're going to have some questions there as well. So I think you've got the point here of congruency between your brand of what you're claiming

versus what an owner will actually find out when they're doing that research is pretty critical. And it's a little harder to know, and it is, to do online reputation management. It's still pretty straightforward. You can still do a search of yourself and check it out on chat GPT and all that stuff. But because every answer you get back is customized to you, it's difficult to understand. The incognito window approach to auditing yourself doesn't work nearly as well I've found. with the LLMs.

So that's just something that understanding what potentially it is. You should have an understanding of the personas of your homeowners and things like that. But what kind of questions are they going to ask? And when they ask those questions to an LLM, what are those grounding queries? If we're going to go down that path here, where are those grounding queries going to show you or are they not going to show you? And how can you make sure that you're answering the questions that these homeowners, homeowners ultimately have because it's not just okay look at the property does it have what

I need to travel no we're good it's I have the property now they're looking under the same hood only your business is different than just checking out the amenities like the guests do so yeah yeah yeah there's this big gap right isn't there between like what you want and then what you can actually offer and maybe in their head what they think is realistic which that's your job is like close as much of that gap as possible and explain these things. But it's just communication. Like a lot of marketing, the marketing people put us on a pedestal sometimes. Oh, I'm not a marketing person. I don't know much about marketing. I'm like, do you know how to communicate what you do? Can you talk clearly about what it is that you do to people? Do you, when you're

working with a client with a homeowner, et cetera, do you have the ability to explain what's working well? What's not working well? What you're changing? What you're doing to fix it? Because you're probably good in marketing, right? Unless you just can't communicate into those concepts. You're probably at least going to be decent. Let's give you a C plus. And if we just polish you up a little bit, we're going to make you B plus or an A minus pretty weekly. Because that's all it is. It's just talking to those and packaging things in a way that's appealing for people to understand, which, by the way, and I'm going through my own marketing right now,

it's like, we've got all the ideas out. Sometimes just putting in different formats of different ways to describe it and people to adjust it differently. If you're listening right now, you might like podcasts. You might really like listening to the Paul and I do these podcasts. We've done them for a long time, et cetera. There are people who don't like podcasts at all. So I send them a podcast episode and they're like, don't want to read it, or don't want to listen to it, don't have time.

Don't have a player, not my thing. Totally okay, by the way. I'm fine with it. It's like, cool. Here's the same thing in written format. Read it. okay, I'll read that. Or here's a, in the graphical format, checkbox format.

Okay, I like that better. I can work with that. So very much makes sense. Last one I want to hit on before we come to a close, one we already hit on congruency. But it's just this idea of like there has to be this connectivity between everything you're doing marketing-wise. And then once they get to your landing page, once they research your brand, once they

research your company, all those things have to make sense. If you say you're the best luxury manager in insert market here and they go on your website, there's no luxury properties. Frankly, you're doing yourself more harm than good by calling yourself anything that you're not. So people are going to check out your claims. Believe me, they will check out your claims. They'll read words on your landing page, on your postcards, et cetera, and try to tie that up with what

they is they're doing. And the moment they see bad reviews, the moment they see stuff that doesn't make sense, they're out. They're going to pick someone else because they don't want to. They perceive it as untrustworthy, and that's the worst thing when you're trying to actually get more things in place. I want to come to a close here, maybe on blocking and tackling, which is what you and I said before we for a record on this concept.

But it's all these things are valuable. And these are, I think, all the incremental things that can take you from, like, mediocre to okay, to at least good or very good. And then maybe they take you from very good to excellent when you actually go and build all these things. But as we learned from Brooke, you and I answer the phone. My goodness, right? How many leads were unanswered from leads that you guys drove in the past through some of the marketing efforts that you've been a part of by God, we did all the work. We got them lined up. They got their phone ready. They started to dial this property manager and he or she did not pick up.

Or they go to your landing page. They give you a call and she didn't pick up or he didn't pick up, which sucks. And not only that, they didn't get a call back. That's the one that killed me when Jay did that study a few years ago. It wasn't even the fact they didn't pick up because I'm like, all right, dude, it's hard. If you're small business owner, you don't have sitting there, You don't have 24-7 coverage, it's fine. But to not get a call back is egregious, right? When you leave a voicemail and say, hi, I own this property and I'm interested in listing it with you,

but not get a call back, which is 20, 30% of the data, I think, when Brooke and Jay did that study is like, that's just bonkers. But yeah, answering the phone, nobody has a sales process. I talk to these people all the time. Very few people have a sales process. If they do, it's very loosely defined. But, hey, here's where everybody is in each stage of this process.

Here's all my people that have reached out that I'm looking for information on. Here's the ones that I've got proposals out to. the way, something they can sign. I had this situation recently. You talked about it before in the podcast, but someone that goes in and says, okay, I want to move forward. And then you're like, oh, yeah, cool. Print out that contract I sent you and scan it inside it. And do, just give me a freaking docu-sign. What are you doing? You're trying to save five bucks and you're killing a million home in the process that you could be potentially working on. Follow process. Very few people say yes right away, having a follow process in place, all these kind of things. What's the onboarding

look like? I went and dug it to the hood with someone recently on onboarding process because I was rewriting a description for them. And boy, was this form messy and confusing. And, and challenging and not filled out well. Unboarding itself could be massively improved in most of these companies. And let's be honest, right, their onboarding experience is going to paint their context for how they think you are as a company. If your onboarding is sloppy and chaotic and they don't really know what they're doing and they're having problems, and we've had to make so many tweaks our onboarding process,

I couldn't even tell you all the tweaks that we've made. And I still don't think it's actually very good. I still look at it every day. No, this isn't as good as it can be. It is really an imperative thing that they get a good impression quickly. And then, yeah, yeah, fall up sales process kind of ties back into my final one, which is reaching back out to colder dead leads. So if you've got a list of these opt-in contacts, people that reach out to you that did not close,

there's gold in them hills, man, but you just got to go out and mine it. You've got to have a reason to reach out to them. One thing I'm tweaking our own fellow process that I've seen some clients work on as well is not, hey, Paul, how you doing? Which is what a lot of follow-up is, hey, Paul, I'm wondering if you're still thinking about doing this thing, and you're like, not right now. But rather answering the follow-up or in the follow-up, include an objection that they might have in their head, or even better if you know what their objections are.

Hey, Paul, I know that switching can be painful. You're currently with another property manager. Switching is painful. I totally understand that. here's what we did recently to help this client switch and make it very painless. We did ABCXY Z. So yeah, just thinking of you, thinking of your property, wondering where things are at. We'll let the chat if it has, if you have time, Conrad.

That's going to be way more effective. Or, hey, you're worried about downtime the property. What we can do, by the way, is we can list your property now, and then you can switch it over 30 days from now, and we can get a lot of bookings in that 30-day period. In fact, we just had this happen recently for John Doe over here. And for John Doe, we got him seven bookings in 30 days, which helped ease the cash flow burden or whatever that he was having. Or hey, whatever, I know you really had struggles with your current company when it comes to cleaning inspection. Just wanting to you to know, we saw on board of

Breeze White's this is awesome software that lets us see everything that we're doing in our company and you can go check out this and this and there's pictures and you click the reports. So that way you know what's going on. Again, not sure if your current company's using that, maybe not, but just something to be on board to make this part of the job easier. We'll love to chat. So if you give them actually like some meat and you don't just say, hey, Paul, checking in, you're going to get a little bit response because you may not know what their objection is. I find that's the case very commonly with the sales that kind of falter out in our business is we don't know precisely what they're objection was. It might have been price. Maybe it was timing. Maybe it was like they didn't,

just want to do it right now. Maybe like their mom died. Who knows, right? It could be a million things. But if you're just following up and just giving them reasons to be like, hey, this isn't, if you're worried about this, we have a solution for it. If worried about this, we have a solution for it, et cetera. That's going to be so valuable. But it just goes back to all this idea of like following up, doing the basics, blocking and tackling. And I do think this is a lot of optimization here, where it's 1% improvement here, 3% improvement here, 5% improvement here. And then you stack them all up. And at the end of the year, you're like, oh, I have 20 homes that I didn't because of these things. So I believe it's very valuable. I don't

think it supersedes the other things of the life cycle that we talked about so far of like data offer multi-oomachannel messaging all that kind of stuff but it's super valuable but your thoughts here before we maybe come to close i think that's funny we've laid it out in a way that the marketing is 80 percent the four top four bullet points are 80 percent of course the marketing guys you know that body bullet point the blocking and tackling this is that's the most important part about this truly we can do all all the marketing we want to do in the world is going to go abs is going to go without a a target or go without a result that we're looking for if we're not doing the blocking and tackling.

That's something that and maybe that's something that we should be talking about that, just those bill of points, answering phones, having a sales process, having a follow-up process, doing the onboarding first, before you even think about any of this other stuff, because if you don't have any of that,

I don't think you're going to be set up for success. And I think that it's, or it's going to be much harder. You're going to have to invest more in different ways. And I just think that Yeah, if you have those things already set in place going into when you want to grow, you are going to be much more effective. You're going to give people a better onboarding experience. Homeowners are a better onboarding experience.

And then all those property managers said, oh, yeah, my close rate is 100%. It's because you've gotten homeowner referrals. And you will continue to get those homeowner referrals because you're giving those homeowners a great experience. You're creating that life cycle for that homeowner. to be a reseller of your business, to be an advocate, to be a proponent, to be out there singing your praises. That's what you want to have happen there. So I do. I think that, yeah, it's 80, 20, but it's 50-50.

You've got to be doing all that other stuff, right? And then the marketing will work, and marketing will be more effective if you're working with the right people. Well, last time on that, when you come to close, but I think there are people who optimize their sales process too early. And it's probably, you don't have any leads. You have no leads. So why we're right about the sales process, right? got a perfectly polished ERM. It's dead empty, right? There's not a single soul in there. So I do think that I'm kind of more of a fan of like market sales, advertising, figure that stuff

out a little bit before because, yes, like without that, it's like you don't have a chance to get messy and feel upset about your sales process until you've kind of fumbled a few good leads and then you're like, ah, I got to get better at this, right? So I do think you can tackle that a bit too early, which I'm sure all the sales training people would disagree with, but I do think that is part of the mix. But boy, does it suck to blow your first really good lead where you go, oh my gosh, you don't have a process in place, and have a serum in place. And we've all have that sick in her stomach feeling. I had one recently where, like, someone asked a proposal.

I didn't put it into my process like I should have. And then they emailed me seven days later and went, where's that proposal? And I went, oh, my God, I totally forgot about that. It's like just super embarrassing. It shouldn't have happened. But it did because I didn't put it in my process. If I put it in my process, that would not have happened. We all have to learn these lessons and relearn them over and ever again, don't we?

And that's just kind of part of the fun we call running and operating a small business as it were. So, yeah. One more thing that's super fun, Paul. I know people get a great joy and thrill out of doing it, to be honest with you. I've heard people improving their quality of life, talking about their marriage getting better, talking about their life getting better,

getting richer, et cetera, but doing one thing. It's leaving a podcast review. So go to your podcast app of choice. I can Spotify. We get the most downloads there. Leave us a podcast review. It's almost like a fortune cookie. Like you're going to do that

and then good things are going to happen to you over the next 12 to 24 days. Like just trust in it. There's some chakras that are going to line up for you in your life if you just go leave this podcast review. Because again, there's tens of thousands of you that have downloaded, but we don't have tens of thousands of reviews. Thank you so much.

We'll catch you in the next episode. Hope you have an awesome rest of your day.