Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Okay, guys, we are live.
Hey, guys, thanks for joining us. I'm Heather and this is Andres. Today we have a very special guest. Sean is here with us today. And Andres, do you want to take it? Oh, before I do that, let me give you guys a disclaimer of this is live. We are streaming, so there's no edits. So anyway, any mistake, I literally made a mistake while I was saying any mistakes, any mistakes we make aren't going to be edited out of this podcast, so just bear with us.
Andres, do you want to introduce our special guest?
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Absolutely. I have a pleasure. We have the pleasure here today to have Sean Reddinger. He's a good friend of mine, partner with Cloud realty, mentor in so many areas, and there's so much that we can talk about on this platform and anywhere. But Sean, we brought him to the guest to speak directly about digital marketing. So, Sean, again, pleasure to have you on board, sir. And we'll continue to have this here.
[00:01:01] Speaker C: Cool. Well, happy to be here. So what. What are we talking about today?
[00:01:05] Speaker B: What.
[00:01:05] Speaker C: What do we. What's the message that we need to get out?
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Well, today we want to focus around digital marketing. And before we dive into the specific of a few questions we have for you on, on that particular space, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into the digital marketing space?
[00:01:25] Speaker C: How I got into digital marketing was I was actually moonlighting when I was in the Marine Corps.
And to make a long story short, I was moonlighting on my way out of the Marine Corps working and selling makeup. And so I got into sales selling makeup. And I was. As a. As a 21 year old, I was making 8, 10, $12,000 a month selling makeup. And then how I got started in digital marketing was I actually went into this office building, and this was several years ago, but I went into this office building on the top floor. And I went to the top floor because if they kicked you out, you could hit you each one of the floors on the way down.
And so one of the owners there, you know, I'm super impressed by the way. This is like a. This is like a corner office, you know, and this is in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and corner office MacBooks. I got a whole team, you know, all Apple products and just jamming away at stuff, making some awesome videos and things. And I said, I don't think you can afford me. And I was really cocky back then because, you know, I was making money and.
But I was also working like 80 hours a week. And so I ended up working for them because I was really interested in sales. And at the time I was into Gary Vaynerchuk and all that, and I really wanted to get into marketing. And then after doing that for several months, after making a lot of sales in marketing, I actually wanted to know the back end of it. And. And so that led me into my journey of media buying. And I did that for about five years until 2020 when I got laid off. And I was looking at all of my case studies on media buying. And media buying is just a fancy word for running ads on Google, YouTube, Instagram or Facebook.
And all of my case studies, the number one kept popping up, and that was real estate. And so in 2020, I decided to go all in on real estate, started my own agency, built that to multiple seven figures, and then two and a half years later, I decided to open up cloud realty. When the market shifted and the interest rates changed.
When, when.
And forgive me for being a little long winded with this, but when. When the market shifted, when the interest rates changed, we decided to open up cloud realty so that we could make revenue on the back end and that every dime that an agent would have paid us up front, which was originally $6,000 for the year or 10 to 12,000 for team leaders or broker owners, we decided that money would have been better used if it was paid towards your own advertising, your own Facebook, your own Google pages.
And so that when you profit, we profit together.
So that's the quick story how I got started in digital marketing.
[00:04:24] Speaker A: That's a very unusual model these days because most of the time it's not agent first, it's profit first for the company. The bottom line for the company, there's not a lot of concern for agents when you're talking about something to help them produce. At least that's my experience. What about your experience, Andres?
[00:04:43] Speaker B: I've talked to a number of agents and honestly, I hear that a lot. I have personally not used any other company, but based on the conversations, I have a number of agents.
They've been burned by companies where the primary focus is profit first.
Not always. You see, I have heard companies with your focus agent centric first, and you profit on the back end. So definitely I could see a great benefit in group and show them that.
[00:05:20] Speaker C: Yeah. And I'll just tell you, Heather, the reason why I made that shift was because the number one objection that I had heard time and time again was if your system is so good, then how about I pay you at close?
[00:05:33] Speaker B: No.
[00:05:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:35] Speaker C: If your system is so good. Why don't I just pay you at close?
And what happened when Jerome Powell made the shift in the market that he did and he raised the interest rates and our entire industry was shifted overnight? Practically.
A lot of my agents went from having 10, 15 active agency agreement buyers down to three or four.
I had several of my agents who had listings on the market that now, that now sat for an additional 90, 180 days because the buyer pool in their market just completely vanished overnight. And so we went from six figures a month to seeing 7,000, 8,000, $10,000 charged back to us refunded.
And I thought, wow, this is, I don't want to be another one of the reasons why someone gets pushed out of this industry.
And when I, when I interviewed some of the agents who I had off boarded during that season, one of the things that they said to me was, you know, I got, I got $1200 in dues coming up.
My broker makes me pay a 3, $400 desk fee.
I'm paying these guys for X, Y and Z and I'm paying you guys for this. And on top of that, I'm paying for ad spend. And on top of that, my brokers are going to take 30% of my commission.
And so here I am walking, you know, I'm witnessing agents leave the industry in droves because of all the people who are chipping away at their hard work.
And so I just saw that as an opportunity to serve our agents better. And I got to admit, it's so much, it's such a relief, admittedly, it's such a relief because some of these folks back in the day, and we no longer do this, of course, but back in the day, some people we didn't know would take out a credit card to pay for us.
And you know, that never sat well with me.
And so what I, when I know it sounds cheesy, but when we say the money that you would have paid us is much better invested into your own marketing, on advertising so that we can profit together.
You know, my goal was not to, I mean, my goal has always been to grow, grow the company, but my goal was, was to not be the reason why agents get pushed out of the market. My goal was to keep them in the fight, keep them engaged, keep them producing, keep food on, on the table. And so, so yeah, the 24% pay it close model was a huge, huge shift and a massive attractor too, because no one else is doing this along with that.
[00:08:29] Speaker B: Sean, what is one of the biggest misconceptions that the real estate agents have about digital marketing.
[00:08:35] Speaker A: Wait guys, real quick before you answer that question, Sean, along the lines of success, I just want you to know that we just got a message from Kara and she said in real time, just got another agent with a client under contract. She is running Google Ads. So literally as we're talking, you've got your clients behind the scenes and your agent clients are out there, they're running their ads and they're closing deals. So that's awesome. So congratulations to her and sorry to interrupt you. Andres, go ahead.
[00:09:02] Speaker B: That's awesome.
That's what it's all about.
Now my question was, Sean, along with what you just said, what is some of the biggest misconceptions that agents have about digital marketing?
[00:09:17] Speaker C: I think that, I don't know if I'd call it a misconception. I think, well, the biggest problem or area that I, that I see agents like really struggling with or messing up with is, is misdiagnosing their problems. They misdiagnose all the time. The lead source, whatever, whatever the, the lead source is, they, they're looking for the unicorn lead. And I'm glad you pulled this back this, this up.
The unicorn lead does not exist.
I mean, they exist, but there's not a source that is inexpensive and cheap that's going to get you that unicorn lead.
So when I say unicorn lead, a lot of the agents that I worked with in 20, 20, 21 and 22, I like to call them Zillow agents, got really comfortable working with, with Zillow leads. And there's a reason why Zillow became a multi billion dollar behemoth Goliath in the space is because they, they figured it out.
And agents have gotten so accustomed, so used to getting a phone call, that person says, hey, I'm already pre approved. I want to go look at one, two three Banana street and because they're, they're already ready to go and then they get, they go see the house, they put in an offer and then they make 15,000 or 10,000 or 12,000 or $8,000 for approximately four hours worth of work.
And now they're hooked. It's like a drug. I mean, hell, who wouldn't be if I got paid $2,000 an hour, yeah, I'd be hooked. Like, give me more of that, right?
But the unfortunate thing is that it just, it does, it's very difficult to replicate unicorn experiences.
And so what I've come to find is that you can replicate that, but you have to have some compromises so, for example, if you have 100 leads, if you work all of those 100 leads, you're going to have maybe one or two unicorns maybe.
And so that's, that's gonna be tough, right? That's, that's hard.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: And so that was the case. We had so many more agents in the industry, right?
[00:11:40] Speaker C: Oh, my gosh.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:43] Speaker C: So, so misdiagnosing the problem, thinking that it's the lead source, thinking that it's, it's the, it's the source of leads that's causing them to not generate revenue, when in fact anyone with a laptop can generate leads.
But what I see most common is the agents who say that it's the lead source that's causing their problem.
They don't even know how many buyers are in their pipeline. They don't know how many sellers are in their pipeline.
They don't know what their funnel metrics are. And when I say funnel metrics, I'm not talking about cost per lead because that's, I mean, that's kind of important.
But what's. Heather Andres, pop quiz. What's the most important metric that we measure?
[00:12:26] Speaker A: I have a slide. Hang on, you're ahead of me here.
[00:12:38] Speaker C: What's the most important metric?
[00:12:41] Speaker A: The cost per conversation. Cost per acquisition. Acquisition.
[00:12:46] Speaker C: That's right. Cost per acquisition. So the most important metric is cost per acquisition.
And if we don't have a cost per acquisition yet because we haven't acquired a lead from this lead source, then we need to look at the secondary metric to that, the second priority metric to that, which is cost per agency agreement.
Because we've all had people under agency agreement that didn't end up buying.
[00:13:11] Speaker B: Right.
[00:13:13] Speaker C: We all had listing agreements that all that didn't end up listing.
So that's the secondary metric.
Well, what happens before that?
Well, how about cost per in person conversation, in person appointment?
And if we don't have in person appointments, then we need to know what our cost per over the phone conversation is.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: What is the average across the board in kind of, you know, the United States right now? What would the average cost per conversation be?
[00:13:43] Speaker C: Yeah. So I'll just tell you right now, the cost per conversation, depending on the market, falls anywhere between 100 to $300.
[00:13:51] Speaker A: Per.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: Conversation per conversation.
[00:13:55] Speaker C: That's right.
And I'll give you the funnel metrics from our benchmarks. Right now, the average lead cost in anywhere from 10 to $30.
The average cost per conversation is between 100 to $300.
The average in person conversation costs anywhere from 6 to $900. And the cost per closing typically ranges between 8% and 18% of the total GCI.
So what do I mean by that? If you have a $10,000 check coming your way because you just closed the 325,000 or whatever the price point is house, then you can expect 800 to 1,800 to have to have been spent to acquire that deal.
Right.
And so what I find is that agents don't know what their funnel metrics are.
So they might have, let's just say 10 to $30 cost per lead, great benchmark, good KPIs, they might be getting one to $300 per conversation in their market, which is good.
They might be getting.
But at this point, this is where a lot of agents kind of fumble the ball. Because at this point now in person conversations, agency agreement and actual closings are very high, high conversion rates. What do I mean by that?
The NAR put out a stat that if you are getting in front of someone to talk about real estate, there's a 70% chance that if you're the first person you're going to be their agent. There's a 70% chance. And that's across the board.
Across the board, which is incredible. So that means that if you're even halfway decent, some of you guys are like 80 or 90% chance of converting.
And then the conversion rates are again also high when you have them under agency agreement, you know.
And so where a lot of agents get a fumble, the ball is right here on the one yard line when they're, they should be pushing for the in person appointment, but they're trying to qualify them all the way to the end, to the close right there on the phone, before building a relationship, before building rapport, before getting to know their buyer, seller.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: I was gonna say I've seen a lot of conversation with, we had some agents involved in a lot of conversations, but like you said, they fumbled the ball in that particular spot at the one yard line. I've talked to an agent not too long ago where the pre vetting, pre qualifying the leads on the phone without even connecting them to a loan officer.
Right.
And not setting that in person appointment, not building that relationship, not moving that lead forward, cutting off communication, falling off. Right on that process. So it's a very, very important step along the way. And like you said, the metrics completely change drastically once you set up that in person appointment.
[00:17:03] Speaker C: And you know the theme, the theme, the word that keeps popping up over and over again is the word misdiagnosing.
Misdiagnosing I can't tell you how many times we have.
I've listened to a call where the person says, you know, I'm just. I'm just looking. I'm just browsing, you know.
You know, could you just send me, like, a list of houses? And then immediately the agent thinks that this person is not serious. They're not serious. They don't want to move forward.
But it's 2025. Some of us have social anxiety. Some of us don't like to be a burden. You know, some of us, when we go to a restaurant, we're like, yeah, you know, I'll just have a glass of water, you know. No, you don't have to refill it. No, it's okay. You know, some of us are really sweet and don't like to be a burden.
And so I listen to this all the time with Internet leads and where the agent is misdiagnosing that this person's not serious, or even worse, they say, oh, you know, I'm looking to buy or sell in six months.
Like, okay, I'll follow up with them on month four or month five.
But by month three, they're already under contract with someone else.
I've seen it happen way too many times. And then what does the agent do? That's the lead source.
It's the lead source. It's definitely got to be the leads.
So misdiagnosing where someone's at is probably the number one cause of agents not seeing results from the leads that they work with.
And the last thing I'll say on misdiagnosing is what I've noticed. The most successful agents, Joshua Wheelog. The guys who are doing multiple transactions with complete strangers.
These guys are treating every single lead like they matter.
There's a reason why there's equal housing opportunity laws. There's a reason why we have fair housing laws. There's a reason for this, because not everyone gets treated like they matter.
And, I mean, Josh just had a. Had a. Closing the other day with some crazy name.
It was like jitic or something. I don't know. It was something crazy. It looked crazy just reading it.
And most people, and I hate to admit this, most. Most agents, a lot of agents, if they see a funny name in their leads, they ignore it.
Yeah, I hate to say this. They ignore it.
And those people have money, too, the people with funny names. And so they're real people. Exactly. So the overall, you know, the headline here is, treat your leads like they matter.
And sorry, I get passionate about this because it's like I listened to thousands of these call reviews, and it's like, oh, my gosh, guys, you have so much opportunity in front of you, but you're just coming up with reasons as to why it won't work.
[00:19:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's something we touched on last week where we.
Some of the reasons that the leads switch from one agent to the others. Right.
Some of the. What happens in that process. And, and it's exactly that. Some agents don't treat the leads or the clients like their people coming. Lack of communication and lack of building a relationship with the lead. If you don't have a connection, you're not building that relationship.
Of course they're gonna find somebody else that. That is doing that for them, that's serving them.
And they're easily. And there you go, you just lost another opportunity just because they were. Interesting name, right? Mm.
[00:20:36] Speaker C: And that's it. And that's exactly why we started opening up the daily calls and. And the calls that the call reviews, because some of these agents don't know they need that feedback.
They don't know.
You know, when I, When I talk about, okay, cost per lead is good, cost per conversation is good.
Why are we not having in person appointments here?
And the agent right here has. Has an opportunity to say, okay, I could either get better at getting people, getting in front of people, or I could blame the lead source and hope for a better new shiny object.
And the good ones.
You heard it on Wednesday. You heard Sarah Runnings talk about this.
You heard them say, if it wasn't for this feedback, you know, I wouldn't be here.
If it wasn't for, you know, coach Russ, if it wasn't for Sean, if it wasn't for the team, you know, injecting themselves and saying, hey, no, you need to be here, but you're stuck here.
[00:21:40] Speaker B: That's like something you. You always mention, having a spaghetti on the face. Right. You're eating a spaghetti and you can't see for yourself that you have a spaghetti on your phone. You need somebody to tell you that you have a spaghetti on your face.
That's right. And it's. It's having the platform to be able to do that and communicate that. Because a lot of times as real estate agents, one, we don't have the classroom and have those calls recorded to understand what we're doing, to go back and for us to review it and listen for feedback.
But you having the platform where you continuously listen and provide feedback to the agents so that they can improve from those conversations that they're having and of course increase their conversion ratio. That makes a huge difference.
[00:22:29] Speaker A: And I think the fear comes, kind of holds people back too. So it's important to have a good, strong, you know, community of agents that you're meeting with because a lot of people are afraid to have their call reviewed and then they're like, I'm going to get ripped to shreds and I don't want to do that. Why would I subject myself to that? But really it's the only way to like you're saying, diagnose correctly what you're doing wrong. Maybe not even wrong, just kind of like tweak things here and there because you can't get better if you keep doing the same thing.
[00:22:59] Speaker B: Along with that.
For agents that are running marketing themselves, what's the common mistake that you see a real estate agent doing when they're running their own marketing? And what would be a smarter approach?
[00:23:16] Speaker C: I mean, I hate to sound redundant here, but I think it's, I think it has to do with misdiagnosing, really. I mean, again, the, the agents are, are, are, and I don't want to, you know, speak for everyone here, but the, for the ones who, who are running into a bunch of problems, who are not getting the results they want with whatever marketing system that they're using, they need to take a cold hard look and see where, where are you playing a part in this?
If we know that the average amount of touch points to connect with someone is 22 and you only gave them two phone calls, you know, let's take a cold hard look at what our follow up game, you know, looks like. And then, you know, someone might say, well, I don't have time for that. I don't have time to do that.
To which I'll ask, you know, awesome. Are you at the financial place? You know, are you financially free? Are you financially comfortable with where you're at right now?
And, and unfortunately most of them say no. Most of them say the ones who are so worried about wasting their time are not where they want to be financially. And so It's a catch 22 where they don't want to take a cold hard look at where their DNA is in this scenario, this marketing situation.
They, but instead they want to blame external sources.
And forgive me, where was it going with that?
[00:24:52] Speaker B: Agents running their own marketing.
[00:24:55] Speaker C: Yes. And so if you find yourself not happy with your lead system or your marketing system, take a cold hard look at where your involvement might be falling short because it's, it's almost like what they, what they say in marriage counseling. You know, you want to, if you're trying to fix someone else, like you need to fix yourself first. You know what I mean?
If, if you're trying to fix a friend or like Michael Jackson says, if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make a change or something like that.
But if, if you work on your follow up, you work on your value proposition, you work on your scripting, you work on your, you have daily or weekly feedback on the recordings that you're having with these prospects so that you can get better. And for those who don't know the spaghetti analogy that Andres brought up earlier, it's. I use the spaghetti analogy for, for feedback because if you're at a networking event, you got spaghetti on your face, and you're just, you're talking to dozens of people and no one has the gall to tell you, hey, buddy, you got spaghetti on your face. And so you're saying all these awesome cool things, but no one can pay attention to you because you got spaghetti right on your face.
And so you need these interventions, you need these masterminds, you need some external feedback loop to tell you, hey, you got spaghetti on your face. And I heard this one time, and it really resonates with me. Your mouth is only an inch away from your nose, but it takes someone else to tell you that your breath stinks.
And so that's why we opened up the Thursday call reviews.
And so when agents are doing their own marketing, that's number one.
You know, think, how can I improve myself before I think about improving the system, the marketing system.
Okay? Now it's a whole nother issue and whole nother game. If you're targeting buyers and you're getting renters in another state. Yeah. Switch up marketing companies. Like, look for something different, look for a different lead source. But if you're getting buyer after buyer after buyer and somehow they're just ghosting you, or the overall objection is just, they're not that serious.
Take a cold, hard look. And there's a reason why 87 and a half percent of agents are not in this industry in a few years, it's because you could easily get really bitter. Oh, and I, I brought this up yesterday.
Agents have been burned so much.
You know, one of the best examples I can give is like, how many agents do you know or yourself, Andres, Heather, who have gotten five minutes to a showing just to find out or just to see the text as you're arriving that they canceled it.
[00:28:05] Speaker A: Yeah, that happens a lot.
[00:28:10] Speaker C: And it just drives you nuts. And how many, how many people have we ever worked with for six months, 20 houses and then they end up renting, you know, so we get, we have all these like misconceptions about who a person is.
And if you actually get good at having a good sales process, those things would never happen.
If you invite people to show houses without a pre approval, it's almost like you're asking for a delayed outcome.
You know, you're almost asking for. Anyways, I'm going on a tangent here, but I know agents have been burned and because they've been burned, they don't want to get burned again.
And because of that they do things and act in a way that's not in congruency with their goal.
[00:29:03] Speaker A: On that topic, Sean, if an agent is at the point where they're like, alright, I'm ready to make a change, I've attached on the bottom, on the little ticker here, the zoom link for agents to log on to the daily trainings. Do you want to go through each of those Monday through Friday and kind of like explain what those are real quick for our viewers in case they want to hop onto one of those?
[00:29:21] Speaker C: Absolutely. And that's a great way to end this. So Mondays are mindset, we're going to go over coaching, general mindset training. Tuesday we're going to go over technology. So like today we're going to go over conversation AI.
Wednesday we're going to go over what's working. Wednesdays, this is where you get to actually interview and see other agents who are converting completely cold strangers into lifelong referrals.
That's every Wednesday. And then every Thursday, every Thursday we are doing call reviews. So we're going to pick one, two or three live call transfers that happen this week and we're going to review them in front of everyone, in front of God and everyone. And I promise we're very sweet, we're very polite and our feedback and what, what's so fascinating, I'll just say this about better Thursday calls is that the feedback that the agent has for themselves, the one who's actually listening to themselves talk over the phone, actually has way better feedback than I could ever provide.
It's funny, it's really incredible how that works. And then Fridays, Fridays are our CEO power hour.
And this is, think of it more like a, like a town hall meeting where you can meet myself, the rest of the team, ask us questions. It's going to be about 10, 15 minutes of updates and what's new, what's going on in cloud.
And then for the rest of the half hour, we're going to be talking about just general Q and A, general review. And also a lot of our partners are team leaders and agent attractors. So that's a great call for team leaders to show up.
And that's every day, noon central, one o' clock eastern time. And it's meetcloudrealty.com not meet cloud reality. Meet cloud realty dot com.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: Wait, did I spell it wrong in the ticker? Is that what you said?
[00:31:11] Speaker C: No, no, everyone does.
Yeah, every, Everyone does. Everyone does it by mistake. But Yep, Cloud, meet cloudrealty.com every day at noon. And anyone can attend.
They don't even have to be a part of cloud.
[00:31:27] Speaker A: Perfect opportunity for agents to be able to go there and get training like that.
[00:31:32] Speaker C: Yeah. And our promise, every single meeting is that we, you are going to come into the meeting and leave that meeting knowing more than you came into it and you're going to know exactly how to implement in your business that same exact day. So that's our promise every time.
[00:31:49] Speaker A: And there may be some freebies that we're giving away, but they'll have to come to the, come to the Zoom to see what that is.
[00:31:54] Speaker C: That's right. That's right.
All right. Anything else?
[00:31:58] Speaker B: No, Sean, I think, I think it was great, great conversation. A lot of input into the digital marketing space, especially for real estate agents and, and what Cloud Realty is doing in that space to help agents. So I appreciate you coming on board and providing always great content. We'll definitely bring you on board several more times on different, different topics, different areas of the business that we can share with with the audience. So appreciate it, sir.
[00:32:28] Speaker C: Hey, my pleasure. And thanks guys, for putting this on you. You guys getting this, this out here, sharing the good word to, to your networks and, and inviting agents into this ecosystem.
We're here to serve agents and, and that's exactly what you guys are doing. And I'm really proud of you guys and I think you guys, what you guys are doing is freaking phenomenal. And you guys are an unstoppable force. The Heather Andres team. I love it.
[00:32:55] Speaker A: Well, thank you, Sean, again, thank you for being here and thank you to all our listeners. Don't forget to go over to our page like, like subscribe, follow and share with everybody you know, and we'll see you guys on the next one. Bye, everybody.
