Justin Stoddart 0:00
Hey, welcome back to the think bigger real estate Show. I'm your host Justin Stoddart and I am really excited today to be here with a good friend of mine with James Adair, of Sierra Pacific mortgage to talk about this, how to differentiate in a crowded marketplace. James and I've had this conversation before that so many agents do what every other agent does. They show up the same way. They say the same things, and they all lead to generating the same way. And that today, I'm going to have James share with us some absolutely brilliant ideas that he helps, that he really mentors and has a process and a system to help real estate agents really stand out. And in again, accredit marketplace. So first and foremost, James, thanks for being on the show today.
James Adair 0:36
Sure, can we get some confirmation from anybody that's on online? Did they give up? So?
Justin Stoddart 0:44
Yeah, if you're watching this live, if you would type live, if by chance you're watching this, as a replay, please put replay once you see this that kind of help us know who's watching the show. So anyway, we'll kind of keep an eye on that. So, James, let's get this.
James Adair 1:00
Let's get into it here. Right,
Justin Stoddart 1:02
Yeah. Right, let's, let's bust this out. So how common is it for you to hear real estate agents say that all their businesses coming from cold market prospecting, open houses, online leads?
expired for sale by owners? Like, how common is that?
James Adair 1:19
Well, I know it's common in town for and I think it's more common for newer agents who are trying to build their book, you know, it's like, All right, let's call some expired. Let's call some fizz bows, let's do some open houses, let's just get in the mix. And fight it out for opportunities. Right. So and I, I don't think that's a bad idea. I think that's a, it's got to be a part of every new agent's business. But I do see a lot of teams that really just prospect focus, prospecting focused, and this is they just crank and crank and crank. And I think it can be exhausting. It can be demoralizing. And it's hard to get the right kind of momentum. If you don't, if you aren't connecting. And you aren't getting some easy wins every so often, right? And so when I say an easy win, I guess what I'm talking about is a referral. So someone saying, oh, man, you gotta call Justin he'll sell your house, he's the best. And then someone calls you like, hey, James told me to call you, I need to sell my house and then use get right to work. You don't have you're not. So there's a difference with prospecting. And there's a difference in selling. And we need to do both. But we really need to be focused on selling, selling is where the money is made. Right. And if you get a referral, you can really compress that timeline. The more referrals you get, the more often you're just selling and educating your clients on how this works, and how you can help them not trying to convince them to choose you and then go into selling, you know, yeah. So I wanted to do a little call back to an episode you did a while ago when you talked about the book Blue Ocean Strategy, which is such a cool concept. It's actually kind of a, it's kind of a classic now, right? I mean, it was that that came out in Oh, six, I think it's an older book. But it's basically about trying to find ways to make it operate in parts of the market, that not everyone else is operating in, operate in a place or in a way that you're not competing with as many people if you call it for sale by owner, it's like that person's just getting you to know, 20 phone calls a day until they list with an agent. And then in this just make it's like part of the value proposition of that for sale by owner is make my phone stopped ringing with other agents, please. But what we're going to talk about at our this Wednesday, we're sharing the stage again, on the third command performance of the exponential referrals workshop, you've got a great piece of content, Nick Crowder, has got a great piece of content about leveraging referrals from retiring agents, such a huge idea that he's got a great system built around. But I'm going to be talking about what I call the homebuyers playbook strategy, which is about leveraging your existing business relationships and turning those into referrals. There's, there's plenty of businesses that everyone uses every day for their own selves, their own families. And well, first of all, most of them, not most of them, but maybe more than you'd like to say, don't even know that your real estate agent. Don't even know that your lender. So make sure everyone knows what you do that if it's a business that you're frequenting, make sure that they know what you do.
And then you want to get into a conversation around. How does your business work? Right, you want to ask them that I'm getting into now this is sort of the, this is the formula for getting your existing business relationships to start referring business to you. Like if you go into a dry cleaner, or if you go into your I have a great story. But my optometrist, I'm not wearing my glasses right now. But I have them. I don't need them all the time. But I do wear glasses sometimes. And I have an optometrist up the street. And I got into this conversation with her, I was strapped into the machine. And I asked her how does this business work, she's actually kind of new. So she had just bought the practice a year before. And it was only the second time I'd seen her. And I'd seen her predecessor in months before. So I was asking her like how the transition was going and just ask her some business questions. And how he asked her how, how do you build your business? And is it a, you know, is it something that's automatic? Or do you something is that something you struggle with, and she just really, really lit up and said, It is something we struggle with, it is something I wish we could devote more energy to, you know, we have a good client list, we have a good location and a parking lot and all the things are in place. But there's definitely room to improve. And we just really started getting into that kind of conversation. And she's, I mean, she's a medical professional, and a highly, you know, specialized kind of service provider. But she's running a business, and it's a retail business. And you know, there's ups and downs, and she has to manage that part. And probably no one's taught her how to do that. And you know, you and I've talked about that all of these highly trained professional services are just winging it, you know, and as a lender, as a real estate agent, we've been able to probably get more training around marketing around client conversion, client retention, around scripts, you know, we can really bring a lot of value to these people. And so just asking, how do you build your business? And, you know, hey, would it be? Would it be okay? I mean, I really enjoy coming here, I have a book that I hand all my clients, it's just a home buyers playbook. And I feature all of my preferred business partners in town, and I'd say, you know, keep this book, it'll show you how to buy the house, and you know how to maintain the house, but in the back end has all kinds of pre-screened vetted local professionals for all kinds of services, not just Home Services. And would it be okay, if I featured this business in my book, I'm going to give out at least 100 of these books this year, maybe more? And she just stopped in her tracks and was like, that would be amazing. In fact, my husband, I am thinking about buying a house right now, it was like a $1.1 million purchase that she and her husband were looking to do. And I uncovered that. And then more referrals just by offering to be curious, having a system in place that I ...
