Broker Recruiting Like No One Else is Doing

Having discussions with some of the top real estate brokers what I’m finding is the number one thing that’s on their mind right now is how to recruit, how to recruit, how to recruit. And I’m finding also that many of them are apathetic to the situation especially when it comes to leveraging their time, leveraging their intellectual capital, and being able to sell their company without being physically present.

Watch this video for visual demonstration of ideas.

Because it’s not so much if you were going to make recruiting calls. Let’s say you’re going to contact ten people and you were going to have ten appointments with them, meet them face to face, how many of them could you potentially get? You may say well I get five out of ten, I may get three out of ten, and I may get two out of ten. Well that’s your conversion rate when you actually get them in the office. But how do you even get them in the door?

And even when I look at the specific web page of a broker they’ll have the “about us” page, they’ll have the “property search” page, and then they’ll have the little link here that says “join our company”. And when you click on that link all it talks about is here’s who we are and here’s what we do, here’s what we do, here’s what we do. When in fact no one really cares and the fact that remains is it’s not targeted to the specific type of agent that’s looking to join your company.

So if we were going to break it down into three different categories of the types of agents that would join your company you would have the zero to two, or the rookies of the business that are just getting started up. And
they’re probably doing anywhere between zero to two million dollars worth of transactions.

Next you have is the two to five year. And we’re actually going to put down two to five million in terms of sales that they’re actually able to produce. Then we’re going to have the six plus years in the business and hopefully they’re doing $6 million or more in revenue.

And wouldn’t you agree if I’m just starting off in the business right now, I’m going to have different needs than somebody who’s the top producer. Absolutely. So how do we then build a value and be able to make that distinctive for each one of those individuals so that we can cater our specific marketing plan to recruit them a little bit more effectively?

Because if I’m just thinking about getting started in real estate I’m going to need to know about license law, I’m going to need to know about forms, I’m going to need to know about the MLS, I’m going to need to know how to work my sphere of influence, how to work the contact management. Those are probably the top priorities before anything else.

And if I’m two to five years in the business I’m going to need to understand what my key performance indicators are, also known as KPI’s. And so that could be examples of market success rate. If I’m taking a certain number of listings, am I able to actually sell them and what’s my percentage of that? Well if you have a low market success rate chances are then you need help with staging, you need help with pricing, you need help with marketing.

And then you look at another key performance indicator in terms of the number of appointments that you get based off of prospecting. That’s another key performance indicator you’re going to want to look at. So agents that know the basics, they need to know a little bit more in terms of how they can start to grow their business.

And then if I’m a top producer what are the things that I need? I need systems in place, I need people calling on my signs, and I need to make sure that someone’s actually picking up and answering or showing the property for me. Or maybe its lead generation that’s done off of a website. Maybe it’s other things that are going to help them continuously grow their business. And it could be people as well; other agents to help them grow within their team.

So if we look at it right now, here’s the problem. As many people had this “join us” page that they’re joining through and all this traffic too, think of this as your offer page. And right now here’s my question to you: Do you know the specific link that you’d want to take somebody to, to recruit agents, new agents for your company? Do you know that link right off the top of your head? The exact URL?

What I mean by that is http://www.yourname.com/joinourcompany.aspx or dot ph or whatever that is. Do you know the exact URL to that page? And if you don’t, do you think other agents in your company know that link to send people to? Do you think your broker managers know what link to specifically send them to?

Yeah, they might have to copy and paste the link, but I would recommend doing is having the link that you could take people to bit.ly/ whatever category of type of agent that you create so that you’re sending them to a specific page. So if we have three different types of agents that we’re recruiting to we need three different offer pages or websites that we’re creating that we can send traffic to that’s going to have the conversation in terms of why you join the company.

So three different offer pages and let’s talk about what an offer page specifically looks like. It’s a website that really the whole purpose of it is to set the appointment. And here’s what you see most of the time, it’s a “contact me” form, right? You enter name and your email address and maybe we’ll get back to you whenever we feel like it, right? That’s what typically the recruiting pages look like right now.

We can talk about conversion and everything like that, but what’s going to increase the likelihood if somebody types in the name and email address? This is a skill set that I would recommend learning, or not learning, you don’t necessarily have to learn it, but hire somebody to be a copywriter to create your offer page. So the copywriter creates the offer page. So it’s why your company right now.

If you can even break it down in terms of how are you different, how are you unique, what sets you apart from the competition. Maybe you create one of these tables here I’m about ready to throw up here on the chart that decides in terms of the products that we offer our company, or the services that we offer our agents, or the types of relationships that we have not just inside of the real estate community but outside of the community.

That you take the time to not just list what’s competitive but really find out what’s distinctive about your company or what do you want to be in the future so no one else does so then that starts to drive the conversation that says, “You know you’ve got to go check out XYZ broker. They’re the absolute best.”

And the problem is, is these always move to the left because once someone in the market sees what the competitors doing they try and model off of that process. So we need to continuously think about how can we be in these two columns because if we’re going to stay right here in competitive then there’s no reason why I would want to get new business cards, get new signs, and anything else because there’s really no reason to.

So if we go back in terms of what’s going to be able to create that offer for us we need to look at creating what’s called a video sales letter. And I’m going to go ahead and write this out so at least you can say, “Gosh team, we need to create a video sales letter.” And what that is, is that’s almost like having the words on the page except for what it is, is it’s a little video inside the webpage of either somebody talking or it could be somebody actually drawing, like the video that I’m writing right now, this could be like a drawing that you create as a video.

And then on the right hand side is a place where they would enter in their name and their email address; keep it very simple. And there’s nothing else you can do on the page except for entering your name and email address.

And so the video sales letter, the argument that’s created is compelling enough, that’s going to increase the likelihood if somebody’s going to type in their name and their email address. To not just learn more, but how they can be more successful, whether they’re zero to two, two to five, or six years plus in the business.

So if we look at right now, of your website right now, I would imagine you also have one of the links right here that says “property search.” So if I click on this link you probably have an email form that people would fill
out and then what ends up happening in the process terms of emails that consumer would then receive.

Well you have an email that sent on day zero, you have an email that’s sent on day one, day two, day three, day four, day five, and then all the way down the line that includes text and then links that they could potentially click on that help educate, they educate, they build trust, it doesn’t talk about how great your company is, what it does is it helps the agent themselves learn what tools and resources are available. Not just even that your company provides but your actually helping them become a more successful agent.

And here’s the big question. You say, “Well gosh, how many emails I need to create?” Well once somebody, what is the average cycle that somebody’s thinking about moving? So if I’m thinking about changing companies, how long does it take for them to ask? Well you might say it takes them the same day or it might even take them an entire a year, it might take them 365 days.

So a part of your campaign that you’re thinking about you would send out would be, obviously, emails, phone calls, and things that build trust. We always want to send out education based marketing that builds trust so then that way they’re saying, “Well gosh, my company never did this.”

And the whole beauty of this entire process is that you can automate this video sales letter when somebody inserts the name and the email address you can automate the process that continues to send emails out until they actually pick up the phone and call you or they respond to the email and say, “Wow that’s great.” This is something that very few people are doing.

So if we look at back here to the offer page, how are we going to get people to be able to go to this offer page because there are three different types. So one you would say, maybe we create video we would put on YouTube. Maybe we use pay per click advertising. Maybe we use search engine optimization. Maybe we use text message marketing. These are just some things to help you think outside the box in terms of what no one’s doing. Maybe you have the direct mail piece that you send out that links to a video sales letter.

What many people do is they take people to the home page which then they have to then search around and find it. So if your target marketing specific types of agents you would send a specific offer page to meet their specific criteria and so forth. So what we can essentially do is put this in a process to where we’re, number one, we’re selling the value of our company.

We can do it effectively face to face but how do we do it online? That’s what we just demonstrated. We’re also increasing the conversion rates of people from when they visit our webpage for recruiting is that they’re actually taking the time to fill out the form. And then the third thing we’re doing is we’re driving traffic to it.

So hopefully this video explains to kind of step by step how to think outside the box to be able to recruit more agents, educate them, so when they do join your team that they would be often to run to the races increasing the profitability to your company.