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- [00:00]
Jeff Zimfer
Foreign hello, my friend. Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Mortgage Marketing Radio podcast. Once again, your humble host, Jeff Zimfer coming at you for this week's episode. Got a question for you. If I was to put up a billboard in your local community and every day your local real estate agents would drive by that billboard, consumers considering buying a house or potentially in the market in the near term to buy a house, how many of them would recognize your name, your face, your brand? Or how many of them would just keep on driving by without knowing anything about who you are? They've never seen you before? My question is, is if you had multiple billboards around town consecutively over weeks and months and potentially years, would you become more well known? Would you be more recognized? Would you build local market awareness? Would that precursor that attention, right, that you've created by that billboard? Would that then facilitate a better conversion rate when you did execute sales activities such as calls, such as doing events and classes? If you were running ads and people saw your ad, if you were doing social media, what am I getting at? I'm getting at one of the biggest challenges that we have in business is awareness. And that plain and simple. Not enough people know you exist and more people need to know. The question is then, how do you do that? Well, we've got two different markets right there, two different kind of targets for us. We've got the referral partner, real estate agent, and then we've got the consumer, right? And in today's conversation with my special guest, in a moment we're going to talk about how do you more directly reach the consumer at scale, doing paid ads the right way, where you don't break the bank and you don't waste a lot of time, money and effort figuring out how to do the Facebook ads thing and working bad leads and all that kind of stuff. So stay tuned for that. In just a moment you're going to hear more about that solution. Before we get there, I wanted to bring to you something I haven't done in a while and that's a win of the week from one of our members over the My Agent classes platform. So you need to become five mile famous with your local real estate agents. And as you know, the way we help you become five mile famous is leading with a content and education platform that puts you in front of real estate agents at scale in your local market and other places virtually. If you're looking to scale your reach. And we've got one of the wins of the week coming in from just the other Day Greg Fisher what's up Greg? Shout out to you. Greg did the open house class for the first time and 20 people registered for his zoom. We sent out the email campaigns, we did the text bot follow up messages. He had 11 out of 20 show up and since he posted this just a couple of days ago, already three agents have reached out about working together and as Greg says, he feels like this approach opens the door to more partner based efforts than other methods and has the potential to secure a new relationship faster. And there's a lot of reasons for why that happened. I won't get into them right now, but I just wanted to say that if you're looking to scale your reach with real estate agents, become more well known five mile famous so that the other activities you already hopefully are doing right accelerate, the resistance goes down and the trust goes up. Well, maybe checking out our platform could be right for you. I don't know. Check the link in the show notes. Go to MortgageMarketing Pro. You can see the success stories from people like Greg and others over there. Link in the show notes MortgageMarketing Pro. Now my special guest for this week's episode came to me actually by one of our members in the My Agent classes community. Trevor. What's up? Shout out to you. Alex Machuca is a gentleman who has spent a lot of time, money, sweat equity and effort in running ads creating leads for mortgage professionals. He is the CEO of Mortgage Lead Hackers and our conversation today unpacks some of the more common frustrations and challenges, but also opportunities when it comes to if you're considering running ads on Meta, Google, other places, what are some of the criteria that you should have in place before you even decide to run ads? Like how do you know if it's the right time for you to even look at scaling your reach and running ads? Because I will tell you, as I said in the intro right, we're in a, you know the game, the name of the game is to reach more people transaction recession. In my business, I'm looking to reach more people with what I do in the My Agent classes platform. That's why I'm running ads, because I can only do so much with my organic content and email and things like that. And ads is one way to take something that's working and apply money right to that with the right strategies and systems in place to be able to increase your opportunities, your conversations, your conversions, et cetera. But you've got to do it the right way. You've got to do it in a way that you don't at the expense of the other pillars in your business. You don't lose focus on the primary sources of business. But this is an add on a layer in addition to when you've already got that base foundation built up. So what I love about Alex and his company over there at Lead Hackers is they've turned the traditional advertising agency on its head. Normally you have to pay a pretty decent monthly sum to an advertising agency just for their management fee to be able to run your marketing campaigns and the ads and all that for you. Well, Alex said, no, not anymore. Lead Hackers has turned it on its head and so now they've got this platform which will do everything for you, help you actually launch a proven mortgage or real estate ad in just three clicks. Think I'm lying? Think again. Listen to this conversation. Most importantly, if you think you're at the right time and place after this conversation where you do want to learn more about our ads, right for you right now, check the link in the show notes. There's a free demo up there, a link to a video that walks you through this platform and helps you decide if this is the right move for you at this time. But I can tell you these guys have a lot of credibility, right? Them being partner of the, you know, highly acclaimed by aim, by NAMM as their top partners. I can see it says right here that this is the number one lead generation solution in Nexus Marketplace. Eliminating ad spend spend management fees allows you to get exponential returns. So guys, there's a lot of great buzz brewing around this and there's hundreds of loan officers around the country already using this platform. Again, it's not right for everybody, but it might be right for you right now. Check the link in the show notes and contact Alex at Leadhackers to learn more. So without further ado, let's get into this week's show. Alex, welcome to the show.
- [07:14]
Alex Machuca
Thanks for having me.
- [07:15]
Jeff Zimfer
Hey man, it's good to connect with you, especially on this topic of leads, Lead gen marketing, consumer direct versus referral partners. We're going to unpack all that in a minute. But before we do, what do you want to tell audience about who you are and what you do?
- [07:31]
Alex Machuca
Well, I could go on for days about that, but I'll try and give you the short version. It might seem long because I've been doing this a long time. I've actually been in the mortgage lead generation space for seven years and my first company that I started was a mortgage lead generation company. I was able to Scale that to half a million dollars a month in under 11 months. And we saw some success. But it was my very first time running a marketing agency and so I was learning operations on the fly. And as you know, the housing market took a turn for the worse about three years ago. And so we were a high ticket service charging anywhere from four to six thousand dollars a month. And so when the market turned, I mean, loan officers and mortgage brokers abruptly stopped buying our services. Everybody was afraid to spend money and rightfully so, right? And so we went from about 50 deals a month to zero, right? Started losing sales guys for lack of deal flow. And so I faced this huge problem in my business because we had no revenue coming in and a ton of overhead expenses. And so kind of solving this problem really seemed like an insurmountable goal because in order to solve my business problems, I had to solve your business problems, meaning the audience, right? The problems of the mortgage brokers and loan officers. And so like any decent entrepreneur, I had to pivot. And that's how my company, Lead Hackers, was born.
- [08:56]
Jeff Zimfer
How do you know when somebody is right for investing in and paying for some type of a lead generation?
- [09:03]
Alex Machuca
They're currently closing loans. It's as simple as that, right? They're currently closing loans. And so they have the money to snowball into it. I'm not joking, you know, and I say this on my demos, right? We're the only lead generation company that's endorsed by both the national association of Mortgage Brokers and the association of Independent Mortgage Experts. And so I feel like I have a responsibility to tell people the truth and do it. Like, we can't lie to people and be like, yeah, sign up for this, this is a good fit for you, right? And so if it's not a good fit, we tell them like we're obligated to tell them, right? And so, you know, here's when it's not a good fit. When you're just getting into mortgage and you don't have any, anything in the pipeline for, you know, any friends and family. You haven't even attempted to get realtor relationships. Like these are all things that you should do at the beginning. Your client acquisition cost at the beginning used to be $0, right? And so if you start spending $2,000 a month in ad spend, before you know it, you could be in the whole six, $7,000. And the reason that's going to have a negative effect on you, aside from the obvious, which is your bank account, but it's a lot harder to sell when you need to sell, right? It's a lot. People can sense desperation. And so you're putting yourself at a disadvantage and in a bad environment to actually be successful because you're playing catch up the whole time.
- [10:26]
Jeff Zimfer
All right, so help for those listening. Some people may have tried ads in the past. Maybe some people are currently doing it. But there's also. Maybe this is just a narrative in my head, right? So let me approach it this way. Like the. When people throw realtors under the bus, right, as an obvious kind of scapegoat. One of the answers I have back to that is like, you know when they say, oh, realtors are hard, realtors suck, or whatever. And I'm like, look at. Everything's hard. Every channel is hard, right? Leads, paid, ads is hard, right? It's about choosing your hard. But things can become easier if you've got the right systems in place. So what do you. Where do you see, like, if somebody's listening right now and they're thinking, I'm closing three loans, five loans a month, is it right time for me for ads? What do they need to have in place that, that, you know, you would want them to have in place before you would consider they're ready?
- [11:21]
Alex Machuca
Well, so if I'm doing like three to five loans a month, right? And I have, let's say, you know, one realtor that's passing me business, maybe two of them, and I know that the kind of the sales cycle is a little bit long because it's about relationship building. Well, then I, you know, you have enough money to scale. Here's what I say. There's only three ways people can get leads. Friends and family. Realtors, or you can just buy them, right? And so friends and family. Most people do not have enough friends and family to scale their business. They are not that popular, right. If they were, they wouldn't even be looking at lead generation in the first place. And the second thing, Realtors, great way to supplement your deal flow. Not a good idea to be relying on someone else for your business. But buying leads is the only scalable and predictably scalable option. And the reason I say that is because if I know that I close one loan for every thousand dollars I spend in ads, that means if I spend $2,000, I'm gonna close two loans, right? And so you can have some predictability in your business, you should be doing all three, right? Because you never wanna be pulling one lever, because if that lever falls apart, you're screwed. So this is why I tell people That I think a big mistake people were making, especially during my marketing agency's tenor, was everybody was relying on refinances, and so they became order takers. And by the time it came time to close home purchase deals, they forgot how to do it. Right. They didn't have those relationships built in as well too. Right. Because that's more of a relationship based sale. And so, you know, a lot of people who were just order taking and doing refinances, yeah, they made a lot of money. But that's probably the same reason why there's only. And I don't know if you look this up, Jeff, somebody had me Google this the other day. How many mortgage brokers there are left? There's between mortgage brokers and loan officers, there's 95,000. You want to know how many mortgage brokers are left according to Google?
- [13:21]
Jeff Zimfer
Hmm.
- [13:22]
Alex Machuca
20,000.
- [13:23]
Jeff Zimfer
Hmm.
- [13:24]
Alex Machuca
Insane.
- [13:25]
Jeff Zimfer
Yeah, I mean, I always question the data.
- [13:28]
Alex Machuca
Yeah. But that's what shows up.
- [13:30]
Jeff Zimfer
Yeah, yeah, no, I get it, I get it. Okay, so let's deal with this narrative of like, you know, I've seen people comment on lead gen companies in the past. Hundreds of leads, you know, low conversion, blah, blah, blah. Timeline is 12 or 18. Like, how do you address what I knew, you know what I'm referring to there kind of the narrative around there.
- [13:54]
Alex Machuca
So, yeah, I'll address a few of these at once. Okay, guys, to the audience, I hate to burst your bubble and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but bad quality leads when it comes to lead gen is unavoidable. Okay, we have a law in place called the Fair Housing Act. You guys should know this. You're mortgage brokers and loan officers, but somehow it goes over people's heads. Because I want to be very clear about this, okay, we have a law in place called the Fair Housing Act. So what that means is you cannot target people on Facebook, Instagram, or Google by the three most important factors that we use to judge lead quality on. And those factors are income, loan amount, and credit score. Okay. It's not even an option that any of these platforms provide. You guys think Facebook and Google want to be fined billions of dollars and just blatantly ignore housing laws? Of course not. Right? Yet what most of you do is you jump around from lead company to lead company, searching for better lead quality. That doesn't exist. Right. And so, you know, most of the time when I ask a mortgage broker or a loan officer, what is your objective when you're buying leads? Most of them say, well, the objective is to find the best quality lead. Well, now we know better, right? Now we know that that objective is fool's gold. So what is it, right? What is the objective? If the name of the game is not about finding better lead quality, then what is it about, right? And so it's about the same thing, funny enough, that every business has been about since the beginning of time. Business 101. How do we acquire new customers for the lowest cost possible, right? If we know that lead quality is left to chance because income, loan amount, and credit score all come in at random, well, then we know that the objective is simply, how do I save on costs and get the most leads for my dollar? Once they're in our ecosystem, we can then figure out which ones are the better quality leads. Now, I'm not getting into the specifics. Like, of course, you can build a funnel and ask them, you know, questions and filter them out that way on landing pages. But when you're talking about generating the lead, it doesn't matter what their credit score is. According to Facebook, I gotta pay the same amount for every single lead, good and bad, right? And so to address the timeline. The timeline is one of the funniest things ever to me, because you gotta just ask yourself this question, because a lot of people, and this is how I explain it. When you go into the mall and let's say you go to American Eagle, you want to buy a pair of jeans, right? And the sale, you know, you're going in there like, hey, I'm going to buy a pair of jeans. This is what I'm going in there for. The sales associate comes up to you and says, hey, can I help you with anything? What do you say?
- [16:35]
Jeff Zimfer
Just looking, man.
- [16:36]
Alex Machuca
Just looking, not interested, right? It's the same thing with these phone calls, right? And so, like, when somebody says, oh, like, because I'll hear that from some of our students, hey, yeah, the lead said they weren't ready to move for another 12 months. I'm like, ask yourself this question. Would you click on an ad, hmm, about purchasing a home if you weren't ready to move for another year? Of course not, right? Prospects lie. You just didn't build enough rapport on the call. And I tell them, you know what you should do? Here's what I do. Like, if I. If I'm calling because I've done this, I'm like, oh, you're not able to do it? Like, and I'll call myself. And so when you're having that conversation and they say, yeah, I'm not ready to move for another night. I'll joke around and just throw it back at them and say, yeah, listen, I always click on ads about purchasing a home when I'm not ready to move for another nine months. You know, like just joke around about it or I'll even kind of play the guilt factor. And so like, if somebody says like, yeah, oh no, like I'm not interested, I didn't fill out a form, or I didn't, you know, just looking or whatever it is, I'll say, hey, can you do me a favor? So I just started running Facebook ads and each one of these leads actually cost me $20. And so I'm trying to figure out like why somebody would click on the ad if they're not ready to like purchase a home. You think you could give me some feedback? And you know what they'll say?
- [17:59]
Jeff Zimfer
What?
- [18:00]
Alex Machuca
Well, you know, I am looking and boom, you got them. Right. And so you have to understand, prospects lie. Yeah, they're getting a call, they're automatically on the defensive.
- [18:11]
Jeff Zimfer
What about the types of ads that seem to work or would be? Because, you know, the complaint narrative to keep pulling on that thread seems to be that some of the other lead gen companies, you know, are going with the DPA type ads. Low down, low credit. What's your take on that?
- [18:27]
Alex Machuca
Yeah, that's what, listen, the people. The reason Boutique Legion companies go with the DPA ads is because in the marketing communities and the classes and the courses that guys like me used to take when I was a kid coming up, those are the ads that are provided. Nobody provided HELOC and DSCR ads and all that stuff as a boutique company. Nobody was doing that before. Our most successful ads that we have in my community are HELOC. We use something called figure 8. We heard about it, it's pretty cool. And so what it is is it's an AI application that you can get approved in under five minutes for a heloc. And so what we decided to do was run ads directly to the application. And what would happen, they would either get approved without even having to speak to the loan officer or they, even better, they would get denied. If they get denied, we can call them up and get them on refinances. Right. And so a lot of people have been doing really like Mitch Chang crushes helocs. Alan Parker, Duke Crushes. He, like Simon Glenn. Simon Glenn just became, he just won top 1% at Nexa Mortgage, which I think is great. I mean there's 2,500 loan officers there and he's, he's great at HELOCs. Another huge one is DSCR. I love, you know, Trevor loves DSCR. And the reason that we recommend it is because it's the gift that keeps on giving. Your customers are investors, which means they're not just investing in one property, unlike a home, they're not buying one every 10 years. And so if you get a DSCR client, you could theoretically, it's like the gift that keeps on giving. You can close more and more deals through yeah.
- [20:05]
Jeff Zimfer
Hey Podcast family. Are you tired of chasing down real estate agents for referrals, making cold calls and feeling like you're just not getting the results you deserve? What if in just 90 days you could double your agent referrals and finally lock in that consistent monthly income you've been striving for? My Agent Classes is the ultimate program designed to help you effortlessly attract and engage and convert real estate agents into top referral partners. We've done the hard work for you. You'll get a full library of turnkey done for you presentations, a marketing automation platform to streamline the entire process. Plug and play marketing email flyers, social media posts, text messages, weekly coaching and accountability calls, plus access to a private community of high performing mortgage pros from all over the country sharing what's working in today's market. And to top it off, we'll even load you up with 200 producing agents in your local market to help you get started fast. So stop chasing agents and start building meaningful relationships that lead to real, consistent business without the stress of cold calling or feeling undervalued. And don't just take my word for it, head on over to MortgageMarketing Pro or check the link in the show notes and you can read real success stories from mortgage pros just like you. So if you're finally ready to grow your agent referrals without chasing and have fun doing it, check out MortgageMarketing Pro today. The other thing that I think is unique about you guys, and you kind of alluded to this earlier, but it's a very important point for people to understand. And I know this very well because I'm actually spending money on Facebook ads as we speak. And so you've got two costs. You've got the agency overhead cost and then you've got your ad spend cost. But you guys have a bit of a fresh twist to this which allows, as you said earlier, frees up more capital for you to redirect that spend instead of towards the agency overhead cost, which you know you're going to Pay a thousand, three thousand, whatever it is, agency overhead costs for them to kind of run the ads, buy the spots, all that stuff. And therefore you've got less to drive towards, towards ads. But you guys kind of flip that on its head a little bit. Tell me more about that.
- [22:10]
Alex Machuca
Yeah, and so you know, most lead generation companies the service fee is more than the ad spend.
- [22:15]
Jeff Zimfer
Mm.
- [22:15]
Alex Machuca
We do the opposite and then we do even more. So we charge 297amonth. And the reason for that is because, you know, people ask me, hey, why'd you go from charging $6,000 a month to 297amonth? I said it's a volume play. And I know that they'll stay forever because if you close one loan, it pays for itself for the whole year. How do you get. There's no. Remember guys, all leads are created equal. Right? When it comes to those important factors that we talked about, it's all at random. And so if that's the case, well then what's going to make you more successful? The cost of the service. If it's extremely low, well then the time horizon on which you can be successful is much longer. So if a lead gen company is charging you $2,000 a month and I only have $4,000, I better close a deal in those two months. Right. But if with us the time horizon is much longer and so you can rest assured knowing that hey, my overhead costs aren't going to be substantial. The reason most people fail is because again, lead generation, especially in the mortgage industry, is fundamentally flawed because your marketing dollars have a 100% markup and so you're getting 50% of what you're actually paying for at most. And if we know that all leads are created equal, you might as well cut out the middleman. Right? The whole reason you're paying that lead generation company is you're paying for their expertise. But in the mortgage industry their expertise are a moot point because they can't get you better income, better loan account, better loan amounts or better credit scores. And so the only reason you would be using a lead gen company is because you don't know how to generate your own leads. But now you can do it with our software in less than three clicks. And all the ads are pre built and proven and tested.
- [24:02]
Jeff Zimfer
Yeah, I guess that's the other headwinds people would come up against when running ads, which is, you know, the intricacies of working in with a Facebook ads manager and you know, promoting on meta, all that stuff because that's Like a separate skill set in and of itself. So, so how do you facilitate that at such a low cost to you, you know, with somebody who, you know, doesn't want to be a Facebook ads, or I should be saying meta ads expert.
- [24:28]
Alex Machuca
Yeah. And so again, it's a software that allows you to launch your ads in less than three clicks. And so what we have is a library of proven, ready to use ads. They're pre built for you. They're guaranteed to get you the lowest possible cost per lead. And so if you wanted to launch an ad, you would simply select the ad you want, enter how much money you want to spend a day, which is great because you're in control of your own ad spend, put in your website and click launch. Now we provide you landing pages. And so you don't need a website, they're already pre built embedded into your software for you. And so it's just click and drag. It took me three months to learn Facebook ads. It'll take you guys three minutes.
- [25:07]
Jeff Zimfer
Really? Come on now, that sounds a little oversimplified.
- [25:10]
Alex Machuca
That's what it is. And here's the beauty of it. The expertise guys is built into the community. We have 60 plus live coaching calls a month. Today alone we've had five. We have support calls twice daily, every single day of the week. We have CRM trainings twice a week where it's just a walkthrough of the CRM to get you comfortable with it, walkthrough of all the features. We have ads trainings three times a week. We have sales trainings, we even have advanced coaching because some of our power users were like, hey, I'm sick of all these rookie questions. You know, I want the harder stuff. And so we made advanced coaching calls. And so, you know, if you were to partner with a lead gen company and you have an issue, you're gonna have to set an appointment with them, Wait three days with us, you can reach us every single day of the week.
- [26:02]
Jeff Zimfer
Hmm, very interesting. Very interesting. Plus okay, so the other aspect of this whole lead conversion thing, timeline, all that stuff is the conversion and the, you know, multiple steps that are involved, such as somebody clicks on an ad, they opt in, they fill out your funnel, right? Then we've got, we've got the text messaging, we've got to do some phone calls, we've got to do some longer term email drip, nurture campaigns. How do you help people do that?
- [26:30]
Alex Machuca
So all of that, all of what you mentioned is built into it. And so every single lead is going to be texted within minutes of them filling out a form, ensuring speed delete at the highest level. So there's text follow up, there's email follow up. All those emails are already pre built for you. Top 10, you know, top 10 best tips on buying a home, right? These beautiful emails. And so they're put into long term nurture sequences but nothing's going to be dialing, right? And so, you know, we teach you strategies on dialing. For example, when I ask a mortgage broker if they're double dialing, they have no idea what I'm talking about. And so for example, if I call somebody or if I get a phone call from a number that I don't know, I'm most likely not going to pick it up, right? But if they call me consecutively, I'm going to think, oh, this must be an emergency and I'm gonna pick up the phone. I'll give you an example. I was in the hospital with my father, he was in icu. I got a call from a number I didn't know. I didn't pick it up. I got it the second time, I was gonna pick it up and I said no. They called me a third time, I picked it up like hello, I'm in the hospital with my dad, like hello. And it was Grant Cardone's office. And I'm like, you got me. You know, like they, they got me. They were trying to sell me obviously some stuff. But and so the other, the other factor for double dialing is because most people, they have their phone on do not disturb and it breaks through the do not disturb if you call twice consecutively.
- [27:55]
Jeff Zimfer
Oh really?
- [27:56]
Alex Machuca
Yeah. And so it's great for contact success rate. Those are things that are important, right? Strategic dialing as well. Certain hours, like there's systems that you can use to by process of elimination, eliminate times of availability so that you are making, you are being efficient with your dialing. So for example, most people, they dial sequentially. So let's say I have a list of callers, I'm just gonna start at the top and go from the bottom, right? And instead of doing, and the problem is, is you just keep doing that over and over again. You're praying and spraying, right? And so what we call strategic dialing is. All right, so let's say it's Monday, I'm gonna call this lead at 9am on Monday, right? And then I'm going to call them at let's say 9:30 or 10:00 on Tuesday, right. If they're not available in that time window, I'm crossing it out. I will never call them on that day again. Yeah, Wednesday and Thursday I move between 12 and 1, and then Thursday and Friday I'm 5 and 6. Yep, I'm crossing those times out. And I'm never calling them at those times again because what I'm trying to do is figure out their availability by process of elimination. And so there's critical thinking that goes into my dialing. But over time, what's going to happen is you're going to have a, like your contact success rate is going to substantially pick up because you are not calling these people at times that they're not available. You're only calling them at the times that could be available. And so by process of elimination over time, you know, your data is going to be way your contacts success rate should pick up substantially in about, you know, if you're doing it consistently, it's going to pick up.
- [29:35]
Jeff Zimfer
What, what is the recommended ad spend for somebody to actually see some results?
- [29:39]
Alex Machuca
Our official training videos and everything that we talk about is $35 a day. And the idea here, guys, is like, listen, with a lead gen company, they're going to ask you to spend $35 a day, at least a thousand dollars a month in ad spend. If you don't, it's probably not worth it. Now we have lead hackers who get away with spending $20 a day, but I wouldn't recommend it. Just because they're successful doesn't mean that you're going to be successful. You know the funny question that I get, Jeff, which I'm sure you get, is what's the conversion rate? Why do you think that there's a general blanket conversion rate for every loan officer in America? Like this guy over here, he's been a loan officer for 20 years. He's going to have a way different conversion rate than you. Right, right.
- [30:22]
Jeff Zimfer
Because it's the magic lead man.
- [30:24]
Alex Machuca
Exactly. And that's what they want, is they want closed loans. They want done for you. Yeah, loans. And that's a mistake I made with my, my first agency is we try to do everything for them outside of wiping their butt. And we had a bunch of unhappy customers and now we empower them to do it themselves. And people are much happier because they're getting results. They're much more consistent. Nothing's going to be better than the broker talking to the lead people try and outsource it. Yeah, let me get a, a VA to call all my leads. What do you think's gonna happen? Listen, I Can say this. I'm Hispanic. My father's from Ecuador. He's got the thickest accent of all the. Of all time. What do you think's gonna happen when they hear a voice from the Philippines or they're not gonna show up to the appointment? There's no credibility there. They're gonna be worried that it's a scam. Unfortunately, that's just the reality of it. Right. And so people try and outsource too much work when they really should be doing it themselves. Like in our community. I have very candid conversations with our community, and I'll say, like, oh, yeah, my va. I'm like, your VA, dude. I looked at your MMI report. Like, who do you think you are? You're barely closing any loans. Why do you think you need a va? Like, what are you doing? You should be doing this yourself so you can teach the VA how to do it, but clearly you don't know how to do it. You're wondering why all my VA isn't being successful. How do you expect your VA to be successful if you haven't made the roadmap and been successful in it?
- [31:54]
Jeff Zimfer
Yeah, that's such an interesting good point. Are the ads branded? Are they generic?
- [32:02]
Alex Machuca
So the ads are not branded. It'd be really tough to kind of brand it for everybody in their own.
- [32:07]
Jeff Zimfer
At that cost level.
- [32:08]
Alex Machuca
Yeah, at the cost level, for sure. And so the ads are generic, I guess, you know, you could call them that. But they're all unique. Every ad is different. They're all. They have different value propositions. They look different, the colors are different. And so, you know, when you're running ads, we're talking about direct to consumer marketing, not necessarily brand awareness. You want brand awareness. You know, social media posting is good. We have a social media planner. You can plan out your social media for the entire year. It'll automate all your posts. But, like, that's not what we sell. You know, it's just a bonus. But, you know, direct to consumer marketing, I'm just worried about the lead.
- [32:48]
Jeff Zimfer
Right, right. Exactly. Wow, that's really cool. Well, obviously, you guys, from looking at the testimonials on your site and, you know, the fact that you guys were the, you know, top aim, top NAM recommended partner, and the fact that you've kind of turned traditional agency marketing pricing structure on its head, that's what really got my attention. And the fact that, you know, one of our fellow colleagues, Trevor, spoke very highly of you and, you know, he was in our community as well.
- [33:17]
Alex Machuca
That guy's Incredible.
- [33:18]
Jeff Zimfer
Yeah, he's a guy who executes.
- [33:21]
Alex Machuca
Yeah, he's a B. And you know what I love about Trevor being our coach? I look at him and he'll have no problem me saying this. If you met Trevor, you would be like, no, he's not good at sales because he's pretty monotone, right? Like he's ever his monotone. But you want to know what makes him so great is the systems and processes. That's what makes him great. And that's how, you know, his systems and processes work. Because when you meet him, he's not. He's not like this captivating, engaging, like, enthusiastic person, right? And he crushes, I mean, 84 million in volume in one year. Like, and it's. It makes it that much more impressive if you. You get what I'm saying. He's organized and he's got systems and processes that he know works. And so I think that makes him an even better teacher because a lot of these brokers might have better raw talent than he does. As far as when it comes to.
- [34:15]
Jeff Zimfer
The sales aspect, not enough people know that you exist. And you need to become more well known and more need. More people need to be aware of what you have to offer. We're in a transaction recession, right? We've got this attention economy. And that's what I find of the hundreds of LOS I talk to over the course of a year that they're just, they're too small, they're too little secret agents. And they're wondering, how do I break out of this and add more loans? Well, get more referral partners. Scale your reach. And if you've got the budget and the wherewithal, invest in ads to reach more people at scale. That's it, you know, no magic formula there. So I think that's good timing. So for people who want to learn more about what you do, I know we've got a website set up for them. We're going to put that link that up in the show notes. What is that URL handy once again? I think I got it right here.
- [34:59]
Alex Machuca
Leadhackers IO MMI and what are they.
- [35:03]
Jeff Zimfer
Gonna see when they go there?
- [35:04]
Alex Machuca
What they're gonna see is an eight. I think it's like eight minutes, right, that vsl. And then everybody that's watching this, we're actually gonna give you a free trial so you could go in, see the software. So guys, if you wanted to, you could sign up for this, steal all of the ads, and then cancel. But you won't. Once you get in you see how easy it is. We actually onboard you and walk you through launching your first ad. And so, you know, we'll hold your hand through it all. And so, you know, sign up for a free trial schedule on onboarding. Again, we're not going to charge you for the onboarding. It's free. Go in there, launch your ad. You'll start getting leads within, you know, 24 hours at the latest and, you know, see what it's all about.
- [35:46]
Jeff Zimfer
Okay, so that's lead hackers. We'll link it up in the show notes as well. Alex, thank you so much for making time, man. I think this is a useful conversation.
- [35:56]
Alex Machuca
Yeah, it's an honor to be here. I've watched a few episodes now and so you're doing something incredibly special and useful for the mortgage community. So on behalf of the audience, thank you.
- [36:10]
Jeff Zimfer
Appreciate it, man. So, listeners, you know what to do. Check the link in the show notes, go check out the video, do the free demo, learn more, start advertising, reach more people, and your pipeline will be more full. That's it. All right, we'll see you on the next one, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. Bye for now. Okay, that's it for today's episode. Before we wrap up, I just wanted to remind you about my agent classes. Your proven system to double your agent referrals in just 90 days. Imagine never having to cold call again. Instead building real lasting relationships with top producing agents who want to send you business with done for you presentations, marketing automation, weekly coaching. It's all designed to make growing your business easier and fun. So if you're ready to take control of your agent referrals and grow your income, visit MortgageMarketing Pro or check the link in the show notes. And while you're there, don't forget to check out the success stories from other mortgage bros who've already seen incredible results. Thanks for listening and I'll see you on the next episode.
- [37:08]
Alex Machuca
Sa.