B (2:53)

Yeah, sure. I mean I think leadsimple is a little bit of an inspiration here of like you guys have this complex tracking software. I was like, maybe I can make a bad version of a part of Lead simple and try and get the information that we're looking, looking to get from this customer. We were exploring on our end, like you know, 8% not good. What's going on? That was like kind of the high level question. And so we're like, okay, well there's maybe some factors on there and some on our end, right? So we're busy, busy digging away at stuff on our end. Like did we do anything different? Right. And when that brought up, no, we're not doing anything different, we said, okay, well maybe we'll take a look at are they taking a long time to respond? What's the content of their emails look like? And so I just, I whipped up something quick to like send along like a fake lead, a secret shopper lead to them essentially and see like, okay, what kind of content are they sending along to their customers? What's the response times like? And you know, we found some issues and Mike.

C (3:58)

Yeah, no, sure, I'll pick up the thread there. So what our hypothesis eventually became was that this property management, this bdm who we had a pretty good set of data for, when they first came on, they consistently closed between 15 and 20%. So we knew they had the skills to do it. It wasn't a matter of competency. So as Dylan's data started coming in, one of the things that really jumped out at us was the lead would come in and there would be no actual human follow up. It was an automated email that said, call me, you know, if you want to. Which in the online lead game is not going to get it done, it just isn't. And so that was our working hypothesis. Now we had to check that over time. We went back to the owner, shared all the data, it jumped out pretty heavy. And so that owner then took a look and said, well gosh, what's really going on here is this BDM has too many referrals coming in. And so they're prioritizing referrals over cold leads. And you know, our leads are definitely colder. I mean every lead is colder than a referral lead. And so what they were doing made some sense. And so the owner changed the compensation structure to prioritize things more so they that BDM was more motivated to work the geek leads in that situation, to not just send emails, but to actually call them. So we thought that did it. We then kept tracking, unbeknownst to that BDM for the next. Let's see, that went from like October, November, December. So we had a three month period. We look back and the close rate more than doubled like two and a half times. So they were up in the 20% range after three months. So that seemed to be what the issue was. It was a real small thing, but it ended up having a really big effect.

A (5:57)

So it's interesting that it speaks to the transient nature of closed rates or any process or any system or any outcome or result. Advantage is competed away, stability is competed away. Things decline over time and certainly in the absence of time and attention. So it sounds like what you're saying is performance was high and acceptable. It dips and then it basically comes back up through some more, more oversight and more attention. Is that kind of the sum of that arc?

C (6:23)

Yep, it is. And then at that point, Dylan kind of got the proverbial light bulb over his head and explain where things went from there, son.

B (6:32)

Yeah, well, you use the word. We got curious earlier, Jordan. Maybe masochistic is a better word. But we decided, you know, we want to know what's going on, right? That's kind of our nature here. And so we're like, okay, well, we have this problem consistently with our customers, right, where people come to us and they say, well, your leads aren't closing. And we don't really have always the best answer for them because it's not just us, right? We can't point to our stuff and say, oh, we're doing this thing different for you than we are doing for another customer. That's just doing well. So how do we kind of uncover what's going on and kind of help our customers or the industry in general kind of see the things that are going on that maybe they're blind to, maybe they're too close to. And so we started kind of, okay, let's take this and let's start doing it on our, on some of our current customers. And we started doing that and it started yielding some, some good results in terms of like, oh, we start to see, like, this is probably an issue here. This is kind of, this is going to be probably hurting our customers, close rate. So we can kind of go in and start to talk to them and have those calls, conversations rooted with data. And we said, well, if little data is good, more Data is better. And so we said, well, pretty, I mean, inexpensively, in quotes, we can kind of scale this project up and try and do it with the industry at large. And so we built a more robust system. We hired some people to help generate lists of all the companies into kind of help us go in and submit these leads. And we scaled the project up and ended up doing it for like 3,000 companies. 11,000 leads are those numbers right, Mike?

C (8:20)

The 200 biggest US cities and a little over 11,000 quote requests. And the idea was to see if we could figure out what successful people were doing, what people that were less successful were doing. And to get an idea not just on quantity numbers, like how fast did they respond, what modes of follow up did they use, but also qualitative stuff. So we were actually looking at the emails they were sending out, which is something we'd never done in the past to get an idea like, what are people are saying? Your leads aren't closing? Well, like, what are they telling people and how are they framing themselves in the marketplace and whatnot? And so we had a lot of information to go through, but it's super important to us because when it gets right down to it, people come to us first for quantity of leads. But believe me, the very next thing they want to know is, are the leads going to close, quote, unquote, lead quality? Every lead vendor has that, and every lead vendor suspects that their leads are pretty similar to a lot of other lead vendors. And that's for the most part true. I mean, there's some exceptions to that, some business models that make it a little bit harder. But by and large, an online needs an online lead. And so when people are saying your leads aren't closing, a lot of times what they're really saying is, I, you know, I can't make the numbers work, which we're sympathetic to. But instead of stopping, they can use that as a diagnostic and say, okay, how can I get this number up? Because if they don't know what they're doing wrong, they can go ahead and stop geek leads all day long. And that's fine. But there's a limited number of options they can go do. I mean, if they have this problem with our leads, they have this problem with their web leads, they have this problem with their own paid search leads. It doesn't make any difference. They've got these blind spots. And so we said, we're going to dig in, we're going to try to figure out what this is, because this is going to be across the board for all kinds of leads sources that they get.

A (10:14)

This is such an interesting conversation and I'll try and mediate taking the position of the pn, even though I have a background in lead gen, certainly the observation can and should be made that the the highest leverage position for any purchaser of leads to take is to say the leads are no good. It's like a blanket response, it's your fault. And, and it could be true if it was true, if that would be a universal. This will not work because the leads are no good. But to actually go into an audit and diagnose is tricky and challenging. Certainly in the lead gen game as a whole, there's been a lot of maturity and there's been many steps, some crude, some more nuanced in terms of being able to actually audit those results. For example, on certain platforms you're getting masked contact information so that the lead provider can tell exactly when and if you did follow up Craigslist, for example, one of the early pioneers in that technology. With other platforms like Thumbtack, the lead is being given to you as you accept it. So if you don't actually respond, you don't actually get the lead. So there's a variety of ways that we can ameliorate this, but at the end of the day, if you want to inspect the goods, it does require some, some heavy lifting. When you lift up under the hood, you find some really interesting things. I think the example that you gave earlier, the answer that was related to the situation was kind of the genesis of this, where you said call me. Right. What an interesting reply. That may work on Tinder, doesn't really work in property management for Triangle and

C (11:49)

well, it certainly didn't work in that set of circumstances. And let me just make just a comment about that, Jordan, because we've generated over 70,000 leads. And so we care about this because this is like how we feed our family. And so we think a lot about, about it because obviously customers that aren't closing don't stick around. I mean, they're not dumb and so we want to help them succeed. And so we took it seriously. I mean, for the first four years of our company, we lived in mortal terror that we were just doing something so terrible and generating terrible leads and that they were 100, you know, oh my God, we're terrible in terms of what we're doing. And after a while we got a little wiser, especially when we started getting close rate data because we now require our customers to tell us what closes. And so we can do some comparisons. And so because the problem in the marketplace is that lead generation providers are succeeding when they're selling leads. Well, property management companies are only succeeding when they're closing leads. And those are not necessarily aligned goals. So we tried to align ourselves more, but what we started finding out is we had people. I mean, the ultimate one was there was two companies, literally service areas butted up right next to each other. One was closing at 5%, one was closing at 20. And they were trying to tell us the 5% was like, you know, your leads suck. And it's like, well, okay, you know, I'm not going to get an argument with you, whatever, I wish you the best. But we knew in our brain, no, we've got a lot of data. We've got people right out of the chute that are closing at some pretty high rates.

A (13:21)

Sure.

C (13:22)

So it had to be something else is what we did. I mean, we've got enough data under the kind of under the bridge, so to speak, that we feel pretty comfortable with that.

B (13:31)

And I think one thing that we never want to do is just throw the responsibility solely on the other side. I think you got to attack this problem from both ends though, is the thing is like, if you look at who's kind of responsible for the thing, it's like, well, if it's all on the lead provider, then what is the salesperson getting paid for? Right. Like their job is to sell and that implies selling is needed. Right. And so, but that obviously means, like, there's how the lead gets to people. Like, that's context, that's important. That's stuff that's kind of preceding that information. And like they can be warmed up more or less. They can negative influences prior to the contact or positive ones. And that's something that we always want to try and move forward with. We also want to have good answers and at least good questions for providers, the property management companies, to say, well, maybe I could look at my process with some humility and say, these are the things that maybe I don't have.

A (14:27)

Right.

B (14:30)

We saw these things happen over and over and over again. We went through thousands and thousands of these emails and it's like this thing has come up quite a bit. This might be good for people to kind of look at their experience on their side of things and kind of see it through the consumer's head a little bit better.

A (14:48)

And I think in the totality of this conversation, it is worth just kind of commenting on pay per lead as a whole, as a category. It's a channel, a lot of other channels you can explore. And there's kind of some stair stepping and some graduation in complexity in financial risk and internal skills you have to cultivate and in these different games that you can play, Pay per lead lowers that bar. Why is it that everybody has tried all property management? Everybody has tried all property management because there's no, there's no threshold. You just swipe the credit card, the lead start coming. It's a very attractive, simple proposition. It tends to attract folks that have less complexity overall, in the same way that, dare I say it, free franchising in general tends to attract folks that are looking for a turnkey operation as opposed to. As opposed to folks that think that they can swallow the whole camel, as it were. So I think one of the aspects of Legion that doesn't get talked about a lot is that in Legion marketplaces, like all property management, for example, or manage my property pick, it really doesn't matter, the losers tend to subsidize the winners. Meaning the winners are there for the long game. They have the skills, they've applied the labor, they have an offer and they're closing at a high rate. And they're consistent because why would they leave the losers below them that are also paying and bidding and are financially propping up the overall lead gen marketplace? A lot of churn down there. These are the folks that say wholesale lead gen does not work. Try that. Categorically, it does not work. But the model is propped up by money coming from all parties, even though it's skewed towards the folks that are able to be most productive with the category. Similarly, in the results that you saw, I have to assume you saw a wide distribution of results and efficacy. Let's get into some of those results. We've teased it long enough. What are some of the actual material results around response time around follow up around medium and channel communication around. Give me the goods, guys. Sure.

C (16:56)

So if people want to put their finger on like one thing that causes low close rates, we don't have an answer for you. We consider it to be death by a thousand paper cuts. Really. I mean, we did. We were able to group some of the things that we thought were issues into five buckets. But we're not here to tell you that this covers every single problem or every single issue or even that it expansively covers the things we're going to bring up. I mean, that's a. It's a lot of data and there's a lot of stuff going on. So we like to bring a little humility to the process as well. However, we did see some consistent patterns. And so we have five problem areas that we do talk about in the book. I'll just hit them real quick and then we can go on a deep dive on any one that you see think is a little more interesting. First is we saw a mismatch between how follow up is being done, which means how you're using email, phone and texting, how much you're using it and between what the property management company is doing and what the prospect wants to be done. There was a mismatch there. We can, we can dive into that. We also saw that there was kind of broken plumbing, so to speak. There is a, there's a pipe that leads come in through to your business and then there's a process by which you follow them up. There was lots of little broken pieces there that we could see and they all add up. Basically another bucket was you've made it too inconvenient for the prospects to get what they want and if you make it too hard, there's too much friction and the prospects are just going to go away and you're going to think it was because they were bad prospects, but in reality you just made it too hard for them. Another bucket would be that it's irrelevant what you're saying to them. You are in a lot of competition for on the phone, in email. And so people, if they're looking at an email inbox that has maybe 300 unread emails and you're, and your subject line says submission, you're probably going to get deleted. When they're in a hurry, they have no idea what that means. And so that's, it's, it's not that it's bad, it's just completely irrelevant to their world and something's got to jump out that it's going to like solve a problem for them. The final one bucket we put things in was untrustworthy. I mean people are very skeptical, they're very nervous online and there's things that you can't necessarily stop that people are going to come to you with whatever problems they have and whatever damage has been done prior to coming to you. But you can, you know, you can stop digging the hole. You don't have to increase and turn the dial up on the untrustworthy behavior. And so there's a number of things that were there. So those, that's the first, that's the substantive part of the book where we dig into those five areas and Talk in depth what we learned from the secret software project in each one of those areas that somebody can use to kind of self analyze and say, well, are we doing those things or not? Any areas that you want to dive into?

A (19:50)

Yeah, man, there's so much there. I think the first thing that jumps out at me is just the conflation between a legitimate scope of services that is meant to stand for the vision of the business owner and stand for being really clear on the kind of service you want and a qualified and vetting and doing qualification on a prospect. Conflating that with utter laziness. I just didn't pick up the phone. I mean, you might argue that having a byzantine governmental like sales process only lets the most motivated prospects through. You could argue that, you know, and in a high enough, cheap enough free flow, God bless you. But for most business owners, that is not the luxury or the position people find themselves in. What I find we've certainly talked about this before is that the sales process is the most neglected, least operationalized aspect of the business with the smallest amount of full time labor. So when we think about this list of maladies, corrective action in great detail is useful for someone that cares and is motivated. But before we get to corrective action, what are your thoughts on what's driving this? These are your clients, these are my clients, These are people I know, these are friends. There's no moral judgment here. This is about optimizing for a result. What do you think is really at the root of some of these? This overarching lack of care and optimization?

B (21:23)

I mean, I think there's quite a few places that this kind of comes from. I'd say my first thought is sort of a misunderstanding of where those prospects are when they come in. Often what we'll see is the way that the salespeople will treat these prospects coming in is like they have a level of knowledge and sophistication about the business. They'll say like, here's our fee structure, here's all the things you get treating them like, like they, they know the language of the industry that they are maybe even just like try to make a decision. What we saw over and over again, just people sending contracts right on the first follow up attempt with people. Right. How efficient? Right. I mean, and you would think like, well if, I mean if someone is a really high quality prospect and they want to sign a contract, I mean like you want those over and over again. But you're right that that represents such a small piece of the pie that it's it's almost an irrelevant thing, right? You need to, you know, you don't want to go for the lowest common denominator, right? You can't just be like, well, I'll take everyone, right? You have to be, be somewhat like, have some discretion with your business. But like, I think that that dial is off for many companies and I think that fundamentally that's a misunderstanding of where prospects are at. Right. We, we did some of our own internal data and we. Let's see. Do you remember exactly the percentage here, Mike?

C (22:55)

I do. I mean in terms of. So without getting super dialed into Eugene Swartz levels of customer awareness, which is in the book, just suffice it to say that most property managers are pretty locked into the idea that their prospects have made their mind up about the service. They know they want property management. So now all they need to get across the finish line is here's all the cool things that we do, like get your, get your check on time and we, you know, we call our renters 24 7, you know, whatever their thing is.

B (23:35)

Maybe not even that. Maybe just, hey, can we get on the phone so we can close this baby?

A (23:39)

Yeah, yeah, well, that's, that's a whole separate problem.

C (23:42)

Yeah, I understand this particular situation. There's quite a few, we saw quite a few things where it was just two parties that were just completely like passing like ships in the night. You've got 55% of the people that contact you. We know this from exit surveys that we've done. This is like their first time. And a certain significant subset of them. English is not their first language. I'm not saying a majority, but a percentage of them for sure.

B (24:10)

And not all of them are sure they even want property management.

C (24:13)

No, not at all. It's a question mark when you come to them. When you come to them and say, well, gosh, I mean, Our record was 11 attachments to one email. The first email. Here's 11 attachments, a contract, a lead based disclaimer, federal. You know, you have to sign these things so we can be represent. You're like, whoa, slow down. Not time to pick out China. Guys, stop, hold on. Can we have a cup of coffee first? We don't even know we're interested in this thing yet. We're just asking really basic questions like is this worth it?

A (24:49)

So, Mike, I got to push back. They filled out the form, right? I'm the pm. They filled out the form and the form says contact us. They contacted me. I'm replying, so help me back into how it isn't reasonable for them for me to assume that they are, that they're ready to tango, to have the conversation.

C (25:12)

Well, I guess if you believe one size fits all, I suppose you can think that what I'm telling you is 55% of the people is in that category. 45% of people are in the solution, aware that understand property management and know what's going on. So you're going to be right half the time. And so in your mind it's like going to Las Vegas. You are going to pull the handle and it's going to work enough to make you think that it's a good strategy. But you are throwing away 55% of the people who are feeling dumb, they're feeling ignored, they're feeling like you're talking past them or talking over their head. And so when they're not eager to talk to you, sometimes it's there. I mean, it's really basic stuff. Like I don't even understand what you're talking about. I mean, seriously, some of the emails, if you don't understand insider language, it is just gibberish to a lot of these people. So there's a very basic, I guess if you want, we're going to take a broad brush to the thing, a lack of walking in the other person's shoes. I wouldn't say empathy because I think property management people care, so. But I also think they're not really carefully looking at things through the eyes of the prospect. Dylan, maybe you can talk a little bit like for example, about the real obvious thing that jumped out in terms of property management work hours.

A (26:34)

Yeah.

B (26:35)

So I mean, I ran into. I'm going to tell a little story. We're currently moving, my wife and I. I was hiring movers the other day and I sent out a bunch of kind of requests that night and I, you know, some companies got back to me, you know, mid morning, Right. But at that time I was in the full swing of my day. I snoozed all that stuff later in the night, right.

C (27:00)

And

B (27:02)

so like this cemented in my head just like this idea, we'd be kind of rattling around it like people are at work from 9 to 5, right? That's property managers and that's people that the property manager trying to get in contact and there's such a disconnect right

A (27:20)

there where it's like

B (27:24)

property manager gives someone a call at 10 or 11 in the morning there people are in meetings, people are trying to just chip away at the chaos of the day. Right. And they're gonna, you know, sit down after dinner with a glass of wine and go through maybe some of the stuff. And so a lot of the ways that we saw property management companies try and handle things kind of assumes that people are going to be available and interactive when they're at work. Right. The problem is there's a huge disconnect. There's a conflict of you're vying for my attention, but also my work is. Right. And so, yeah,

A (28:07)

I just want to try to chime in and say that this is a really interesting one for me because it makes me think about the idea of doing the unscalable. This is something that Paul Graham talks about, the unscalable activities that by definition you kind of shouldn't be doing. Like this isn't going to scale. We can't keep doing this. And yet what I see in property management over and over again is folks get to 200, 300, 400, 500 doors and they get stuck. And they say, I just don't know how to grow the business. I keep beating my head against the wall. And the curious question is, well, how do you get to several hundred doors? I mean, clearly you do, right?

B (28:49)

Yeah, clearly you did.

A (28:51)

And part of that is a former willingness to engage in a set of activities which are no longer acceptable through exhaustion, lack of novelty. I've covered my nut, I just have less need. But when you're starting out, getting on the prospect, getting on the phone with the prospect on the weekend, 7pm, 8pm totally reasonable, happy to do it. I'm just trying to get my first book to be able to feed my family. But at a larger scale, that same activity somehow seems inhumane. You mean I've got to work crazy hours, I've got to work nights and weekends. What about my life? These are hard questions. And it's less about telling everybody what they need to do and more just about pointing out the mismatch between what the average consumer is looking for relative what most, most companies willing to do. Because there's always someone, right? I mean, if you fill out an APM lead, gets back to seven companies, someone's going to be able to. Willing. Willing to get on in the evening. Yeah. So this mismatch, I mean, what is Yalls empathetic response of how the PM provides coverage in these off hours, knowing that they have lives too?

B (30:06)

Well, I mean, I think one of the things just in general in this book is we're going to, we're putting forth some ideas to test for People, but there's no solid answers here. Right. We're in a little bit unknown territory. You know, there's one thing to notice the problem. You're right. Jordan, though is like the solution is a lot stickier than that. Mike, you were to say something.

C (30:26)

Well, yeah, I mean, we have a whole series of ideas. Kind of the, well, gosh, if we own a property management company, we might spend some time exploring this. I mean that's the whole final third of the book is where we come up with ideas. Not saying that and we're not trying to evade responsibility by saying, well, you know, good luck, I hope it works out for you. We didn't bother to test these things. In order to properly test these things, given the leap, given the volume of traffic to the average property management company, it could take a year. I mean, this book wouldn't have been done for three years if we wanted to test all the solutions as well. We are testing them with our customers. And so to give you an idea, like one of the challenges that you face, here's a perennial problem of 60% of the leads that we generate come outside of business hours. Okay? So this, this is congruent with the idea that people are at work. So they get home from work, it's after 5 o' clock or it's the weekend, that's when they're free. 60% of our leads come in then. Now if, if you fill out a quote form at 7 o' clock on a Tuesday, the soonest you're gonna hear back from somebody is like 17 or 18 hours later. And you know, we can talk about automated emails separately, but, but if you do that on Friday, you're not going to hear back for 50 plus hours.

B (31:45)

This is the data that we found, backs this up. We analyzed, we looked at the response data. It's like people don't respond at night, people don't respond on weekends. Right. I mean there's the outlier like you said, Jordan. But the data backs up the fact that people aren't really responding outside of hours on weekends.

C (32:04)

So for example, one of the ideas that we're going to recommend that companies test is the idea of a 24,7 sales process that allows customers to self serve to some extent. And before anybody gets excited and thinking, I'm getting rid of salespeople, no, I'm not getting rid of salespeople. But the reality is at Friday night or Saturday morning, most BDMs are not going to respond. They're just not going to. And yet here's the problem the consumer is not really dying to talk to a bdm because right now the way the process works is I'll come to you with a problem. What I really want to do is I want to move forward and feel like I'm making progress. Dylan wanted to hire a mover. Well, Dylan doesn't, isn't dying to talk to a mover on the phone unless that's the only way you've given them to get information. If I can.

B (32:51)

I'm actively trying to avoid talking to a mover on the phone.

C (32:55)

But on the other hand, like for example, the number one question people want to understand is how does pricing work? There is no reason why there couldn't be an in depth, nuanced kind of self education process about how pricing works. Are we suggesting that you give an automated quote online? No, we are not suggesting that. But on the other hand, if somebody understands that, like, I mean we have people that, I mean they come in, they're brand new, they're thinking, I don't know, Maybe it costs $500 a month to manage my house. It would be really good to dial those people down and say no, here's the range. You know it's going to cost you about what a good cup of coffee costs. You know, it's going to be three to five bucks a day. That's the realm we're talking about as far as monthly management. And it's going to cost you half or a full month's rent to find a tenant. It's going to depends. And honestly, I got to talk to you in person in order to understand your house more and get more details from you. So now we have a reason for them to talk to us. Right? But that way I feel like if I fill out a quote form and the first thing most people get, a thank you page says thank you, your submission has been received. They go back to their regularly scheduled life. What if they filled that thing out? Instead of a thank you page, it was boom. A small little video that says, hi, I'm Bob, I'm the guy who's going to be contacting you on Monday. I'm obviously off with my family tonight, but here's some resources that you can go through. And the reason we know this has merit is because internally at Geek, we're eating our own dog food on this one. When we started selling pay per lead services, I got on the phone with people. That was the only way you could do it. I mean from our perspective. And so the phone calls took forever. I mean, I had Two hour phone calls, and I wanted to blow my brains out. And so did probably the person on the other line. So then we moved to a slide presentation, kind of an early zoom thing where somebody got online, people were canceling the appointments, and we had technical problems and there was just blah. I hated that. So then what we do is we said, well, guys, let's just go a little smarter. Let's move a lot of our sales funnel online, let people go through the funnel themselves all. And we're calling this in the book, like the perfect sales presentation. We're not kidding ourselves. There is no such thing. But it's the idea of a lot of times when you're on the phone with somebody during the day, they're busy and you can tell that you can't kind of give your full answer. Right. They're not ready.

A (35:15)

Right.

C (35:16)

For whatever reason. Well, what if you had a situation where they could go through, they could watch the whole thing, they could pause, go get a cup of coffee. Oh, the kid's crying. I can go deal with that, you know, whatever. And I can get through to my own pace where we're kind of covering some bases. Will everybody look at all that stuff? No, they won't. But what it allows you to do as a consumer is feel like this company is putting themselves in my shoes. I'm solving my own problem here a little bit. I'm kind of. I'm going through. And I feel like when I started this process, I knew nothing. And now after an hour, I feel like I know a lot. And this company has really served me by providing value. So I want to talk to this person and get something more specific from them later on. So the sales process has gone on in what we call the book an asynchronous way. It allowed me to do things on my own time, and I didn't. Because right now, most of the time, if you want information for property management, you've got one choice, period. Wait till we talk on the phone, then I'll tell you everything you need to know. And we're just saying that's maybe that's okay, but maybe you could help people solve their problems sooner and they would be more appreciative and feel like. And then response time becomes less of an issue because you literally are responding instantaneously. They fill out the quote form and boom, they got the information, a lot of the information they want, as opposed to, I'm waiting 51 hours to talk to somebody on the phone about a question. And now we're going Playing phone tag on Monday. And the whole process just feels convoluted. And we think there might be a better way to try that.

B (36:48)

We're not trying to extract selling from the process. What we're trying to do is we're trying to split it up a little bit. Right. We still want someone to get on the phone with somebody, but this is like a warm up to that so that by the time it's not just the first thing that they receive is can we get on the phone? They're a little bit warmed up. And you're not even. What you're doing is you're just taking. You're extracting yourself as a salesperson and putting in a different medium. Right. It's like instead of me talking on the phone, I'm taking my selling. I'm still writing words, I'm still making a video. I'm still talking about what I need to talk about and selling the company I'm selling. It's just in a way that. That allows again, someone to be asynchronous. Right? Yeah, go ahead.

A (37:28)

So this is not. This is reminiscent of they ask, you answer. Marcus Sheridan assignment based selling, the idea of meeting people where they're at. And it speaks to the incredible advantage that you have when you educate someone in the process. When you're the one laying down the breadcrumbs, pulling them deeper in the funnel, you're creating a level of bias that's. That is beyond 5% versus 6% releasing fee versus no leasing fee. There's a ton of leverage in that you're setting the buying criteria, which I can't speak to how important that is for you to be the person to say this is what matters, by the way, that happens to map to the things that we emphasize in terms of what we're selling. And it also goes back to the issue of speaking to how things got this way in the first place. So they filled out the contact form. Why would they fill out the contact form if they didn't want to talk to me? Maybe they had no choice. Maybe that was the only way they could get any information.

C (38:37)

Absolutely.

A (38:38)

And so therefore we get in this situation where you think that they want a sales conversation and they really were just looking for any shred of information or contacts, trying to avoid talking to the salesperson, which is the universal experience of where consumers had moved to. We're beyond the point of assuming it's specific people. Wholesale, the market has shifted and the amount of education taking place pre sale and the amount of social anxiety associated with talking with salespeople has gone up. We've jumped that shark. We've moved past it. It's interesting to pick up on the language, the beliefs and the intent behind language, like terms like tire kicker. It's a really interesting one. Tire kicker. Well, here's what I assume someone means. I heard it. And even worse term, this is really bad plate liquor. Like, I'm going to invite someone to dinner, I'm going to pay for their meal, but they're just a plate liquor. They're not going to buy. But let's just go back to tire kicker, Something nominally more civil. My operating assumption when somebody says that is they're talking about a prospect, meaning somebody that's interested and not yet ready to buy. And in my world, that's a valuable person. That's a valuable relationship, something to be cultivated. It could be nurtured into a lead at some point down the road. I mean, let me just jump in

C (40:04)

there for just a second.

A (40:05)

Because it.

C (40:07)

And part of the reason that people. It's a way of them not having this extreme cognitive dissonance.

A (40:13)

Sure.

C (40:14)

They're like, I'm a good salesperson. I work hard, and a good portion of the time I have success. So this is their problem. And it's like, well, okay, I get it, I get it. That's why the way you look at that. But what if the way this person is looking at this problem is they're coming in scared, they don't know anything, and the first thing you want to do is get them on the telephone. They're one of those 55%, and so they feel like you're boring in on them. Now, if you were able to warm them up with some information and actually see your face ahead of time, maybe they're warmed up then. And now instead of that phone call that goes, what's your price when you get off? You know, as soon as I, you know, that's that whole thing, then maybe it's a different conversation.

B (40:59)

I mean, yeah, maybe another way I rephrase that is tire kicker means I don't really know a better way to make this decision than price. Right. I haven't been given another way to make the decision, right. Where it's like, I've just gotten three sets of totally different fee structures. I don't really know how to compare them. There's that kind of anxiety. Then there's like, well, everyone seems to offer the same thing from what I can tell.

A (41:22)

So.

B (41:23)

So I guess this is how I'm making the decision. I'M used to making decisions on price and I haven't really received any other heuristic to do so otherwise. So I'm going to do that and I'm going to ask you what your price is. Oh, yours is worse than the other guy. You can explain to me why you're better than them. Oh, I'll just go with them. Right.

A (41:42)

And this speaks to the self commodification that takes place within the industry, which is to say the belief that it actually is about price or it actually is about service, or it actually is about something that could be put in a spreadsheet and surely they would not buy based on rapport or relationship or common values. And so therefore that's at the back of the list. You know, the real meat is everything that can be modeled out in a spreadsheet, which we know is a misnomer. What a shortcut. What a beautiful shortcut. As a consumer, when I can have the burden of having to do some heavy cognitive calculus as opposed to, you know what, babe, I really like this guy. I think this is our guy. And that's how business is done.

C (42:26)

Yeah, well, in fact, we'll go one more on that in terms of like, for example, let's take the trust issue. There's a lot of issues that we critique, but mostly what people are doing is they're playing 2D chess because everything is two dimensional. It's only words. And you know, who can have the most clever words or clever attachments. And this is not a novel thought, but we just don't see anybody. I mean, literally nobody in 11,000 quote requests used something like a bombbomb or a Vidyard or one of those video sorts of things.

B (42:56)

And we might have had a few, but it was like a huge outlier.

A (43:00)

We're talking about percent of a percent.

B (43:01)

We're talking under 1%, probably. Yeah.

C (43:04)

Let's just say it was hard to find them. Yeah, and it's such a game changer because now we're three dimensional. Now we're human beings. And you're also selling with one hand behind your back because so much is communicated through tonality, facial expression, so much trust. And think about the differentiation that's allowed if you do something like that. Well, let's see. I got three responses. Two of them were a bunch of words and attachments and one was this guy that remembered my name. Somebody's way ahead in the game right there. And it's not about price anymore. I mean, price matters. But let's face it, almost everybody's pricing is within a hair's breadth of each other. Realistically, there may be a few models out there, but when you add everything up, there's a certain amount of money that needs to, that you need to make in order to bear the freight of running a property management company. So people rearrange it, but the reality is, is that it's going to cost. Not that much different between companies. So now you're making decisions based on a whole bunch of other things. And trust is obviously a key component and also your ability to communicate things to people. I mean, for example, we had people send us to their pricing page and I know the popular like three channel, three column pricing thing with the 16 things down there and they all compare. And I'm not, I'm not dissing on that, but I am saying the average person, given their knowledge level, doesn't understand what about 15 of those 16 things mean. So you're not communicating anything. Yeah, it's there. See our pricing page. It's like I feel just as stupid as I did five minutes ago. I don't even know what it means.

A (44:46)

And I feel like this is a whole other conversation internally. It relates to pricing is massively important. It relates to profitability. But it gets. When it gets bastardized as who can manipulate it to best represent it to the, to the client. And that's the primary focus. We're getting close to falling into a conversation about who's being more clever, not thinking about the fact that there's a cost with carrying complexity, period. More complex. You've made it. At some point you're going to confuse yourself. You're certainly going to confuse the customer and the consumer.

B (45:22)

And.

A (45:22)

And so in the absence of clarity, people have coping mechanisms. And one of those coping mechanisms is to go back to the basics of trust. I had lunch with somebody today that said there's nothing illegal about insider trading as long as you're a private company, which really made me chuckle. But what I took from that in the most charitable sense was there's a form of cheating that's okay. Like being nice, being friendly, having a great personality. I mean, let's be honest, being attractive like that is actually useful. Is it fair? I don't know, but it's effective. If there's something you can do to give yourself an incremental edge in this process, that is having a perspective, having a personality, being timely, courteous and prompt. Why wouldn't you do those things? Now, everything I just listed is human, which means it's time. And I do want to speak to and get your take on the amortized cost of a system, which is what you were talking about a little while ago, versus the emotional energy of the thought that you're implying that I need to be a 24, 7 happy, amped up, available salesperson. Let's talk about some of the practical pros and cons of these two approaches. Because to me, the idea that I could build this system, there's some time involved, but at a cost of what. What does this cost me? It's a. A couple grand. I make some high def videos. 3, 4, 5. 5 grand. How much time back of napkin do you estimate it would take to build some of the 24, seven selling systems that you're talking about?

C (46:57)

Well, we've actually got a vendor and so they'll have. I mean we'll provide that as a part of the contact information there for somebody. They can do it themselves. That might or might not be a good idea. But you know, probably all in, if you decided to go super mega deluxe, it might cost five grand. And for production level stuff that's going to actually have correct lighting where you're going to be asked the correct questions. Because we've tried some of this stuff before with our customers, said, hey, why don't you talk about pricing on video? Well, four weeks later we get a dark, barely audible video back that rambles. And so it's like, well, huh. And so this is a terribly hard problem to solve unless you get. You kind of need some outside help to put your best foot forward. It's like having a professional photographer. But we're trying to find a way to make it accessible for people. So that's one thing. Dylan, do you have any other ideas?

B (47:53)

Yeah, I want to just touch on. You bring up you said the word human, which kind of triggered me to think of something. Right. I mean one thing that we kind of been thinking is like people treat leads exactly the same all the time, right. That's what we typically see.

A (48:08)

Right.

B (48:10)

We see this in a variety of ways, like time, the type of lead, what the lead says. It's like, you know, one you see like someone says something in the comments of the lead of an email like their contact you and then there's no mention of this thing in the email back to them. Like there's a problem there. There's not that human touch. That person is being treated like everyone else in a way that makes them feel dehumanized. Right. And so there's the 24, 7 selling that part of they're Outside of the realm where I can actually, like, I can't necessarily be available all day, every day. Right. You know, I'm a bdm. I don't work weekends.

A (48:51)

Right.

B (48:52)

I need to have a process for that. But the low hanging fruit is you could be a human during the day and people aren't it doing, doing that. You can, you don't need a mega deluxe video. I mean, I think that helps. I think that's part of the equation here. To have something that is for people that you kind of can't respond to quickly, but you can get a free Vidyard account or pay however much for a bomb every month and just be better at getting that first human touch. And instead of having that automated email. I mean, I don't know exactly how you do this, but like, you do it automated night, you do it automated at night, and you do it manual during the day. You just.

A (49:29)

So let's, let's touch on that. Because, Mike, you're making that reaction. But hey, that's an automated touch. Isn't that, isn't that the 24 selling

C (49:37)

system thing you're talking about? Okay, so I understand it's a vexing problem to solve. Like how do you do it when you're not there? But what Dylan was pointing out is during the day, from nine to five, I am there. And so I have sensed pushback periodically from salespeople kind of saying, hey, I don't got time for all this jazz. This is like too much. And so I see, I used to be a sales manager. And so I call BS on all this because here's the deal. Our best customers get at most three leads a day, at most. Okay, they might. The average customer for us gets one or two. So the average person, let's say the average lead flow into a property management company is one or two a day, maybe. I mean, really, if you stop and think about the numbers, that's 20 working days, two leads a day. That's 40 leads a month. That's way more than the average property management gets company gets. Okay, so now we're talking about two leads a day. And what I'm saying is, would you please spend up to 10 minutes on each one of those new leads? So Now I've taken 20 minutes out of your valuable time. Now you've got, if you're working eight hours, you've got seven hours and 40 minutes to do whatever else is so important. Much more than new business. Like you were saying earlier with Paul Graham and Y Combinator, do something that doesn't scale. Why don't you, why don't you actually read what they sent? And how about you say, hey Bob, your house on such and such an address looks like it's large. Is there something behind, I mean something that's going to let them know there's something human going on here? Because you know what we're trained to do, if it doesn't feel like human anymore, if we just click, we learn to filter it out because we, because we can't survive with all the automated stuff. And so what we're hunting for is that like that letter that comes to your mailbox, that's handwritten. So what's the digital version of that handwritten letter that says, hold it. This is something totally different here. This is like there's a human being here. This isn't just a bot.

B (51:35)

Yeah. And the amount.

C (51:37)

Yeah, go ahead.

B (51:37)

I mean we saw that over and over again where there's just, just not a sense of personalization to this stuff. Right. I mean we would track. Okay, what did the, what did we have the prospect or our kind of secret shop relief say in the comments field?

A (51:53)

Right.

B (51:53)

And did the property manager address that concern question desire in any way? And the amount of personalization to that end is very, very limited. And it's like, wouldn't you think that the thing that they thought about enough to ask you personally to point out would be the thing that you would first want to address? Set yourself apart.

A (52:17)

Amen.

B (52:19)

It just doesn't, it doesn't make sense. And it's like, like Mike said, it just doesn't take very much time. It doesn't take, you know, five grand for a nice video. It takes 10 minutes of your time twice a day.

A (52:30)

Right.

B (52:31)

And you can have good answers for these things planned out. You could just have a canned email and lead simple. And just delete everything that doesn't apply or put like the thing that needs to be personalized up front and then the headline and then you are exponentially better off than you were before.

A (52:47)

So back to the explanation, back to systemic causes, back to prioritization. Let's talk a little bit about the role that OPS plays in this dysfunction. Certainly for a smaller PM, manage 100, 150 doors. It's me, I gotta do it. We're not talking about an SOP or a system for my bdm. I have to take all these calls. So all the good ideas between the three of us are just a guilt trip for them to do. Some folks will feel or interpret that as in another company they have a BDM in place. Certainly I've got my opinions, but I wanna hear from you guys, what is the role that you see on ops? Kind of creating pressure at times to either provide more or less permission for sales. And I'll finish with this. The classic example to me is around the idea that you need to perform some kind of a forensic analysis to do a DNA sample to confirm that this prospect owns such and such a property before you call them back. Right. The implicit thing is like, my time is so valuable, there's such risk if I was to waste some time, et cetera. What's the interplay that OPS has on this?

C (54:01)

Well, I mean, I'll just. Maybe I'm not smart enough to understand the full scope of the question, but I will say as a salesperson, I relate to what you're saying. And as a person who's in part of this research, we saw it happen all the time where these people were spending a bunch of time to make sure that they weren't wasting any time. And they would have been better off just getting on the phone or actually reading the thing and providing the value to the person that they actually asked for. That was. That would be more likely because they spend. We've seen a shift in the last, I don't know, five to seven years. When we first came on, people were like, I need to get a follow up system in place. Like, my follow up is disorganized. And so, okay, we acknowledge the fact that human beings are bad at keeping systems going. So you need a lead simple to do certain things. However, we've seen it swing too far in some regards to where now the human parts being extracted. And so if you come across as a real human being, that's a point of differentiation.

B (55:01)

Yeah.

C (55:01)

People are tired of it and they don't notice you. You're like, okay, this is how it is. It's all blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, oh, there's the corporate video. That's another favorite thing. We saw the corporate video. The corporate thing.

B (55:16)

It's like, here's the thing, we waste time as people all the time to make a better return. Right. You just want to feel like the time I'm wasting leads to a return. Right. And I think that that calculus kind of internally can be off for people sometimes of like, okay, am I willing to waste five minutes here to have to close one more deal out of 10? Like that's a pretty strong ROI, I think. But you just, they don't think about it like that. It's like, oh, well, nine times out of ten it doesn't turn into something. Or eight times out of ten it doesn't turn into something. You know.

A (55:53)

And in a proper sales org, sales has its own priorities and sales knows to push back against ops. I always know I'm talking to a thoroughbred on the real estate side and this certainly has its positives and negatives, but I know I'm talking to a thoroughbred. When they are crystal clear that you never, ever, ever turn off the leads, the worst possible thing that you can do is turning off the leads. And the broker takes it as a personal, their personal mission to make sure that the organization exists, to make sure that they continue to keep the sales and marketing engine running because they know the economic contribution that it makes to the rest of the organization. As opposed to other organizations that go through this feast and famine cycle. There's tension between sales and ops. Sales getting 10 more deals means that ops has a bigger burden. I'm sure that you guys deal in situations where you sense that they really don't want the leads because they got too much of the thing that, that they wanted. Is that true for you guys? And what are your thoughts on practically how an organization should, should deal with that? Knowing that the idea of just turning the leads on and off is, even in a pay per lead paradigm really just isn't that simple?

C (57:14)

Well, yeah, no, we have opinions. We don't generally share them with anybody because people have their own reasons for turning things on and off and we try not to be judgmental about that. But if we put ourselves in their shoes, the obvious question is like, okay, so what you've decided is 10 leads a month is as much as you can handle. What they're really saying is, I don't want to go through the trouble to scale my organization up in some way to be able to deal with the fact. And so, and I guess that's okay for some people if that's what they want. But for me, I would probably be, I don't know. There's a variety of things that you could do. There's a combination of obviously some technological things you can do, but it means that you're going to have to get better at training and getting people to be more efficient with their time and also be more efficient with their selling.

B (58:06)

Yeah, I think it's a mindset of like, okay, things are really cranking up and there's a lot going on. Do you lean into that or do you lean away from it? I mean, I think that's the attitude Right. It's like, oh, this is more than we can handle. Okay, is that a signal that we need to level up our ops, that we need to come up with a better system? Or is it like, whoa, whoa, whoa, it's too much, I'm stressed out, I'm going to just stop everything, stop time for a little bit. And I mean, and that's just like, I mean, I don't know if there's a wrong answer. It's just you lead to different outcomes, right? You're going to have a smaller business that like chips away a little bit by little bit with one side and you're going to grow on the other side if you choose to kind of lean into the challenge of being able to level up.

A (58:52)

So speaking of different outcomes, let's end here. It's easy to point out the flaws of the dysfunction in this industry, which is not in any way, shape or form materially different than any other small business vertical. That said, let's end on the other side. What was the common denominator that you saw amongst. I don't know what it was. The 10%, the 5% of folks that were at the top of the food chain. What were the positive correlations that you think are worth us kind of ending and highlighting?

C (59:26)

Well, it's a little tricky because the research is going to highlight more problem areas because we never allowed them to get on the phone and close us. So we're biased towards finding the problems and we're making suggestions based on practical solutions. So I don't want to get too far ahead and say that the book is going to talk about all these best of breed practices. We are going to talk about specific things that we think will work and make. We would do them if we were a property management company. We think they make some good common sense things that we Talked about like a 24, 7 sales process or a more personalized process or how about something simple like, you know, the majority of your customers, property management companies think, well, gosh, when you get on the phone, that's the gold standard. But we're also going to send an email. And so we found that only 10% of property management companies use texting at all. Do you know that's the most popular modality with consumers?

A (60:22)

No doubt. I mean, I get a text, I open it, generally speaking, 100% of the

C (60:26)

time, it's crazy in terms of how, how those things don't overlap. And so, you know, we're going to suggest people some things that hopefully will be common sense, like gosh if you're working during the day and they're working during the day and you can't connect that way because they're busy, why don't you try to do something outside those areas to try to. And we're not saying, oh my gosh, this is going to be a home run. Everything's going to be different. You're going to double your close rates. We're talking about 3% here, 2% there, 4% there. But people that do this and grind this for a living know that those are real gains because then they multiply over time. So we're not promising the moon here, but we do come. I mean, there's some other ideas. Let's see what are the.

B (61:09)

Well, let me. I got an answer to your question, Jor. You're talking about like what kind of differentiates the, the high performers from, from everyone else, right? And I, I think that what you see is like, I mean we're pointing out kind of the tail end of things, right? Things are changing. Phone call doesn't work the same way, texting working differently. And so I think that the star performers are the ones that you see one emphasizing like you see the tension between operations and sales, right? That, that really focus on sales, that see sales as a really high priority for the company and willing to put the resources towards that, the training toward that, the, the eyes on that salesperson to kind of assist them and go through those emails and kind of like analyze that process. Right? When you taking a BDM, for example, instead of just saying poof, now I don't have to handle the sales anymore to walk with them and try and train them and try and like work with them to build a sales process together. So it's like I think that focus on sales, you see people that view their property manager companies as sales organizations versus that's just a way to fuel the operations. Right?

C (62:19)

I'll piggyback on that and say things like there was a very famous study done by a famous company called Lead simple and it showed how important that fast follow up was. And we talk about that in the book. But that information came out a long time ago. And so why haven't people taken it to heart? Well, the people that are successful are. There's companies out there that are. And I mean, I'll give you another one. This is like blowing your own toes off. But the majority of companies have voicemail turned on after hours. And we make an economic case that the average property management company is losing somewhere probably between 35 to $110,000 a year by not hiring a live human being to answer calls after hours. Because people are hanging up, they're not leaving messages. And so, I mean, you'd obviously want to test it, but we see it all the day. Click, click, click, click, click. And so people that take this more seriously that, I mean, we've got customers that answer live. For example, every. Every call that comes in, a human being picks it up. That is not the norm. That's not the norm. During business hours, the first thing you get is a voice tree that takes you a minute and a half to get through. And you know, you're ready to blow your brains out. And it reminds you of all your terrible. All that voicemail rage starts building up in your body. And much better to like, oh, my gosh, a real human being picked up. I'm delighted. I can't believe it. That's a simple thing. And we see companies doing that. And that's, I think, a successful behavior to treat a human being like you'd like to be treated. I mean, I know it sounds radical, but that's what I want when I call, I don't want to leave a voicemail. I don't want to go through a voicemail tree.

B (64:00)

And here's the reality. I mean, Mike's throwing out quite a few things, like, you do this, you need to do this, you need this. And this is grimy work, right? I mean, this is a lot of details. Like we said in the beginning, this is death by a thousand paper cuts, right? So this is about can you sustain the focus, to deal with all the details, to have the humility to look at the process that you were satisfied with six months ago and see how it's changed, see how it's fallen apart, see how systems have gone awry or things aren't being followed the way that they should be. And our goal with this book is not to show everyone how they're doing it wrong. That's not our attitude. That's not where we want to go. But I mean, this is the kind of information we'd want, like checklists to just sanity check our processes, to say, like, oh, man, this is happening with all these other people. Am I doing this? And having the humility to look at that and to just hit on all of the details and say, okay, check, check, check. I've done all these things and to keep up with looking on those details.

A (65:05)

So for those of you listening at home, the book title is We Secret Shop. You, Mike and Dylan. For folks that want to read more. Want to go through the whole treatise? Where can they get a copy?

C (65:14)

Well, so we've set up an offer for people that are listening to your podcast. If they go to Secret shopped, that's secretandshopped.com, they'll get to a landing page and they'll be able to get whatever. We haven't finished the book 100%, to be honest with you. We're finishing up the third section right now. So you've seen a pre publication copy, Jordan, that's what you have?

A (65:36)

I have. This is great.

C (65:38)

And so you'll get what we finished so far for free. Then as we finish chapters, you'll get those for free. And then once we finish the book, you'll get a digital copy for free. And if you hang around and keep paying attention to the emails that come to you, we'll eventually give you even a shot at getting a hard copy, Hardbound copy for no charge as well.

A (66:00)

Well, so it's an offer that is the least surprising thing I've heard all day. Mike and Dylan have an offer. Go to secretshopped.com, get a copy. The last book, Make It Ring was fantastic. There's a lot of meat here. Guys, I just want to say thank you for taking your craft seriously. This is a lot of effort writing a book for your customers. I mean, it's kind of a pain in the rear. Nobody knows how much work goes into that. But I really appreciate the fact that you guys have taken your craft seriously, put in this work, and I know the industry as a whole will benefit from it.

B (66:34)

Yeah, thanks, Jordan. Really appreciate you having us on.

C (66:36)

Yeah, thanks for letting us talk about this.

A (66:38)

All right, guys, it's a pleasure. Till the next side next time, be well. All right, there we go.