Aspirational and Experiential Marketing-with Jim Remley-EP43

During this episode of the Lab Coat Agents Podcast, host Jeff Pfitzer speaks with Jim Remley, a broker-owner and coach. Jim understands how to start a conversation and go beyond the basics. He is a great teacher who shares his secrets to understanding aspirational and experiential marketing and how it can help you convert more in 2020. If you are struggling to talk to enough people every day to achieve your goals, you need to tune into this podcast episode. Episode Highlights: Jim Remley had a dream of getting into the real estate business. He dropped out of college, walked into a Century 21 office, and began his career. Within twelve months he took 150 listings and got into the top 1% in his region. At 24, he opened an office that he grew to 17 offices over a 15 year period. He sold that business in 2006. Jim’s strategy about how to overcome your age is that you can win with enthusiasm and authenticity. His secret to success was that he outworked his competition and was completely authentic while doing so. It's really important to have your goals set. Have written goals and an action plan behind the goals. If you want to do 20 million dollars, what does that boil down to in terms of a daily action plan? Use the "act as if" approach. Jim is currently using this approach with a weight loss goal. What does a 160-pound person do when they get up in the morning? What does a 20 million dollar producer do with their day? It really is about setting priorities. The difference between successful agents and those who do not succeed is always their daily action plan. Think about your business like you just got a medical license. You have a 2-3 year period where you are essentially an intern. When his agents first go out, Jim teaches them to go after FSBOs and expired listings, learn how to farm, and then at the end of that tunnel he wants his agents to be 80-90% sphere-based within 2-3 years. Your personal life carries into your professional life. Aspirational marketing means we're going to touch on what really drives people to make any kind of housing decision. Housing changes are based on lifestyle changes. One version of aspirational marketing is asking someone about their dream home. When you ask people that question, you're accessing a dream center of their brain. Often people will tell you something local. He will set up a dream search for them. Then every month you send them their aspirational goals. At some point, no question they'll do business with you. The dream search is a fun way to do business with people and have fun conversations. People default to writing an amenities list when writing ads. Jim focuses ads not on the amenities list but on the features that the amenities give you. This way he's selling a lifestyle. Ask if your ads paint a lifestyle picture. Do they create an aspirational goal for someone to be living in the house? Ads should drive curiosity. Hand curation is when the agent handpicks properties that their buyers should absolutely see. This is experiential marketing. Experiential marketing is really only for buyers who are A+ buyers who will be buying in the next 30-60 days. If you're closing 24 deals per year, you're in the top 4% of agents nationwide. The average American has 27 conversations per day. If you could just insert the dream house question into 5 of those conversations each day, your career will transform. The problem is that most agents are afraid of rejection. Everybody likes to talk about real estate. 30 conversations leads to one transaction. You just don't know where transactions will come from. You've got to be outside the box and thinking all the time. Once you get in the habit of turning conversations to real estate, it will become self-reinforcing. Jim provides a starter for easing the conversation into real estate. Tell someone you're in real estate and that you're showing two properties today. Ask them which one they like better. You need excuses to engage people. If you're not taking risks every day, what you want to become is an employee. What you're really providing is an experience. You have to rethink your business as an experience. Create a drip system of videos. This is especially helpful for out of town buyers to help them get to know an area. Provide recommendations that help build a lifestyle experience. When you're in escrow, creating a drip series of process videos. Ask yourself if you've updated your listing and selling presentations recently. When agents start basing their business on referrals, they start phoning in their listing presentations. Every time you're with a seller, even if it's your best friend, you do the full experience. Real time videos can be scaled out to your entire database. A lot of agents get caught up in being perfect. It's good to be perfectly imperfect on video. Jim built a coaching platform based on how he trains his own agents. When a student comes into their path performance coaching, they have hundreds of videos they...