The Myth of the Tool That Does It All
We’ve all been tempted by the siren song of the tool that promises to solve all our problems. But is there such a silver bullet? Join hosts Zach Hammer and Charlie Madison as they dive into the myth of marketing tools that supposedly do all the work for you. Discover why you still need real conversations and connections, no matter how automated your systems get.
Tune in to gain clarity on whether you need more conversations or just better filtering, along with actionable tips you can apply right away. The illusion of easy passive income awaits – see through the myths on this episode of The Real Estate Growth Hackers!
Other subjects covered on the show:
- The importance of optimizing for conversations in real estate sales and marketing.
- Examples of tools like HomeBot that can help generate conversations when used strategically.
- How to determine if you need more conversations vs. need to filter existing conversations.
- Mindset around growth – you’re either moving forward or falling behind.
- Leveraging tools to create opportunities for conversations.
- Using tools to identify the right, qualified prospects to have conversations with.
- Combining referral/relationship-building strategies with tools.
- Assessing if tools help you progress toward your goals.
AND MORE TOPICS COVERED IN THE FULL INTERVIEW!!! You can check that out and subscribe to YouTube.
If you want to know more about Zach Hammer and Charlie Madison, you may reach out to them at:
- Website: https://realestategrowthhackers.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachhammer/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charliemadison/
[00:00:00] Zach Hammer: All right. Welcome, welcome back to Real Estate Growth Hackers. I’m Zach Hammer here with my co-host, Charlie Madison. Charlie, welcome back to the show. Today we are gonna be talking about The Myth Of The Tool That Does It A ll. Here’s what I mean by that. We find very often that in this business of real estate and business in general, that we get really excited about some sort of tool, some strategy, something that we think is gonna fix all of our problems.
[00:00:27] It seems like everybody is looking for the magic silver bullet that accomplishes everything that you need to without you having to do anything. And hey part of the story of this is that marketers tend to sell us on the idea that it’s gonna do everything for you.
[00:00:40] And here’s the truth. It’s a lie. No tool is gonna do everything for you. It’s gonna make things easier. But let’s dive into that and talk a little bit about, a little bit more about like, how to think about these things. What does matter, what doesn’t matter?
[00:00:53] All of that kind of idea. So, we’re talking, this comes as a result. I have a client that was recently telling me. Recently talking to me about their [00:01:00] utilization of Home Bot , right? So Home Bot pretty cool tool.
[00:01:03] Anybody who isn’t familiar with it lets you put people into a list and then automatically send out like home valuations so that you could see who’s engaging with those follow up with the people who are, et cetera. And if the expectation is that I just drop a bunch of people into this thing, and then it’s magically going to get me a bunch of deals Charlie how successful do you think that is is likely to be with basically any tool?
[00:01:25] Charlie Madison: I think someone’s going to be mildly versus extremely disappointed, one or the other.
[00:01:32] Zach Hammer: Yes. The only guarantee is that they will be disappointed. It’s just a question of how much . But yeah none of these things are gonna do that now to be fair, if there is a tool or a process or a concept that takes the least amount of work compared to the most amount of outcome.
[00:01:49] There’s only one tool in my mind that actually fits in doing this very well. That’s actually what you have with with a realtor waiting list and referrals while you sleep in terms of the [00:02:00] level of what you can achieve outta that. And that’s because it optimizes for a couple of key things.
[00:02:06] So when it comes to the world of real estate. Everything hinges around one key thing, and that’s conversations, right? If you have to optimize for one thing, you optimize for conversations. In a world where you have no conversations happening, you should start to get more conversations happening, right?
[00:02:26] You should find more reasons to be able to talk to people. You personally, you actually ended up having the opposite problem, right? You did the opposite, but a different problem. Your backstory on some of this stuff. You had you had gotten to the point you were generating tons of leads.
[00:02:41] You were able to have as many conversations as you wanted. And so you had a different problem. What would you say the problem was when you got to having that many conversations? What became your problem?
[00:02:52] Charlie Madison: I went broke, literally time, and money, t he way you deal with leads is, you have more team members and all the software you [00:03:00] pay per seat. You hire an ISA, you do your three to four hours of calls in the morning and then you figure out how to convince them to show up for the appointment, and then you convince them to sign it and then you hope they’re qualified or, they’ll be fun to work with.
[00:03:19] And then you get down to it and you’re working with them and they’re just assholes. it was a very expensive endeavor until I was so exhausted. I couldn’t work. I didn’t have the energy to work with the come list me’s. I wanted to like, I lost money and it was terrible.
[00:03:36] That was my experience.
[00:03:38] Zach Hammer: And so, to put one big word to contain all of that the problem that you ran into was not, how do I get more conversations? It was, how do I figure out which are the conversations that actually matter? How do I figure out who I should be talking to?
[00:03:51] I have plenty of people to talk to, but how do I make sure the right conversations are happening? And how do I make sure that the conversations that I need to be happening, that best optimize for my time, [00:04:00] my money et cetera, how do I get those conversations happening? But ultimately, that’s what it boils down to, is it boils down to conversations.
[00:04:08] If you don’t have enough, then you need to get more. If you’ve got too many. Then you need to figure out the right conversations. But it all boils back down to conversations. And so the biggest mistake that I see people making is thinking that they’re somehow going to leverage a tool that’s gonna work on its own without having to talk to people and that just doesn’t happen.
[00:04:29] So even ideally like, part of what you’re up to with referrals while you sleep. Especially for real estate folks, you know that the tool is working when you’re getting conversations showing up , right? You know that it’s working when people are reaching out and part of why that works for what you’re doing is, you are curating the list of people that you’re even running your process with. So you’re making sure that you’re showing up in front of people already familiar with you and just making it more likely that they think of you when [00:05:00] it’s time to do a real estate transaction, right? That they’re ready to reach out to you with their referrals or with their business.
[00:05:05] And so you optimize to make that happen, but there’s still the expectation that you’re gonna be living your life. You’re gonna be talking to people, you’re gonna be staying in conversation with the people that you already know and trust. You’re gonna keep showing up in life and having conversations and being involved.
[00:05:21] It just allows those conversations to go farther and to when they’re relevant to real estate, to show up in that way. More so on autopilot. But that may, like people have various goals for how they wanna work and how they wanna, how they want to do some of these things.
[00:05:35] And if you have the expectation that I’m just gonna have this tool and it’s gonna do everything for me you’re likely not leveraging the tool to its full extent. So, something like Home bot, for instance. The thing that I would like people to, realize with this and to flip on its head is to figure out how does this thing.
[00:05:53] Either help me have more conversations, or if I’m having too many conversations, help me to figure [00:06:00] out where are the right conversations. And so when you’re looking at tools that’s what you should be thinking of is does this help me get more or does this help me optimize? And maybe it does both.
[00:06:10] And so, I’ll be looking for those. So home bot’s a great example. Instead of thinking, I’m gonna put a bunch of emails, and contacts into this and send ’em out and expect it to magically bring me deals. What you need to do is you need to realize, hey, this is a really great tool, but most people ignore their email and so if you want them to actually see this thing, what are you gonna need to do? You’re probably gonna need to pick up the phone and call them or send them a text message and say, Hey, I am paying for this really cool thing on your behalf as a gift to you to make sure that you are able to keep track of what your home is worth in the market as that changes, you’re gonna start getting this email that’s gonna show you this information.
[00:06:50] It’s gonna be really cool, really powerful, really detailed for you. I’m actually, I just sent you one. If you wanna go and take a look at that real quick, go ahead and pull it up. You got a quick second [00:07:00] to look at that, go pull it up. And I wanna walk you through what’s in that so that you can see what it is and know what you’re expecting.
[00:07:06] And then now, after doing that, now you got the benefit of you just had another touchpoint, another conversation. So they’re used to hearing from you. You actually made it so that they’re more likely to go and look for this thing that you sent them because they want to have it, rather than it just showing up randomly and them having no idea what’s going on.
[00:07:22] And then further, now you’ve created opportunities that in the following months you have another excuse to call him up and say, hey, your monthly report just came out. Any questions on what your home is worth, what’s going on in your life, and do all the standard things of just touching base with people and staying involved in their life.
[00:07:38] But it gives you that excuse, that good reason to reach out. And you could set the ratio of how often it makes sense for you to do those kinds of reach outs. And then further, if you start having too many people to reach out to. Well, you could see who are the people that are opening the thing, who are the people that are actually engaging with it and giving you signs that it’s likely time for you to have conversations about what’s going on in their life.
[00:07:59] And you could be more [00:08:00] proactive and shoot when you combine multiple strategies together where you deploy things like referrals while you sleep so that you’re in front of your list of warm contacts consistently. When you combine that with that plus tools that you’re sending out, things like home bot and making sure that you’re having these touchpoints and conversations with people, these things all go end up going together to create an end result where people think of you when they need to do a real estate transaction. They’re used to talking to you. You stay in their life. You stay involved, even after they’ve bought a house or whatever.
[00:08:29] And you’re more likely to do repeat business easily, readily and more often. And those are examples that tend to be geared toward people that you already know and trust. But really the same idea applies to anything. If you’re generating leads, what you should be looking for is, you should be looking for, if I’ve got too many people to reach out to, what is the process for figuring out who are the people that I should be reaching out to and talking to?
[00:08:51] How do I make it so that they self-Select, and then make sure you’re having those conversations. ’cause it’s not about getting rid of the conversations, it’s about either getting [00:09:00] yourself more conversations if you don’t have enough right now or if you’ve got too many, figuring out how to optimize to have the right conversations and get more of the right conversations happening.
[00:09:10] So, that’s the idea there. Any takeaways or thoughts on on that concept, Charlie?
[00:09:15] Charlie Madison: Yeah, I like that simplicity. Do I need more conversations or do I need to filter, for the right conversations? And I’ve got a friend, when he needs to filter conversations he sees who’s been watching it. Are looking at it and he just calls and, he says, Hey, yeah, I was just thinking about you.
[00:09:31] Ask them about their family. Like you build the connection. Like most of us, this is a connection business. And then he asks, he’s Hey, I’ve been sending you a home report. Have you have you gotten it? Like he doesn’t tell ’em like, I can see that you’ve opened it 20 times. He just says, Hey, have gotten it?
[00:09:48] And let them explain and talk. And then start asking, you ask about them, like you find out whether he had a new job or they’re expecting a baby or a kid’s moving out. Like you’re listening for those [00:10:00] factors that you know are likely to indicate someone to move and then you offer to help.
[00:10:06] That’s such a cool, easy way to do it. And I think the magic of, Home Bot is for 500 contacts, it’s really inexpensive. If send out a postcard that’s $500 a month, a newsletter that’s more than 500 bucks a month for just 500, you got, 500 to a thousand.
[00:10:26] It’s really affordable for what you got.
[00:10:29] Zach Hammer: Yeah, exactly. And like Home Bot is the example that comes top of mind. ’cause I was just talking to somebody about it. And it’s a good tool. Like I recommend it, but it’s not, this principle isn’t even just specific to that. It applies to anything like this. This could be how you’re thinking about what your IDX is supposed to be doing for you, right?
[00:10:44] Like, your site that people search through listings so that you could see what they’re actively doing. You shouldn’t think that those things are going to do the work for you. What they’re going to do is they’re going to create more opportunities for you to have a good excuse to have a conversation, or they’re [00:11:00] gonna create more clarity on who you should be having conversations with, if you’re already having enough. So either it creates the opportunity for conversation or it creates clarity on the right conversations with the right people. And when you understand that basically every tool likely fits into that world when it comes to marketing and sales and whatnot in the real estate space.
[00:11:21] It lets you have a better understanding of what to actually expect when it’s working right. You are likely going to either have more conversations you might need to reach out. They might not be inbound conversations. But you’re either gonna have more conversations, and good excuses for them, or you’re gonna have more clarity on how to better filter through the conversations that you’re already trying to have. And if what you’re expecting is you’re expecting, I’m gonna use this tool and I’m going to, sit back, kick my feet up on the table and just let everything come in, it’s technically that might work.
[00:11:53] It’s probably not gonna work out great financially , right? Like you’re gonna,
[00:11:56] Charlie Madison: Probably in the wrong business.
[00:11:59] Zach Hammer: If you just want the [00:12:00] inbound calls coming in. I’m not saying that doesn’t happen and that won’t work for some people, but that is definitely the mentality of somebody who isn’t pushing toward growth, isn’t pushing toward a better future.
[00:12:13] That’s the mentality of somebody who’s just coasting on what they’ve got, rather than being motivated to figure out ways to push forward. And man, I’ll tell you, there’s some truths I’ve found that just when you’re looking at life in general, when we look in the natural world, if you’ve got a plant that plant is not getting bigger, it is doing something else. It’s only one thing
[00:12:43] Charlie Madison: Yeah.
[00:12:44] Zach Hammer: It’s getting smaller and it’s dying , right? Like essentially living things exist in these two states. There isn’t stasis. It’s either growing and improving or it’s dying. And that doesn’t necessarily mean growing in your business.
[00:12:58] Everybody’s got different [00:13:00] motivation. It doesn’t necessarily mean doing 10 times as many deals. It might be doing the same deals in less amount of time. It might be achieving what you’re looking for with, less lead cost or whatever. But there’s forward momentum.
[00:13:11] There’s forward progress, right? And typically sitting back and just letting it happen, is not what forward progress looks like for most people. So yeah, so, when you’re looking for real estate tools software tools, especially in the marketing and sales side of the game.
[00:13:26] Look for tools that either create more opportunities for conversations or give you clarity on who the right conversations are and what you should be talking to them about. So that’s the that’s the idea there.
[00:13:37] Any final thoughts or does that sound about good to you?
[00:13:40] Charlie Madison: I Just love that clarity. Is this creating more conversations or helping me filter my conversations? And it depends on how much time do I have. If I’ve got the time, have more conversations. If I need more time, look for filtered conversations. I’m gonna use that. That’s really good.
[00:13:59] Zach Hammer: There you [00:14:00] go. Glad to help. There you go. I am Zach Hammer, Charlie Madison with me, with Realtor Waiting List and referrals while you sleep. If you guys are looking for a great tool, a great program, a great bit of software to help you whether you’re a lender or real estate professional real estate team owner.
[00:14:17] Charlie’s got some great options for you. Check them out at if you’re a lender. RealtorWaitingList.com. Is that correct? Is that the believe that’s the website. RealtorWaitingList.com. If you’re a real estate professional check out at ReferralsWhileYouSleep.com.
[00:14:31] But yeah, there you go. If you want to continue following what we’re up to, RealEstateGrowthHackers.com, check us out and make sure that you’re up to date on our list where you can keep up to date on these episodes and tools that we’re coming out with. We’ve got more stuff coming in the future around AI automation courses, training tools about that.
[00:14:49] Keep informed about that. But there you go. Today we’re talking about conversations and and having more of them, or having more of the right ones. And so Charlie, here’s what I want to end with. I wanna [00:15:00] have more conversations with you because they are the right conversations.
[00:15:03] So there you go. you go. There we go. Have a good one. We’ll see on the next one.
[00:15:10] Charlie Madison: See you guys.
[00:15:11]
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Real Estate Growth Hackers Founder
Zach Hammer
Zach Hammer is the co-founder of Real Estate Growth Hackers. Over the last 36 months Zach and his team have managed ad budgets well over $100,000, generated over 25,000 real estate leads, and helped create over $50,000,0000 in business revenue for their clients. Zach is also a highly sought after speaker and consultant whose work has impacted some of the top Real Estate teams and brokerages across the country.