We Are Selling with Lee Woodward
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We Are Selling with Lee Woodward
Mastering Your Future Business Sequence with Monique Field
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In this podcast episode, Lee introduces Monique Field from Illawarra, New South Wales, who shares her success story in real estate and the use of a digital prospecting sequence. Monique, with 10 years of experience in the furniture industry, transitioned to real estate and highlights the difference in the challenges faced.
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Hello and welcome to the podcast We Are Selling, brought to you by RealTare, the home of Pitch, Sign and Sell. Each week we look for people that are having success in understanding the digital sequence of prospecting. And today's a great story as we go down to the Illawarra era, uh Illawarra area of New South Wales. And joining me is Monique Field. Monique, welcome aboard.
SPEAKER_01:Hi Lee, how are you going?
Lee Woodward:Monique, absolutely fantastic, and I thank you for joining us. And just a little bit about your story before we get into our sequence. You came from the furniture industry.
SPEAKER_01:I did. I spent ten years there importing furniture from all over the world, and um that was a as much as I loved it, was a bit of a hard slog. So I can tell you, as much as real estate probably has a mo a huge, a lot more emotional ups and downs, um, it doesn't probably you don't you're not really doing the heavy lifting.
Lee Woodward:Yeah, it's a seven day a week grind that one. And when you come into real estate, people say, Oh, you know, you'll have to work hard, and you're like, Yeah, okay. So you're gonna go.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, hard working seven days in real estate is not working hard, it's especially if you love it. It's it's different, it's um probably more mentally um draining than it is anything else. But when you're actually doing the physical and the mental, trust me, real estate's a walk in the park.
Lee Woodward:Well, you then how long have you been in real estate now?
SPEAKER_01:Um I've been six years in my own under my own brand and two years with another agent before that.
Lee Woodward:Now, under your own brand, we got Monique Field Property and you're with the Smile Elite Group, which does your administration and compliance. Is that what they do?
SPEAKER_01:That's exactly right. So we basically run our own businesses and we have them aside from us. So we share a lot of data, which is fantastic. And they do, as you said, all of our admin trust accounting, compliance, um, they're rigorous at that, but I think we all have to watch our compliance. But it's um doing all the stuff that n that you don't want to do or that takes up time, so that we can do you know the bits that we're really good at and the bits that we like.
Lee Woodward:And that's exactly where we want to be now. I want to discuss what you've learned and observed from the lead generation process and what you've been doing with the pitch price update, because you came on my radar yesterday when we saw just how many you've got out this year. I think you've hit the two thousand mark already. It's been a a huge year. Take us through the sequence. What did you do?
SPEAKER_01:Followed the sequence. We did the training and they basically taught us what to do, and we just went, okay, that's what we do. So I think what people miss is I I think a lot of people don't like um I don't know, it's it's doing it, but it's very simple and very easy. Once you've done the first one, whether that be you might have met somebody and you're doing an appraisal, or you might have met someone and they're really only curious, you don't it depends what sort of level of detail you're going to provide for them. But once you've done it once, you can set reminders in and it will remind you, like you'll get an email sequence come up saying these people need to hear from you. So simply you open it up, um, we then make sure the properties are relevant to that particular property that we know about. If not, we make it more relevant and we send it off again. I was always looking for a way to stay in contact with clients without actually bringing up the word real estate because we all know that you know it's really difficult to know everything about a client when you've met them only once to just ring them up and ask them about their grandchildren or about their whatever else, you know. So you're trying to find a common ground. And we know that if people have ever been on the fence about selling their house, real estate is the common thing that we all have in common, but you don't have to make the phone call straight away. So what we do is we send you know the update out if they haven't decided to sell it, list and sell at the time that we've met them. Um we run a lot of other lead gen um, I suppose, lead gen um as well. It's not just out there um door knocking or going out appraising or it could be Facebook leads, wherever we've met the people. Um once you've sent something once, it knows what you sent. So whether it's a full update, whether it's a just a price update, a subair report, or whatever we do. It knows what to send again. You can actually um personalise that. Um you can send it to their mobile, you can send it to their email. We all know that mobile has a pretty big uptake, like straight away, more or less opening it. Um but because we also know when they open it, it's you cue to be able to call them. Like you wouldn't call them straight away. But we know they've opened it, so we know they've engaged in what we sent them. Like it's pretty amazing technology. And so once we've then made a call to them, you can actually just say, you know, hey, I was just driving down your street, or I was just whatever, because you can't say, Oh, I saw you opened I saw you open my email, or I saw you open my you don't want to do you don't want to give all the secrets away. But it's an in to actually give them a call. Um and then you can actually say, hey, I've just sent you or whatever, yeah, yeah, I just opened it. Oh, did you? Oh, what'd you think of it? Most people will disclose they got it or they opened it because that's the reason you're ringing them. Um and then a conversation can go from there. So you don't actually have to find the small detail to talk about them. You're actually telling them why you called them. You don't have to tell them that you knew they opened it, you're just saying, hey, this is the reason I called. By the way, this week I sent you a such and such. Yes, we got it, we opened it. Oh, what do you think? Have you been following the market? Whatever it just gives you an an in to discuss real estate and it doesn't have to be their house, it is the state of the market. And it's a real stock approach.
Lee Woodward:What you're doing really well there is working off the rebound. Because as you know, when you would when you first started in real estate, you're just ringing anyone hoping somebody wants to speak to you, but working off the rebound meaning okay, it's rebounded that they've opened it, seen it three times today, now I'm calling. That means you've got 100% connection and breakthrough versus you know, let's ring a hundred people and one person might want to speak about what they're doing. Tell me about ID for me and how you've blended that in into it, where people may not know what that is.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so ID for me, I think most people, if they follow Tom Payne off, they definitely know about it, um, because he loves it and he tells everybody about it. But again, it's uh it's um a subscriber pays, I suppose, database where you can um find people in your patch, your farm area, that their name, their phone number, their email, and you've got to be um quite clever because at one address could be four or five people. ID for me also often knows their age, so you can have a fairly good guess at who could be the vendors, otherwise it would be their children. So you don't want to be marketing to the wrong person. But we basically um use ID for me and sometimes the email might bounce, so the data's only as good as what they know, but it we find it is the most current and relevant data that there is anywhere at the moment. So we use ID for me to make sure our um because if you've got a really good database or a CRM and and people haven't notified you of an email change or a mobile, ID for me can often replace the old data that you've got so it keeps it relevant, and that's how we can stay in contact with with our people more regularly as as they change or move addresses if you didn't know they moved. It's a really good way of keeping your database fresh and up to date.
Lee Woodward:And how many of these are you trying to get out a day as part of your sequence?
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's not so much a day. Well, now that we've actually got them all in a sequence, and remember I said to you of an email tomorrow, we'll have um say we sent say we wanted to send them every three months as a suburb report. They will pop up tomorrow and we'll say these people need to hear from you. And it could be ten that we did that day, three months ago, it could be twenty. So it's trying to stay on top of whenever we've been notified to do them. So it could be, you know, in a week, it could be sending a hundred out, but not all in one vote. We do them when they remind us to do them. And if that becomes on our to-do list, we make it a real good priority to make sure we get them out because it's a way then, as I said, just setting them three-monthly. Um, if they don't open them, we don't press to call them all the time, but at least six monthly when they've come on go, okay, these people need to call now as well. And then it could be that they have slipped into their junk mail. And we said, Oh, remember when we last saw you, we said we'd send you some updates each um quarter? Did you get the last one? They might say no. We'll say, look, we did send it, can you check your junk mail? And if we're falling into junk, at least we know that they've gone looking for it. And then it still um gives you an in to say, hey, what it was was just recent sales in your area. Um, and then it allows you then just to talk freely about the market without actually talking about their property and feeling like you're interrogating them. And then you can softly say, So, you know, last time I spoke with you, you thought you just went like yesterday. What happened was a lady opened um one of them up. So I give her a call, and they were traveling to Gunda Guy. And I said, Oh, well, last time I spoke with you, you were traveling, and she goes, Yes, I was in Tasmania busy month, and we got onto that. Oh, yes, so where are you going to Gunday? Da da da da da. And I said, Then what we've done all the nice things, and then I said, And how are you going with that decluttering? She goes, Oh my god, you would be so proud of us. We started doing this and that. So I didn't have to ask her about the time, and I said, Well, you know, there's only six weeks to Christmas. And she goes, Oh no, we won't be ready before Christmas. I said, So what if I diarise to call you around the third or fourth week in January? How do you think? She goes, That's probably a good time to touch base. I didn't have to ask any of that. It all just came out in conversation. So it wasn't an awkward conversation. But her husband was driving and she was in the car and she opened up the report while she was driving. So it's good to get them close to when they've opened them because they you know they're actually on the computer, because it we know, we know they've been looking at it.
Lee Woodward:How long how long have you been using the sequence?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, we've been using it. This is our second year. Um I was a little bit disappointed actually because we stopped using it after the trial period and I wasn't aware that um that our the company had done a like a group deal where everyone was already getting it this, that, and something else. And I went, What? How could you leave me out? I'm actually one of your best prospectors. I was so cranky. And then once we got back on, like seriously, I I blew up because I went, no, we were the we were the best at using it. And so then we started using it again, and then we we actually um had a problem with the sequence, and we ended up calling one of the support people saying, Hey, this isn't working like we'd set it up, and they fixed it, and now it's working like in a dream. So it's just about following the sequence. It does it, once you've automated it, you don't have to go and do it again. All we do is open up and go, are those properties, because it chooses properties for you in that last three months, are they relevant to this property? If they're not, we drop a few out, we add a few in and away we send it. And then we actually use the link. So you can just send the link, as you know, straight to a mobile. We do both. We send it to the email and to the mobile, and we can send a we can add a little bit more into our emails of a little bit more talk, a little bit more dialogue. You can add a you can personalize it, you know what I mean? Whereas in the mobile, you've only got so many characters to send out and get your point across. Um but yeah, we do both. We send it in an email and we send it in them in the text message.
Lee Woodward:And Monique, how many future sellers would you have registered for 2024?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I couldn't tell you off the top of my head, but I actually um I like I was going to try and FaceTime you, but technology become our challenge. We actually have written down on our board or our pipeline that we think we may be dealing with in 2024, but we also have all of our yearly past appraisals and they are all on pitch. That's why you've got so many. We've we're making sure that if anyone was ever on the fence that they're getting updated regularly. Um we don't harass those that, you know, we're just curious or that might have come through a competition we run or something like that. We don't want to be that we don't want to be that agent. But we also it's a real soft approach, and people I think need to understand that the more that they hear from you regularly on a soft basis, we should be top of mind when it comes time to selling. Well, we know it's all about.
Lee Woodward:Oh, it is, and I know you've got family overseas and you know you fit in quite a bit of travel time when you need to, and this thing just keeps ticking along in the background. So when you do arrive back on the land, boom, uh people wouldn't know you're not there because these are still going out.
SPEAKER_01:Well, they don't. I actually just spent six weeks and then another week um in the UK with my son or our son, and I worked every day. Um there's nothing you can't do um if you're prepared to actually be available to your clients. And they were amazed. Like I was up at three o'clock every morning talking to them, they're going, What time is it there? And they all of the clients that needed to know that I was away, they all knew. So all my vendors, anyone I needed to talk to, I was in constant contact. Um, but the people that don't know um were still hearing from me, like my phone was on, if they rang, they got me. Um one of the things that I think people really need to take a really good look at is everything becomes easier under automation, and this is one of those things. And AI as well. Like I'm blown away by some of the stuff that we've been shown um with artificial intelligence. I know for good reason, not not bad, but good, it really can accelerate your business. So it does allow you to have a little bit more flexibility because everybody knows real estate is you know, it's long hours. So we've got to work smarter and be able to provide just as much commitment to our clients, but in a smarter way that we can actually not have to be, you know, working from six to ten every day, you know. Like we've got to become smarter as well. And there's so many tools out there that allow you to stay top of mind with your clients if you're prepared to learn them. Absolutely and implement them.
Lee Woodward:Absolutely fantastic. Monique Field, great story, mastering the sequence. Thank you for joining us on the programme, and we wish you all the best for 2024.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks, Lee. Thanks for having me.