We Are Selling with Lee Woodward

Be The Person They Still Call Two Years Later with Craig Barnett

• Lee Woodward • Season 1 • Episode 197

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What if success wasn’t a secret, but a habit you repeat until it becomes your reputation? That’s the thread running through our conversation with Craig Barnett, who moved from banking and the car yard to real estate and built an 18-year career on one idea: show up consistently, with value people can feel. Craig breaks down the simple mechanics that compound over time—hot, warm, and cold tasking rhythms, face-to-face touchpoints that trump phone calls, and consent-based marketing that homeowners actually want to receive.

We dig into the practical playbook. Craig explains why he ended each day with zero tasks, how a weekly cadence for hot prospects and monthly or fortnightly contact for warm ones keeps pipelines honest, and why cold prospects still deserve a six-month letter plus a call. He shares the coffee voucher routine that doubles as an annual appraisal, turning a courtesy drop-in into meaningful, face-to-face conversations. We also cover his farm area in Innes Lake and the local market reports that earned opt-in trust across Port Macquarie’s suburbs, from Lighthouse Beach to Westport.

There’s strategy, and there’s style. Craig’s shopfront approach during floor time—standing outside, greeting passers-by with humour, becoming a familiar presence—created natural, low-friction openings. He reveals how lessons from selling utes, where he removed friction by bringing the vehicle to the buyer, map neatly to real estate: make it easy to say yes. And in a thoughtful look at life transitions, Craig shows how consistency outlasts a job title; even in retirement, clients still call “their agent,” and he now matches them to the right person in the office, lending his trust to the next relationship. Want a system that endures? Hit play, steal the cadence, and start showing up the same way, every day. If this resonated, follow the show, leave a review, and share it with a colleague who needs a nudge toward consistency.



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SPEAKER_00:

Joining us now on the program is Craig Barnett. Craig, welcome to the program. Thanks, Lee. Good to see you again. Good to see you. And I'm actually going to start there. Many, many years ago, I created a little CRM called Complete Data. And the passionate people that followed that system did very, very well. And you became a scheduled task ninja. Take us into that.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I certainly did, Lee. Just the scheduled task, it's something that you need to follow and keep you in front of all your clients. Like you've got a hot buyer or a seller, warm buyer or seller, or a cold. So the hot ones is you know something's going to happen fairly shortly. And it comes up once a week as a scheduled task to make sure you ring them or do whatever you need to on that task. A warm one is on a monthly basis. You're not quite ready yet, but you want to stay in touch. And then a cold buyer or seller is someone who's just starting to contact you now and looking at something in the next six to 12 months. So that's a six-monthly, and they we send out a letter, and I ring them as well. That's six months. But it's uh it's a task that just comes up in front of you every day. And I just made it my passion, I suppose, to make sure my tasks were zero by the end of the day. So I knew I was up to date with all my clients.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely brilliant. And your segment today is Success is about consistency. And for a bit of background, you've been in real estate 18 years. You came in from the car industry. Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

I had six years in the car industry, and I had uh 12 years in the Westpac Bank as well. So I had finance background as well, which helped me in regards to looking at finances and how to help people when they're looking at that sort of thing, and had contacts to uh give people to the real estate industry as well.

SPEAKER_00:

In selling cars, you're stuck in the dealership, whereas in real estate you get to go out, but you sort of found a hybrid version of that when you were selling ute. What did you do?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, when I was in the car industry around the uh end of financial year, we're always stuck in the in the car yard. So I thought, how am I gonna get around this? So I grabbed a brand new ute, put a trade plate on it, and I drove into the industrial area looking for old ute. Go up to the owners of the business there and say, go for drive in this. Can I take your old ute and go get a uh evaluation? And then I come back with some figures saying it's only gonna cost you$20 or$30 extra a month to have this instead of that. What do you want to do?

SPEAKER_00:

And I sold a lot of ute. You know what? That is the best example of target prospecting because you can see the old one. There's a new one. I'm gonna take it. You take that one and tell me if you're gonna hand it back or not. Yeah. The the greatest thing there in the world of sales is make it easy to do business with you. You've turned up, they don't have to find time to come and see you. Let's come into the real estate world. What got you passionate about coming into real estate?

SPEAKER_01:

I suppose in the car industry, uh family came a different way. They gave me the option of what I whether I wanted to look after my kids or or sell cars. Um, and I said, my family always comes first. So I I took the change into real estate. Uh Ron and Belinda uh were advertising. I I went for the job. I sat and told them why I was leaving for that, but I still wanted to be in the sales industry. And they said, you know, family always comes first. Uh we want you to have a lunch with your wife once a week, which, you know, was exactly what both of us wanted to do. I was passionate to do my job and give them 110%. And they were passionate that I want to look after my family as well.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely brilliant. Now, when we look at success is about consistency, I'm going to go into some of these things you did consistently. Now, everyone's mentioned to me at some stage, oh, we do coffee vouchers, but you did it consistently differently. What did you do?

SPEAKER_01:

A lot of people do do the coffee vouchers and they do them, you know, on the anniversary, but they sit in the office and ring the people and and say, Oh, we're sending out a voucher. Whereas I always go out and hand deliver the coffee voucher. So I'm in front of the people again. Then I can talk to them, say, what have you done since I was here last time? Sometimes I'll I might, you know, hand out six or seven vouchers in a day, other times it's only one or two because I always go into the house and we sit out and have a coffee anyway, and they show me what they've done on the home. So you're doing another appraisal just about every year.

SPEAKER_00:

And getting face to face versus being on the phone for your style, Craig, that there's no comparison. There's not.

SPEAKER_01:

I believe that uh every face-to-face is worth 20 phone calls. So you just got to be in front of them, you're talking to them, they can see that you're genuinely interested in them, just a number, they're become a client and a friend.

SPEAKER_00:

Take me back into this house hunting, like the you'd idea I just absolutely loved, with your tasking. A lot of people when they were using tasking would come in and there's 4,000 tasks in there because they would flag everything and then they couldn't get through it. How did you strip it back so you could get to naught? What was that allocation of what's real, what's not?

SPEAKER_01:

I think it comes back to your hot, warm and cold prospects. If if they're ready to go, you put them down on a hot prospect and you make sure you call them. If they're not quite ready and they're they're warm, but you know something's gonna happen shortly, you still stay in touch with them. It it might not be monthly, it might be every two weeks. But if someone's just wanting an appraisal and they want an update, I'll put them on a cold potential seller, and that way they're getting a letter every six months, and then I'm still ringing them as well. From what I understand, you need at least seven contacts per year to you know be seen and be remembered.

SPEAKER_00:

Claiming doors was a very big part of our industry last year. You did this many, many years ago. Take us into the picking an area, work in a farm area, claiming those doors, and what you did to get them onto a sequence.

SPEAKER_01:

When I first started, um I lived at Innis Lake area in Port and Crawry, and that's where you know I'd built a home out there, and that was going to be my area. That's my farm area. So I pretty well door knocked the whole of the Innis Lake area at the time. Um, ended up getting about 350 people on board that were happy to receive information, put them down. Majority of them were on the warm and cold list, not the warm uh the hot list, uh, because they weren't quite ready. But um, I started creating a Inner Slake market report just showing what's happening in our area. Started doing that on a quarterly basis. I created a market report and said, I've created this market report for our area. I live in the area, and would you like to get some information on what's going on? And that was a really good way to get them on board to say, yes, I'll give you my information because they're going to get something out of that, which is some information on their home and their area.

SPEAKER_00:

And the pickup there for our listener is consent-based marketing. You're not just spraying it out to everyone. You've claimed the door, you've met them, they know who you are. Again, you've knocked on the door, you've saved 20 phone calls. Hardest thing the world to get rid of is a body. You're there. Yep. Them consenting to receive the quarterly is very different than just pushing out quarterlies.

SPEAKER_01:

If you're just going to send them out, you're going to get a lot of uh people uh unsubscribing. Whereas with um, if you're getting their consent, they know what it is. I created it just on the Inner Slake, but I also did one for the whole of Port Macquarie as well. So I ended up doing it. Port Macquarie comes into a lot of different areas, you know, Shelley Beach, Flint's Beach, Lighthouse Beach, Westport, Eastport, Inner Slake. So I ended up creating that report as well, showed how every part of Port Macquarie is going as well as Inner Slake.

SPEAKER_00:

When we look at real estate on a national level, Port Macquarie First National has been a very powerful brand for the area. It matches the community, it's worked well. This particular office, and I've been coming here for 20 years. Yeah, you know, uh to walk in today is just amazing. But it's right in the the center shopping strip. It is a shop front, which is a marketing piece in itself. But unlike many agents, you took advantage of the floor time. Take us into what you did there with the shop front.

SPEAKER_01:

I think standing out the front of your shop, we've always had a system here that when you're on duty, you're here. So we've got a an agent on duty all the time. Someone's in the office at all times. So if someone walks through the front door, or if they make a phone call into the office, we've got an agent here that they can talk to. But I did something a little bit different instead of sitting out the back and making other phone calls and not being available. I stood out the front of the office and talked to people. And it's amazing how many people you get to see out the front, whether it's, you know, passers by, previous clients, people looking at the window, did something different there on the window as well. If someone's standing there, I never sort of said, Can I help you? Because nine times out of ten, they're going to say, Oh no, I'm just looking. I just sort of made a joke of it and said, How many would you like? And then the walls drop, we have a bit of a laugh, say, I'm here if you need me, and leave it at that.

SPEAKER_00:

Very good. And you even had people come back two years later and go, You're still here.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah. I had I had a few clients that would come back two three years later, and I'm out the front at the time when they're walking past and said, I saw you that stand in that spot two or three years ago. And I said, I'm still here, ready to help you.

SPEAKER_00:

I've caught you at an interesting time today. I'm here at the company doing the new onboarding frameworks, listing systems, everything that's going to be happening there. But we brought you back in today because you've just you've retired, yet we've still had like 20 listings come in of you referring them back to the business, which means one of my favorite campaigns in the world is to love the one you're with. You did that very well. How did you keep the love alive with those existing clients? What was that sequence? We've got the coffee card, you got your Christmas card, your anniversary card, the fact you dropped it off was brilliant. What else did you do to make that established client campaign so loyal?

SPEAKER_01:

I think it's because of all those things that I did, and I was so consistent over the times, they still think of me as their agent. So they've got my number in their phone, you know, Craig Barnett, my agent, and they just ring me. Coffee vouchers are still going out. Yeah. Jason's sending them out um under my name, so they're going to still give me a call. Think like I'm I'm semi-retired, I would say. So they still give me a call, and then uh I explain that I am sort of semi-retired or retired doing the the full-on work and some people would love that though, wouldn't they? I'm available to talk to, but then I say, I've got you know two or three of the agents still working in the office that I've worked with for you know 10 to 15 years, and I'll match you with the one that I think will work with you the best and someone that you can trust. And then they really love it that I'm putting my name to them, to another agent in the office that will then look after my old clients and and go from there. And the office has done um a great job with you know, nearly all the properties have all sold and been looked after, and I've talked to the clients since and they said had a great job that done. You know, those agents will then carry forward with those people for the future.

SPEAKER_00:

Craig, absolutely brilliant information, and you've nailed every part of this interview I wanted to do in a very simplistic way because you're just telling it as it is. What did you love most about your 18 years in real estate?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, good question. I think it's the people. It's I just enjoy talking with people and being able to help. I never really saw myself as a salesman as such. I saw myself as someone there to to help someone achieve their dreams.

SPEAKER_00:

So I enjoy the people. And for those people that are one day contemplating the final part of their career, how's the transition been? It's been really good.

SPEAKER_01:

I bought a home two years before I retired and had that ready set up to build my retirement home. Uh, as soon as I retired, we started the build of the of the new home, which uh uh we moved into six months ago. We're still finalizing that. And three months ago I had a double knee replacement. So I'm going through the rehab of that at the moment, but um getting around and doing walks every day.

SPEAKER_00:

For those that can't see you, he looks fit as an ox. You built the best garage in Portland Quarry. Tell us about that.

SPEAKER_01:

We built the house around a garage, really, because we bought a new caravan, we're going to travel. So I've got a 16-meter long garage to put a full off-road caravan in the back, my car in the front. Beauty of it is we can load up the night before, have everything hooked up, open up the garage door and drive out. Don't have to get up in the morning and start hooking up and packing up and getting me. We can do it all the night before. Apart from that, we're keeping our caravan off the road, off the front lawn, safe and sound and protected from from salt and the weather.

SPEAKER_00:

Very thought out, very methodical. Using the build as a transition, I think, is kept you stimulated. Yeah, it did. Because you you were making a lot of decisions all the time. Yeah. Do you miss selling real estate? Yes and no.

SPEAKER_01:

I miss coming in and seeing my family here. I treat you know all the all the people here as my family.

SPEAKER_00:

Pi day today. It's pie day today.

SPEAKER_01:

Pie day today. Pie day Friday. I might have to stay stay around. I it is Fridays. But I miss my family. I come in every time, every every week. I come in and say good aid. I'm usually coming in to see one of the agents that I've um given a property to anyway. So I do miss that.

SPEAKER_00:

But I really am enjoying retirement as well. A great story and congratulations on not only a successful career, the consistency, but also that transition into the next part of your life. And I want to thank you for joining.