Welcome New Client Chris Cecere

John: So, Chris, Donny, how did you guys hear about us? 

Chris: Lars Hedenborg.

John: Oh, great. So, what motivated you to give us a call or take our call? 

Donny: Help with what to do!

Chris: Let me expand on that a little bit. We have done video for a few years now, more of the property tours sort of thing. When foreclosures were big we would do hub videos, so we would have three videos each week that we would go out and do. Previously,  I worked in television so I have a little bit more of the technical ability to shoot and edit, and that sort of thing. Donny, is certainly comfortable in front of the camera as well, so it seemed to be a perfect fit for us and something we could really take and run with more so than a lot of other marketing systems, such as postcards. It’s hard for us to get excited about doing postcards. We get way more excited about doing mock videos than anything.

Donny: Adding to that, Lars did recommend you. I saw you guys before Lars recommended you and I will say the barrier of entry I think veered Chris off a little bit, because we’re already doing video. We shot it down based on that. We’re excited about not just doing video, but doing video correctly. We have 250 videos, so part of what we were talking about with the last guys was going back in and re-indexing those,  adding the right stuff to make them more searchable. The houses are gone, so there’s no useful data on the videos, but there’s still some SEO’s to gage with that.

Chris: Yeah, when we spoke to Scott last week he had mentioned that could be something you could do for us as well - that  is, take the existing content we have and rejuicing it. The other thing is that for about 8 months we had a radio show, so we have all of that audio content segmented out that we would love to put back into use as well.

John: Why don’t you guys summarize where you’re at with your business right now and what your goals are moving forward? 

Donny: Where we’re at right now is we did $20.6 million dollars last year at about 100 transactions. We are mostly a buyer-focused organization. 90% of our business is buyers. We are trying to transition into lifting under Lars’ guys. Obviously, doubling the business would be the goal there, but in gradual stages. Again, I think our mistake is we are very technical. We’re more technical than a typical client. We want to do cutting-edge type stuff. I am really tougher on camera. I’m a lot more advanced so I’m kind of used to being front and center. That doesn’t bother me. Hopefully, that will keep our door open a lot quicker on this.

Where we want to be is, as much as possible, living on referrals as much as we live on our internet marketing system. We spend about 6 to 7 grand on Google a month right now. We have lender sponsors that are helping us offset some of that cost, but we have a lot of marketing- based overhead, maybe some of which is unnecessary. When we’re paying Lars some of his allegiance, some of it is we’re not going question any part of the strategy until we’ve at least tried it. We want to implement everything, cut out what doesn’t work for us, I suppose. At this point it’s effective for Lars, he’s doing it, we’re taking his word and I think that’s why Chris was swayed to do it. I think we are both very happy. We were probably one of the leading video companies in Colorado Springs anyway. This is just going to add to that. You guys are probably going to do it even better than we’re doing it, so that is just going to make this more effective and ideally more profitable.

John: Awesome. How many people do you guys think are in your database right now?

Chris: Close to 20,000.

John: Oh, wow. So, how many of those people do you guys truly know?

Donny: Two or three hundred.

John: What are you guys doing to market to the database right now?

Chris: Well, we had Infusionsoft over the last 14 months or so, and that was a project where the content was all uploaded. We never really got very hands-on with it. The automated nature of the emails made it so we didn’t really need to be involved, so we never really looked at it. The results just never materialized and we just kept putting it off, putting it off. So, we finally made the decision to go ahead and cut it loose looking for more effective marketing.

John: Ok. Donny, you mentioned you guys have been making videos for a while and you guys have some of the most in your market - why hire us? Why not try and keep doing this yourself?

Donny: We have taken this as far as we can take it. I think we are a mile ahead of most, but we could be Grade A, whereas we’re Grade B. We know that video, as far as market recognition, I became the foreclosure king of Colorado Springs, it was a no-brainer thing. Then you add the radio show and that was an unstoppable brand for a great deal of time. It died out a bit. We were doing a lot of things right, there were also a lot of things we were doing wrong, and we kind of outsourced things that we were doing wrong and grew a lot greatly. Rather than reinvent the wheel, we want to have you guys figure it out for us. You already have figured it out for us. You can get it done.

John: Great. Love it. What kind of result are you expecting? What does success working with us look like to you? 

Donny: Success looks like we actually have a system that is counting on our sphere to produce a percentage of our business. Right now, because we don’t market to our sphere, any amount we get shows we get improvement. So you guys have a pretty easy task ahead of you - what you do is successful by design. If we are not doing anything now, we can only improve.

Chris: Right.

Donny: We know the consistency of marketing works. We didn’t do 100 buyer transactions back to that. We’re really good at buyer-marketing. We’re not so good at consistent listing-marketing, but we’re working on that, were not consistent to our sphere marketing. The success ratio is going to be...you want a number I’m sure. Somewhere I read that 10% or so is what we can expect.

John: 10 times.

Donny: If we have 200, I guess the success would be 20 deals. I would love to get to 600 and make it to 6,000. We would be ecstatic about that. So, if we did 22 deals as a result of this marketing upkeep, and found 200 people to upload to the sphere, it would be a success. Obviously, I would like to have more than that. Our goal would be to go from 100 units to 200 units!