April 16, 2014

How Jeremy Larkin Compliments Prospecting with Video Marketing to Win a $5.9 Million Expired Listing




“I’ll generate at least 24 sales directly from Vyral Marketing this year, even internet leads I've never spoken to are hiring me. This has immediate impact; the fee is ‘pennies’ to get this automatically implemented.”



St. George real estate agent Jeremy Larkin has been on the Vyral Marketing program for just over 2 months and has sent only 4 videos out to his database (following The Vyral Marketing System perfectly). He has already landed a $5.9 million dollar expired listing, had people stop him at the gas station to compliment him on his branding, and received responses from internet leads he had no existing relationship with. He says the biggest single benefit of hiring Vyral Marketing is ‘forced implementation” to consistently communicate to his database with value. Jeremy shares his best tips on how to get the most out of working with Vyral Marketing, and how he spends an extra hour a month “tweaking” the writing to get his message just perfect for his audience.


Jeremy:              The first thing that's happened is the site is so clean, the blog is so professional-looking, the first time I sent a video out, I had literally 4-5 other realtors, including a couple of them that are my good buddies, respond and say, whoa!
                                One of them is a competitor in my office. He said, I am respectfully indignant of what you - this is big boy marketing stuff! He was boggled. This is a top producer. 100+ transactions a year.
                                That was the first thing that happened. The next thing that happened was probably in the next 2 weeks, I started to see people around town. It's funny. I run into a guy at the gas station where I get my Diet Dr. Pepper. That's my guilty pleasure, right? And the guy, he's a dude in the community that is well-known. He's a player in the community. Owns a restoration company. Used to build parade homes.
                                He said, hey. I don't know what you're doing. But everywhere I look, I see your brand name. And it is classy. Keep going.
                                Well I know for a fact that I haven't communicated with this guy Paul in a long time. And I know for a fact that he had just started getting my videos now. It was probably after the second one I sent. Now I understand we have other branding. We have gorgeous signs around. But those are the first things, right?
                                But from 3 specific scenarios, I so far, and this is probably good for a testimonial. I so far have never cold-called the Cliff Report yet. We've been in transition. We just hired two brand new buyer's specialists. We let an ISA go that wasn't working. I have not been calling the Cliff Reports. This is literally sending the videos out, and taking 30 minutes out every single time Jason sends me the proof and cutting and pasting into Microsoft Word and tweaking the actual -
Frank:                 Oh, that's great. So you're getting your language just right. That's great!
Jeremy:              It would be kind of fun, after the call or some time next week. Pop onto my site and just read the most recent piece, and you'll catch my tone in there. You'll hear this Jeremy.
                                I'm not rewriting them, I promise. But I'm taking about 30 minutes - because look, it's an email to 5K people, plus a blog post. I have 30 minutes, right?
                                So I've had 3 specific things come out of it. One was a sphere of influence of mine who responded and said, hey, I've got a neighbor who's thinking about selling their house. This guy I know. I mean, I know him well. But I haven't heard from him in years. He's thinking about selling his house. I say, great. Call me. He calls me. Here's their name, phone number, address, connect with them.
                                Another one was probably maybe with the same email. A gal responds to me that had come through. We captured her as a buyer lead in Real Pro Systems probably 3 months ago. I don't know. It was a web lead. We didn't have her phone number. We got nowhere with her.
                                She replied to the video email. Hey Jeremy. I'm ready to sell my house.
I didn't know who she was. So I responded and said, hey listen. You have to forgive me. I hope you'll forgive me. I kind of said, I don't know who you are. She said, oh yeah, I came through a while back to set up my email home search. I'll be in town on the 17th, which is tomorrow, and I'm ready to list my townhome.
Frank:                 You know what's funny. I bet you the phone number she provided on that site was incorrect and it was the email that got her to convert, and you never would have gotten her without it.
Jeremy:              It was purely the email. Again, I've never talked to her in my whole entire life.
                                I responded and said, oh my gosh! What's the address? And by the way, if you'd be so kind as to complete this form? We have kind of a Google.doc form, which is a seller free type form.
                                Five minutes later she completed it, sent it back. Done.
Frank:                 Let me ask you this. After two months of this, how much business can you directly attribute to Vyral Marketing? At least in your pipeline, because it hasn't closed yet.
Jeremy:              We'll take that listing tomorrow. We're working on the listing that I mentioned before. We're in communication with the other one. But the third piece - and this is pretty interesting - a fellow I've known since my childhood. And in 2009, he built a 2400 sq ft home for the Parade of Homes.
                                Now I know a lot of people who listen to these testimonials don't know what that means. The property is about a $6M home. That's the equivalent Frank, in San Diego, if you saw this home. It's a $20M property in San Diego. I promise it is, in every way, shape, and form. Bowling alley, the works.
                                He replies to my email Monday. Hey, we've been thinking. You reached out to us with an expired letter 6 months ago. We've never done business with you. We're finally ready to sell the house.
Frank:                 And how did you get his email?
Jeremy:              Facebook.
Frank:                 Nice!
Jeremy:              He responded and said, would love to meet with you. I meet with him and his father today, it's totally informal, because we were childhood friends that disconnected forever. Like we played around when we were 10.
                                We meet totally informal. They said, you are so on the ball. We felt like you are the guy. We've seen this stuff you are communicating. So yeah, let's meet next week. And let's get this thing on the market. $6M, $5.9M.
                                But here's the interesting part. Again, $5.9M listing is huge in any market.
Frank:                 So what you're seeing here is look, you've got a past client come back to you. You got someone that came on from an online buyer lead that you weren't able to call, wasn't calling. And then this is helping you move up your price point. I mean, they probably looked at a lot of realtors they were going to hire and said, yeah, I'm a friend with you, but this guy's coming across as very professional.
Jeremy:              I don't know. I just can't say enough about the concept of sending out value. Not self-promotion. At first, we're so used to self-promotion, even though we're told not to do it. We're always going, but can't I do a little bit of it? Can't I do just a tiny bit of self-promotion? It's like asking our mom for permission.
                                And you guys are like, don't do it. Don't do any self-promotion, at least not up front.
                                So I don't know, man. I've seen people say, this is good for 2 transactions a month over time. I fully believe that. I don't have any question it's good for 2 transactions a month. I think it's good for more though. My database is 4500 right now. So who knows? We've got 2 new buyer specialists. I mean, I don't know.
Frank:                 Here's the bottom line, Jeremy. How do you track ROI from all of this? How do you know what the ROI is going to be? What would you say to someone who says, well I don't know what the ROI is?
Jeremy:              I think people just need to step back. ROI can be tracked as complex or as simple as you want it. Hey, if you're putting in $400 - What do I pay you a month?
Frank:                 You're paying $6300 a year for a 10-time return. I want to see $63K in commissions.
Jeremy:              Right. It's very simple. So just for me, we started using an ROI tracker. It's a Google.doc. It just has all of your marketing expenses in one row across the top. And then you're just plugging in deals that came out of it. Well I don't see how this isn't a 10x return. That's my personal opinion.
                                And I understand, this $6M listing, that's an anomaly. Like, this is where across the bottom of the screen you have the warning that says: results not typical.
Frank:                 But it's pretty cool. It happened. Let me ask you this: what is the biggest benefit to you of Vyral Marketing?
Jeremy:              Wow! I always have to give things in threes. But I'm going to give you number one. And I'm going to give you 2.5 or I won't be able to hang out.
                                But the biggest single benefit is forced implementation - well, I know it's not forced - but how about the skids are greased very nicely by you guys. I realize you can't force me to shoot the videos. But it's nearly forced implementation of communicating with my database. That to me is hands-down.
                                Now the supporting items, number two would be the frequency. Not only are you forcing it, but it's communicating with people, Gary Keller style. Build a database, communicate with it in a systematic way. Doing that twice a month. And the last piece, I mean it rivals the others. But it's having you guys as marketing partners. And you already know that.
                                I realize we're talking about a testimonial here. But I've told you guys off the record that I consider you guys marketing partners.
Frank:                 Why is that so different than other vendors you work with? What makes Vyral Marketing a marketing partner versus than someone else?
Jeremy:              Because the average vendor as you now might be really great, and they may care, but basically their deal is to sign you up, give you the service as fast as hype. Great. Here's the service. And nothing more.
                                And certainly they're not going to take some time and say, we've been thinking. Maybe you ought to try this. Or maybe you ought to tweak this.
                                Here's what I've noticed about Vyral. It's totally under promising and over delivering. Here we'll do that for you too. Oh wait, we also do that. I'm going, you do? I thought you guys just sent two emails a month for me?
                                Remember when I wouldn't sign up with you guys because I thought you were just going to send two emails for me?
Frank:                 Yeah.
Jeremy:              And I understood at the time that it was trackable and you put it on blogs. But literally, I was like, I don't know if I want to spend $500 a month on it.
                                But when you look at building a big business like I'm trying to do - I don't know what people define as big. But we'd love to sell 200-300 homes. We did 110 last year.
                                When you're looking at that kind of stuff, you have to have this kind of outreach going on, you know what I mean. And $500 becomes literally pennies to have it happen automatically.
Frank:                 How much time would you say Vyral Marketing takes you? So you're improving the writing a little bit by putting some of your personalization on it? But altogether, to get these results, how much time are you spending on this?
Jeremy:              Honestly, and I know people love to give really low numbers, I'm spending 60-90 minutes a month. I figure I spend 30 minutes twice a month to tweak the transcripts of the blog.
Frank:                 And another 30 minutes to shoot your two videos.
Jeremy:              You got it.
Frank:                 Great.
Jeremy:              90 minutes. Max 30 minutes. I understand, I have an easy time on camera.
Frank:                 Here's a great question. Would you rather spend that 90 minutes grinding out cold calls; or step back, do this, and then you have these results coming in?
Jeremy:              Dude, this is 30x better. It might be 90x better. It's almost a rhetorical question, because the answer's obvious, but it's true.
                                And listen, I'm sure when we start calling the people on the Click Report, I'm sure it's better. But you know what's really cool about it, if you don't want to, you don't have to.
                                And guys out there - you know anybody who gets this? If you don't call anybody on the Click Report, you're probably giving up some money. But seriously, if you have this massive anxiety about calling people in your database, then don't. But for crying out loud, send two videos a month.
                                That's my attitude.
Frank:                 What tips could you give someone to be successful?
Jeremy:              One is so simple, but execute the plan. Do it every month. I realize that if you give people this content, they say, oh you must be good. But I really believe, it's a little bit like calling the lead back fast is more important than having a great script. Would you agree?
                                Speed trumps skill. I think execution trumps skill on this. I think sending out a video from someone who's kind of corny on camera and uncomfortable twice a month gives way better value than spending two hours on a newsletter. That's number one.
                                Number two is just be ready for that video shoot. When your coach sets that up: 4 o'clock on Wednesday, we're going to do a video shoot. You really need to not be saying at 3:57, oh crap! I'm not ready. Just have 2-3 basic stats, some homes for sale, some sort of national trend, something people care about, get it up here on the screen and be ready to go.
                                That's why the calls I'm doing with Jason are seriously 12-20 minutes. That's recording time included. That's recording calls. He and I do some other coaching calls where we just master mind. But mine are pretty short, man. He calls in. He's like, are you ready to rip? Yeah, let's go. We start talking.
Frank:                 Great man. I'm really excited to see what your final ROI is, one year in.
Jeremy:              Yeah, that's the thing. I'd love to go out 12 months from the day we signed up with you guys.
                                I'll give you one last thing that I think is really stellar. We like so many people operate from all these different systems. We have are Real Pro systems account. So many people have a Boom Town account.
Frank:                 All these different CRM systems that your leads are locked up in.
Jeremy:              Right. Right. Here's what's awesome. I don't have to go in and say, these people need this newsletter. These people need that -
                                No. Everybody comes in, they go into Vyral.
Frank:                 Everybody.
Jeremy:              That's it. That's what they get now from the Larkin Group. Even the new sales team, what do we send to our database? We send them this.
                                We send them direct mail. But I'm saying, you don't have to build a new campaign. We do it. (Or you do it, with me.)
Frank:                 Cool, man. Well is there anything else you want to say that people should know?
Jeremy:              You know what? Honestly this sounds like such an infomercial, but let me say this. I've said this in the rate board. I've said this in the master mind board on Facebook. Just sign up! Seriously.
                                I don't know how much time I wasted between (a) not sending out value (b) not sending out value consistently and (c) trying to concoct a silly newsletter on my own every month. It wasn't silly. It was fine. But it did not have the impact this does.
                                I figured two years passed when I could have saved myself a lot of trouble.
                                So there you go.
Frank:                 Cool, man. Well Jeremy, thanks so much for the interview.
Jeremy:              Yeah, man. I love it! I'm excited to talk to you because I feel strong about it.
[end of transcript]
 

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