Welcome New Client Erik Hatch

John: How did you hear about us? 

Erik: I heard about you through the Rate Group.

John: What motivated you to take our call or give us a call? 

Erik: People who I trust were saying that Vyral is the way to go. I'm a marketer by nature, and I have experience in both radio and video. So I'm always hesitant putting that trust in other people when I'm confident in what I can do for myself. Realistically, we have a large need to better service our current database, and our current sphere. We wanted additional ways in which to touch them and be strategic on it, and sometimes it's easier to hire people that are smarter than us than to get smarter ourselves.

John: Summarize where you're at with your business right now. What are your goals going forward? 

Erik: We've been established as a team for three years now, and we've had some pretty rapid growth. In 2012 we did 192 transactions, 2013 we did 246, and 2014 we did 411 transactions. Our goal for 2015 is 701 closed transactions in the calendar year, so that is just under two a day, seven days a week, which is an exciting challenge for us. Being in Fargo, North Dakota--yes, there are that many houses to sell, and we plan to sell most of them. We're looking forward to the challenge. We're a little behind pace right now, but we're certainly on pace for the 600s. We're striving to find that extra oomph, and we think Vyral can be a piece of that pie.

John: You mentioned there's about ten thousand in the database, with everything combined, right? 

Erik: Yeah, about.

John: Are you doing anything to market to these people right now? 

Erik: Our inside sales agents are the most diligent people in the business in terms of lead follow-up for people who have raised their hands. For anybody who is not a closed transaction for us, they are aggressively going after them. But if you are a closed transaction, or if you're somebody who's from our sphere, we do client events every two months, so I get face to face time with them.We have a pretty robust presence on social media, so we're standing in front of them in that sort of way.

John: How's all that working so far? 

Erik: You know, our client events have been pretty successful. Our last client event we had just over 300 people attend. We're expecting those to grow exponentially. I think our client event before that was our Thanksgiving pie giveaway, and I want to say we gave away about 400 pies as well, so we're seeing a large number of people come through with it. Our intention is to be a brand, to be a go-to, to be a problem solver for these people.  So we know it's a long term play with our database. Leads are a short term play, and our database is a long term play, so we know that videos are a piece of that. That's why social media is a great, important thing because it always reminds them of what we're doing without intentionally being sales-y.

John: You mentioned at the beginning that you're involved with Rate Group, you've done TV, and you've done radio. Why not try to do this yourself? 

Erik:  It's certainly something we've entertained. There comes a time in your business when you have to decide what's better to leverage out, and what's better to do on your own. We're at a point right now where my marketing director has more than enough on her plate. We've hired a photographer/videographer that's starting here with us soon, and we've also hired an additional graphic designer for part-time work. As we're doing that, we're still saying that we want to do more. If we want to get to where we want to go, we're only going to get there by leveraging. So, we're leveraging our talent well enough, and we've found that Vyral is a nice fit for what we're doing, and a nice enhancement for our intention of staying in front of our database.

John: Got it. Great. What does success while working with us look like to you? What results are you expecting? 

Erik: Success in working with Vyral would have to look like the phone rings or the emails blow up from our reach. I'm okay with people saying please stop emailing me, please stop calling me, because it shows that we're really staying in front of them, so I'm not afraid of that. I certainly want to bring value to our clients. I want it to be not sales-y and pushy, I think that's why people get turned off. We can figure out that dance. It's difficult to measure the success of something with past clients, current clients, and database, when we know Vyral is a way of touching them. But I put it into the same play as what we're doing with radio and TV. It's a reminder to people of who we are and what we do, as opposed to a direct call to action.

John: Is there anyone specific in that Rate Group that we should thank for your business? 

Erik: No, actually. I've had a number of people say that it's been great. I met Frank a couple of years ago, and was going to do business with him. But then I had some big changes within my business personally, so that opportunity didn't present itself.