What To Say Now: Episode 23
The ABC's Of Real Estate Marketing

What To Say Now Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/whattosaynow
Upcoming Webinar Link: https://happygrasshopper.com/webinar

(00:12): Hi, everybody. My name's Dan Stewart, founder of Happy Grasshopper, and I have a question for you. Do you know your ABCs? Do you know your ABCs, right? If you're watching this, you're probably thinking, "Yeah, duh. Absolutely, I know my ABCs," and yet I'm going to go in a bit more detail today because what we're talking about when we say "ABC" is attack by combination, that's what we're going to be discussing today. Each of you who are watching this now, my goal is to make sure that you leave this conversation empowered to start more and better conversations with the new leads that you're capturing with the people you've already got in your database that aren't engaging, for appointments that you're setting that don't show up, we're going to cover all of this today, and best is that you'll be able to apply it right away as well.

(01:14): Let's dive in here. This is the 23rd episode of Happy Grasshopper's project called What To Say Now. My name's Dan. I'm more than happy to host this and share what I've learned over the years. I'm going to be taking a look here to see. I see we've got Brian Rayl with us, as always. Hello, Brian. Glad that you're here. I see Maya's here. Love to see that Maya's in the house all the way from Delaware. That's awesome. Who else do we have here today? Let's see some hellos. I want to see them pop up here. Brian's saying hello. Very cool. Very cool.

(01:50): All right, guys. I know the lag with Facebook is a little bit strange. This could take a minute for an audience to gather. If you're just arriving, I want you to know that what we're covering today are ABCs. We're going to be talking about attack by combination. Later today, one hour from now is 3:00 PM Eastern, I'll be going really deep on this topic in a special webinar we're running called The Martial Art of Achievement. If you'd like to attend that, it's not too late, just go to happygrasshopper.com/webinar. You can go ahead and register there for that event.

(02:28): What I'm about to teach you is the tiniest slice of that much deeper exploration of how martial arts philosophy is a positive influence on our achievement as small business owners, as sales professionals, as real estate professionals, as parents, as human beings. We can leverage what we learn from martial arts to allow us to make radical breakthroughs and enormous amounts of progress in our careers.

(02:57): Today, we're starting with the very basics, right? We're doing the A, the B, and the C, that's attack by combination. Let's imagine this scenario which happens millions of times per day throughout the United States and around the world. This would be where someone has scheduled an appointment with someone else, you pick up the phone, you go to Zoom, you arrive, you try to have this appointment and the other party is not there, right? I mean, raise your hand if that's happened to you. I know that's happened to me more than once.

(03:28): One of the ways that we get past this is by using an attack by combination techniques, so this first one is the double dial plus the text message plus the email. I'll break this down for you. Here at Happy Grasshopper, we have a team of people called "SDRs." They're sales development reps, and their job is to keep the calendars of our account executives full, so if you're a real estate professional and you're considering using Happy Grasshopper services, you will at some point talk with one of my SDRs and one of our account executives.

(04:06): What they will do is they will call you at the appointed time of your appointment and if you don't show up for that appointment, you're going to immediately get a second call, right? They'll wait, they'll hear your voicemail, they'll hang up. Then they'll call right back, they'll hopefully get you, but if not, they will go ahead and leave a voicemail message for you on that second message, which then they'll immediately follow with a text message. Then a few minutes later, they'll follow that with an email message.

(04:37): Let's walk through exactly what that sequence should be. Let's say the appointment is at 9:00 AM. The phone should ring at 9:00 AM, not 9:01, not 9:02, not 8:59, right on time at 9:00 AM is when that call should happen. If the party on the other side doesn't answer, we're going to hang up, we're going to immediately call right back. We're not going to wait two minutes, we're not going to give them five minutes. We're going to call right back. It's startling to me how often people pick up on that second call back. Yet sometimes they don't, right, and so we leave a quick voicemail: "Hey, it's Dan, just reaching out. We were supposed to talk this morning at 9:00. I'll shoot you a text in a moment." Right?

(05:19): Then boom, you follow-up with that text message. "Hey, I set aside this time for you this morning. What's up? Are we going to talk?" Right? That text is hard to ignore. It gets a lot of replies. Then if I don't get a reply to that, I'm going to follow that up with an email saying something like, "Hey, I dedicated this hour of my day for you. Hopefully, you can still make it. Please call me back when you see this message," or I'll give them a link to reschedule the call on my calendar, so that is a simple attack by combination that you can use for those appointments that get set.

(05:56): Another one I'm going to cover is, this is useful, by the way, for people who are in your database for long periods of time. These folks are going to be email followed by email followed by email followed by phone call. Again, I'll give you an example of how we do this here at happy grasshopper. Let's imagine you're one of the people who's registered for a webinar, so we're expecting you to show up for that webinar. We're going to send you messaging right up until the webinar's about to go live to remind you that that's taking place, right? Then we're going to invite you to schedule a call with us, and even if you don't take us up on that, if you don't schedule that call with us, I want my staff to call you to thank you for registering and to provide you the opportunity for us to serve you however we may, right? That's important, so that sequence is email, email, email followed by a phone call.

(06:55): Another simple sequence here we'll teach, this is an attack by combination specifically for birthdays, right? A lot of you are watching this on Facebook right now. We're sharing it live there. Think of what Facebook does on our birthdays, right? We get tons of notifications. Tons of people reach out to us on our birthday and that's a nice thing, right, but if you're the person doing the reach out, you're one of many, and you'd be better served by being one of only, like it'd be much better if they were only getting your message, so my recommendation would be to send this combination:

(07:34): Send an email, followed by a voicemail drop, followed by a text message. Before their birthday, send an email that says something like, "Hey, if I remember correctly, you've got a birthday coming up, don't you?" They're going to respond to that, right? It's very hard for them not to respond to that.

(07:53): Then you can send a voicemail drop automatically on their birthday: "Hey, it's me, Dan. Just wanted to reach out and tell you happy birthday. Hope you're doing great." Right? That really sets you apart because they're getting all those texts, all those pop-up reminders on social, all those people liking and tagging them. It's nice for them to actually hear your voice as part of that process.

(08:17): Then finally, I'm going to say the text message and I'm going to save that for after their birthday, right? A couple of days after their birthday, I might send out and say, "Hey, I noticed you had a birthday, right?" You could give it that approach. You can say, "Hey, happy belated birthday. I hope you got everything you wanted," right? Start a conversation with them that's around that one topic, and again, have a combination of different send methodologies sent over varying periods of time. That will radically increase your effectiveness because you're giving people multiple chances to say yes, right? You're giving them multiple chances to decide that they want to contract with you or do business with you.

(09:01): Now, one last thing that we're going to cover here, this is a specific technique for email, and it's called the "Oops, I made a mistake message," right? Brian, by the way, is an expert at this. I appreciate how he does this. Sometimes, we'll have a message that's going out and there's a minor error in the message, so he'll follow that shortly thereafter with another message, and it's calling out that error, it's apologizing. What it's doing is it's giving them a second chance to see your message in their inbox, because I know I'm no different than the rest of you, right? I get hundreds of messages per day in my email inbox. Unless you have a strategy to help your messaging stand out, it won't, all right?

(09:50): Let's recap here. Today, we've talked about attack by combination, the ABC's of selling, and this, by the way, is a technique that you've probably already heard of. A few years ago, Gary Vaynerchuk released a book called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, right? That is a classic attack by combination and the terminology comes from the martial arts because if you are going to be in a situation where you've got to defend yourself, or maybe you're choosing to enter a ring, right, in a boxing match or an MMA tournament, whatever it might be, you've got to expect not to just walk up and have one punch and have it be over, you've got to expect to be able to attack by combination fluently, so that's what we've laid out for you today are four different scripts, four different recipes, four messaging combinations that will help you get more of your appointments kept, will help you have more appointments scheduled, will help you have greater numbers of people attend your online and offline events, and will help your sales staff get better results.

(11:00): Everything that we're teaching here, you're welcome to apply in your business. Whether you do it on your own, or you do it with Happy Grasshopper, the important thing is that you do it, right? Thank you for attending today. I really appreciate the opportunity to share. One last request: Go to happygrasshopper.com/webinar and register for today's event. It's called The Martial Art of Achievement and it's a project that I started working on back in 1997 and I've got some stories to tell, I've got some things to teach that I know you'll really appreciate, so I'll see you guys at 3:00 PM. Have a great day, everyone. Bye, now.

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