Blog / Leadership
Feeding the Farm with Dane Atherton and Lee Woodward
with Dane Atherton - Harcourts Coastal and Lee Woodward - Real Estate Academy
It may not seem like it but agents are in fact like farmers, so say Dane Atherton and Lee Woodward. They believe that agents can try and go it alone farming their patch but a far better strategy is to work collaboratively to see prospects increase exponentially. To be successful agents and for marketing campaigns to work and to creative longevity in business, Lee and Dane believe agents have to share knowledge, recognise that the collective can produce more than an individual and love, tend and nurture their fields to promote new life and growth.
First and foremost, agents have to let go of seeing themselves as one farmer with a high fence surrounding their farms. Data has to be shared. Lee explains that connected marketing campaigns will not work, “unless we look at one of the biggest issues which is data surrender. If I've got ten agents and they say, ‘Stay away from my data base - it's mine - keep away, Lee’, I then say, ‘How then can I send these beautiful reports, and letters, and articles of interest, such as Dealing with Divorce, Preparing your Property for Sale, and Purchasing a Property - all these wonderful, leveraged marketing materials - to let them know you're still alive, if you don't want to surrender the data to the conveyor belt machine?’.”
Dane has the answer: he believes you must put the case forward that more can be achieved if everyone works together as one; that agents will benefit if they see themselves as being in partnership with their principals. Both principals and agents working together have a shared interest, Dane believes, and it’s mutually beneficial for them all to work together on the farm.
He explains, “It's about the principal and the leader designing tools, systems and structures to support the sales person and then having them buy in and the sales person understanding that that's part of the arrangement. I wouldn't so much say it's surrendering. It's really a partnership. It's a joint marketing initiative, in which both of us benefit. For example, we've introduced a trail, action plan, which is called the Coastal Report, so when someone's talking to a future seller, we have a Coastal Report, which is a quarterly document that's got every single sale that our company does, and it comes with a cover letter and it comes with a personalised message from the agent.”
These kinds of marketing assets create leverage and it’s very hard for individual agents to produce them on their own. They favourably position agents to then make meaningful contact with clients. The production of marketing assets work for principals too. Dane says, “Leverage moments ensure that our clients who are being scooped into our nets are actually being communicated with and not being forgotten about.”
Dane believes that agents who try to farm their own individual patch and make it alone and who can’t see that their individual interests will be furthered by working and sharing with their principals and other agents, are like farmers who rope off a pig and tell it, ‘Stay out of my soybean paddy’. A ceiling will be hit and soon. Lee thinks that such people build brick walls around themselves. But the farmer on the other side of the wall has the “watering truck. I've got the fertilizer. I've got a couple of really good farmers who know how to make sure the soil's moist and they know what to do in this nurturing process, so when you come back to this patch, we've got growth, versus, you've fenced it off, gave it no nurturing, no water, no love at all. It's now just dead - or worse, got competitor's signs in it because you were protecting something you weren't going to service, and no leverage.”
So when the data is shared and you are building marketing campaigns remember, customers are like seeds. They need to be tended to. Customer service is what the customer tells you it is. Client fulfilment is the oxygen behind lead generation because it's in the heat. Client nurture equals follow-up.
So while we may set trails for marketing campaigns that contain a blend of emails, SMS’s and other assets, they can’t be rigid and set in stone for we must always, always be aware and responsive to the needs of our customers as well. The customer is king. Customers need carefully targeted marketing campaigns that build leverage and create touchpoints for the agent to provide strategic and purposeful contact.
Lee says, “Trails or action plans were taught in this country for years. I used to teach trails, but then, as we got so volume of data, trails began to block careers.” He continues, “In my own office, I see action trails and I see four thousand two hundred and twenty-two emails come through of scheduled tasks that get lost and get overwhelming.”
To avoid this problem, Lee has adopted, “the chip and chase approach. I think real estate sales people need to be responsive to the contact or the client in front of them, and that's difficult to do when you're doing it en masse, and you're sending emails and it's generic. But when it's a scheduled task, following a conversation that's relevant to the conversation they've just had with you, then, to me, that just opens up such a high level of personal follow up.”
Lee says, “For example, if I was running a marketing campaign and I got Dane’s business card and I thought he was a good candidate for Real Estate Academy, I'd just pop him into the system, knowing he is going to get a Hot Topics magazine, articles of interest and audio quick tips. I’d put him on the conveyor belt of wonderful things that happen, but I wouldn’t do every one of them myself.” These tasks would be done by a wonderful marketing administrator. All Lee would have to do is call and the next trail would be activated based on that conversation.
Dane says, in those conversations, “something may come up about destinations, so enter destination CMA. It’s a good example of tailoring that chip and chase and becoming more personal, so it’s about actually reading the play in front, rather than just generically hoping that marketing is working.”
Put another log on the fire and keep the heat in your own market
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