Top 5 Ways to Leverage Your Database with David Anderson

Like, it's pretty simple, right? I mean, the best businesses in the world are always nurturing their database. They're growing their database, they're categorizing their database, and we've seen a big increase of usage, which is great, which means that people are realizing, like, man, I need to, like, I need to get organized, right? Like, I need to get in contact with my clients and ask them how they're doing. And if you didn't have that, you need to, right? Because that's the first step. And like I always tell people, like, real estate agents are running a business. Like, it's pretty straightforward. You're all business owners, just like, I'm a business owner, you're a business owner, and you've got to think of it that way. It's like, what's your most valuable asset? It's your database, right? And that's it. So, if you're looking at the long-term viability of a real estate agent all the way to the point of an exit strategy, right, the database is the asset.

There's nothing else. No one's going to, I mean, you're not going to retire because somebody bought your lockboxes from you or your signposts or whatever. But if you've got a database that's consistently spitting out revenue year in, year out, because you've got a process and you've got a system and plan and everything in place and it's working, you've got something that when it's time to retire, when it's time to go, you can sell. Correct. And I think that in itself is something that a lot of people miss out on when it comes to, you know, organizing the database, right? And so, that's the first tip is just get it organized. It's not easy. You know, there's a lot of people that can do it for you, but you got to get it done for the long-term viability of your business. Yep. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. All right. So, our Top 5 topics today are how to leverage your database to grow your business. So, let's jump in, shall we?

You mentioned that the number one tip is organizing your database. So, tell us what that looks like, because I think that a lot of Realtors have a hard time with how many categories, what categories, how to do this, how to do that. And I think that the old KISS moniker is probably the best, but I'll leave it to you because you do this for a living. Yep. So, we see so many different ways that people do business, right? You've got the model of like, these are my A, B, C, D clients, right? And you want to keep in contact with your A clients more than you want to do with your D clients, right? And so, with LionDesk, for example, you can set those categories up and it'll automatically send them or send you a notification like, hey, it's been seven days since you've talked to your A clients or your hot clients.

But if you're going to organize like, from a business perspective, right? You got your buyers, you got your sellers, right? You got your sphere, like start from the top and then get granular after you do that, right? And so, it's like, okay, these are my buyers in this price point, right? They're looking for this so you can continually just getting more and more granular. The biggest thing also is commenting every single conversation that you have because just as humans, we forget 90% of what we learn in a seven-day period, right? And so, you always want to say like, when you're going to go have that listing appointment with your client, make a note of it, write down specific things that they talked about, right? Tag them as such so that when something comes up in the future, you can run a filter.

But, you know, from a specific standpoint, man, like I always tell everybody to start from the highest level that you can start from to make it simple on yourself. And then just, you know, then take those buyers and say like, okay, when did they buy? What did they buy? And just start from that aspect and just keep going down and next thing you know, you've got, you know, detailed tags and hotness levels and all this other stuff that you can just filter in an instant. Well, that's what exactly what I was just about to say. I love the fact with LionDesk for us, we can tag. And so, we can keep the category, the overall category really simple. But the tags let us get super granular with stuff so that, you know, if we've got a listing on a golf course and we know that some of our people love to play golf, we can just hit them with, hey, who do you know that might want to live on this golf course?

Exactly. The other thing is put other agents in there as well. Put your lenders in there as well, right? Like, categorize all of those. I preach that all the time. I'm like, why go spend money on these flyer programs and this and that? I mean, over the course of a couple of years, you can build up a huge database of Realtors. And, you know, we try to talk to our new agents specifically, but anybody who will listen, really, when was the last time you asked your title person for a referral? When was the last time you asked your lender for a referral? I mean, none of us do it because we just are like, oh, well, we do business with that person every day. Surely, they'd say something, but they won't unless you ask. Correct, dude. I mean, you know, I think part of that stems from, Chance, is the fear, right, of like, am I bugging them?

They already know what I do, but it's like, you're a business owner. Like, you need to be talking. Like, I wear my Lion Desk shirt everywhere, man. Everyone's like, what is that? Right? So, you always got to be thinking from that aspect of it. And absolutely, like, we have a lot of clients that take that Lion Desk number that they get from us for texting, and they use that in the MLS, right, and on their business card. Because everybody that calls and texts that number is going to be added as a profile inside a Lion Desk. And so, it's like, little things, because again, back to the very beginning, right, your business is your database, and you should be asking your clients for referrals, your title guy for referrals, like, everybody. And if you can just get a couple, right, two or three a month even, it's like, that's a huge value that didn't cost you anything on marketing.

Again, we don't have a leads problem. We've got a follow-up problem. That's right. Right? The second one we could talk about, automation, right? And a lot of companies I've talked to, a lot of business owners across the real estate space, and the biggest thing that all of us, including myself, are working on right now is, like, how can we automate, right? And so, we've seen a lot of increases in automation, plugging things in, and I always ask ourselves, and I ask my team the same thing, right? And as a business owner, you should do the same. What are we doing today that's a manual process? Can we automate it, and can we get somebody else to do it, right? Because it's like, on my calendar, I've got things I have to do, and you're going to be able to find somebody cheaper than you to do it, right?

And then if you automate it, it's going to take less time, because your time as an agent should be spent selling as much as possible, right? And so, automation is a huge revenue-generating activity, right, if you look at what you're going to do as a business owner. Yeah, I mean, for us here at our brokerage, it's kind of a weird tradeoff, because you want the focus to be on the revenue-generating activities, like you said, right? And nobody got into this business of being a Realtor so that they could upload documents into a back-end system or whatever that tedious crap that everybody hates doing. And so, you know, we've tried to find ways, including bringing LionDesk into our business, of how can we automate as much of the tedious BS that agents just don't want to screw around with, and let them focus on the part of their business that actually grows the business without sacrificing service.

Correct, right? That's the tough part, right? Yep, agreed, right? I mean, the relationship, as we all know, is the gold, right? And you've got to do the things that build the relationship. But on the other hand, like, that's one of our jobs that LionDesk, right? I mean, it really is. I look at it as, like, our function in the industry is to create these automations, right, to make sure that it's easy for you to plug in your systems together and so that you don't have to do these repetitive tasks over and over and over again, right? I mean, that's really the job of a CRM is to help with that automation. Yeah, save time, save effort, make you work smarter, not harder, all those cliches. But it's the truth at the end of the day is that that's what really frees up the time for an agent to be able to go out and grow their business.

Correct. Yep. So, you know, with the automation, right, a lot of the stuff is a business. You know, the third thing that we can hit on is the outsourcing when necessary, right? And so we talked about getting your database organized, right? Does that mean that you should spend a lot of time doing it? Sure, right? Like, if you're at home and you're having a glass of wine and the kids are asleep, right, like, go in there and do it. But there's also other services that can help organize it for you. Another one is my sister's an agent, right? But she's been an agent for 15 years or longer, right? And so she, right now, has been trying to do some Facebook ads and creating these things. And it's like, you know, should you really be Sheila?

And I'm talking to her right now if she's going to listen to this, right? Like, spending your time doing that, right? And that's the question you've got to ask yourself, right? Like, can you outsource this process to someone else, to some other company? Because if it's going to cost you $500, right, to get somebody to do it, how much of your time, like, what's your time worth, right? If you don't think you're worth $20 an hour, you know, then do it. If you think you're worth more than $20 an hour, then outsource it, right? Right, absolutely. You know, we talk about the whole idea is, you know, let's look at our strengths and weaknesses. And then as many of our weaknesses as we can not do, let's just not do them. I don't believe there's a whole lot of valor in taking something that you're not very good at and just becoming great at it, even though you hate it.

Just let's focus on the things we are good at and go rock that and let somebody else do the crap that we're not good at. For sure, man. I mean, that's part of, like, you know, as a business owner, which was actually just kind of dovetails into my next point, was that there's things that we like to do that we shouldn't be doing, right? And there's things that we don't like to do that we should be doing, you know? So it's like, you got to understand that, you know, you can work in your business and you can work on your business, right? And so when you're working in it, you're doing the maintenance, you're doing this, you're doing that, you know, you're doing the functions that you got to do. But when you're working on your business, you're taking a step back and you're figuring out, you know, where do I need to automate, right?

What should I outsource? What should I not be doing? And, you know, a lot of people say, like, you know, eat the frog, right? Like, do the thing that you should do, but you don't want to. And I'm a believer in that. And with that idea comes from or comes out of it is like, can I bring somebody else on? That's the outsourcing part of it, right? Because if you're able to hire somebody and they can do that function, that leaves you with more time to build your business. And I think we've seen a lot of companies, whether or not you're a brokerage, an agent, a team, it's like, what should I be doing to be making the most use of my time? And what should I not be doing, right? So going back to the first thing, you want to get your database organized, you don't like to do it, hire somebody else, you spend your time calling clients. It's pretty straightforward. There you go.

So when we talk about kind of pushing things off that we don't want to do, you know, I think we had a conversation, I mean, I had a conversation this morning with one of our agents about the idea of hiring a transaction coordinator. So we talk about automating or outsourcing or whatever it is that that looks like, you know, we were seriously having the conversation of, okay, if they spend 10 hours on a file and you pay them 400 bucks, that's $40 an hour. Is your time worth more or less? And do the math. Do the math. Then in addition to that, I think that you made a brilliant point there because that conversation led to a place where we were talking about taking that step back, looking at your business from sort of a 30,000 foot view down onto your business.

Because I think with Realtors, it's really, really simple for us to get, we've got this transaction and this transaction, this transaction, we get bogged down in those details, plus we need to prospect, plus we need to be our accountant, plus we need to be this and that and whatever those functions are. And so it's really easy to get bogged down in the minutia of the day. And when we talk about taking that step back, that's really a good opportunity to take stock and be real honest with yourself. And if you're not good at being honest with yourself, have somebody else come and tell you. And whether that's a SWOT analysis or something like that, have somebody else take a look at that and say, this is where you could be better. Hire a coach, whatever that looks like. Yep. So we actually, we do quarterly with our executive team, right? And if we go back, like when I first started this company, it was just me, you know?

And so I was just answering the phones and trying to sell and, you know, doing the programming. And it's like, yeah, enough's enough, right? Like you got to be able to, you're going to get to the point to where I shouldn't be doing some of this stuff. And so, you know, one of the things is like these Facebook groups, right? Like I love them. They're great. But, you know, you see these posts out there of like caption this photo because the toilet's in the, you know, against the wall backwards or something. It's like, I get it. Like it's cool to have fun, right? But if you're spending time doing that, like what should you really be doing, right? Like what are these dollar producing activities as a business owner mindset, right, that you should be doing? And so getting back to it, our team, our executive team, every quarter we do a start, stop and continue exercise, right?

And so it's pretty straightforward. We all do it ourselves. We all write it down. We put them up on the wall and it just makes us refocus, you know, like, okay, what should I be doing? What should I not do? And what should I continue doing? And it's great. I mean, the best one that came out of the, for our team was stop asking David so many questions. And I was like, perfect. So it's funny that you say that because truth be told, the conversation that I just alluded to a minute ago was a, an exit debrief for an agent who just graduated from our new agent training program. And our exit debrief is start, stop, continue. That's it. Same exact survey. We stole it from Scott Stratton out of a book years ago. I mean, it's simple stuff, right?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's funny. So, small world. Anyway, we read the same book. Well, one of our team members gave it to us, man. She was like, we should do this. And I was like, I love it. And now we all just do it. So, that's part of learning. I mean, you got to always, I mean, you got to, and it's not one of my Top 5, but it should be. It's like continuing education is so important, right? Like, listening to what you do is going to help me as much as me talking to you about other stuff. You know, it's like, I'm always trying to figure out what are other people doing that we should be doing? What shouldn't we be doing? You know, like, and some days, like, you can't do that. I mean, you just got to work in your business and you're just like, you know, but other days, you got to lean back a little bit, like I said, and figure out, like, you know, where do I want to take this thing in six months or a year, you know?

And you can't do it unless you have help, unless other people are, like, guiding you along the way and, you know, hiring the right people. Like, and you know, as a business owner, I mean, it's not easy, right? But it's a process and it kind of gets me to my fifth point, which was having a plan, right? Which is important. I mean, you know, right? You got to have a plan. Got to have a business plan. So, so my, what I try to tell people on our staff, right? I mean, because at this point, we've got about 60 people and we're servicing, you know, tens of thousands of clients. And, and this wasn't my first business, right? I had another business as well. And it's good to think about five years out.

You also need to think about, you know, a month out, three months out, especially now, right? More than ever, right? And everybody always says, you got to write it down, right? But the one thing that I do every night is I look at my calendar for the next day, right? And I think of what did I, what did I not do today that I needed to do? And so that way I'm not thinking about it at two o'clock in the morning, right? That's like something that needs to get done. And so, you know, for me, it's like, what am I doing today? Am I being effective and efficient with my time, right? And if I am, then I'm feeling good about it. And then I review at the end of the day, like, okay, was it productive? I mean, we always ask each other, how was your day, right?

Like reflect on that a little bit and like put some thought into it. And then that way the next day can be better, you know? As opposed to the default. Oh, it's great. What's for dinner? Correct. Yeah. Right. It's like, I mean, you know, Randy, Toby, who's our director of BizDev, he and I talk all the time. He's on the East Coast. I'm on the West Coast. And it's like, you know, how was your day? And it's not just like a, oh, it was okay. It was like, well, you know, I talked to this guy and I did this. What do you think about this idea? How do we, you know, it's like, it's a conversation so that the next day can get better. Yeah. One of the, one of the mindsets that we try to create is a mind, it's a money mindset, you know, where your time is money. And so you're either investing it or you're spending it. Which one? And, you know, if you can end the day having invested more time in things that are going to happen in the future, then you've had a great day.

I mean, it's just. Yeah. Right. I mean, so it's like, like, you know, right. I mean, you know, we can all come up with another five, I think. Right. In terms of like, what's going to help. But for me, you know, building a business from the ground up, it's like, think about, you know, where do I want to take this thing? Right. Like you said, start from the top, move down, and then just put the little pieces together as you're kind of making, as you're walking down the path. And some days are going to be terrible. Right. I mean, for sure. We all have them. But then it makes the wins even better, you know, when you actually have those good days. Because for us and for every agent that's out there, like, organization, automation, right, efficiencies, dollar producing activities, like, none of that actually happens unless you can have a plan and then you execute it each and every day.

There you go. That's the key, right? Daily disciplines repeated over time. That's it, man. Sounds simple, right? Exactly. Sounds super easy. Yeah. So let me ask you a question real quick. You've got your plan. You've got your database organized. You're working your plan. You're doing all the things you're supposed to. In the course of building LionDesk, how many times did you fail? Constantly. We still do, right? But I don't dwell on it at all, right? So, you know, for me, I'm very optimistic. I also have, you know, like, a short-term memory problem when it comes to losing or failing, right?

Like, it's kind of like, you know, Tom Brady, you know, and Belichick, when they lose, like, he's on to the next, you know, team. So what we do is we figure out and we do a review, like, hey, if something didn't work or if we launched something and it wasn't good or, you know, hey, maybe we shouldn't have done that. Take stock, figure it out, right? But then move on to the next thing and try something else because I always tell our team, I would rather try and fail every single day than not to try at all. And I think, you know, all business leaders say that in their books, but it's so true and it just needs to be a mentality, right? Like, don't be afraid of it. I mean, we're all afraid of failure, man. Like, we got to get over it. Yeah, no, I agree 100%. I think that a lot of the time what we see is, you know, an agent will try something new and it doesn't go the way that they had it planned.

And then they just stop. When have they just took that debrief session and said, okay, well, this is how we're going to do it different next time and went and did it again. It could be wildly successful. I think that that is, you know, I think it's a function of not having a plan, number one. And number two, you know, people that are entrepreneurs and people who are going to be the risk takers out there doing these kinds of things tend to be very impatient people. So, you know, I want my business to be 10 times as big as it is right this second. And I feel like we're doing the things to get there, but I know it's not going to happen. And that's a learned thing. That's an acquired taste, you know, and it's not one that I particularly still like.

So, it's just, you know, having that patience to realize the process has to work its way through. Correct, man. And you're right. I'm pretty impatient as well. And I think everybody that knows me will tell you that. But then it's also a matter of knowing that you can't always just make the right decision. And sometimes it's bad timing, right? Like who could have predicted what happened, you know, in January of this year, right? And my last company, my last business was in the travel business. My family is still in the travel business. Like they went from here to zero, you know, in 30 days. You know, I mean, when you, you can't predict everything, right? But, you know, you got to just stick with it. And then, and I even told the team, I told my dad, who's the chairman of the company.

So, I said, forget about the last three months. Like, let's focus on what's going to happen in January, right? If you believe there's going to be a vaccine, then you got to plan for that happening, you know? And so, just like in our business in 2008, when everything crumbled and everybody's freaking out, people still made a ton of money, right? On those like REO properties. So, it's like, you got to be able to adjust to the times, you know? And then if your business plan has to change, it's got to, it's got to change. But at least you have your processes, your operations, your automations all in place. And it's just the message that you're changing. Perfect. That's right. Right? Hey, so let me touch on that real quick while we're organizing. We're talking about this. If you look at different research from different places.

So, I'm going to use Zillow as an example because everybody knows Zillow. Zillow kind of ballparks the fact that it takes around 13 months from the time that somebody clicks on a Zillow home and asks for information or whatever, to they actually become a customer. And I think that part of that, you know, conversion problem, that lead conversion, that follow-up problem is that we're kind of short-sighted on that. What practices have you seen agents use that are better for kind of that long-term sort of prospecting, that year, year and a half, two-year prospect? Yeah. If you don't automate it, it's never going to happen is really what it comes down to. Right? And we have a lot of drip campaigns inside of LionDesk that are a year long.

I've seen one that you can download that's a five-year campaign, right? That includes emails and reminders and, like, calls and tasks. And it's like, you know, we're all stuck on the instant win, right? Like, and then you're moving on to the next one. But what you don't realize is that that person that's shopping, right? It's kind of like watching a parade. And you're sitting up there in the stands, right? And the only people you're talking to are the ones right in front of you because they're ready right now. But you've got a lot of people in the beginning of the parade that are still coming up. They're just not ready, right? And then once they're – if you haven't communicated with them, they're past you and gone, right? And so what you've got to do is think of it from, like, okay, there's a funnel here.

And maybe they're not going to be ready today, but maybe they're going to be ready in the future. Or maybe they know somebody between now and 13 months from now that is ready that they can refer over, right? And so, again, unless you're like a magician and you can text everybody when you need to and send them emails and do all this stuff, you got to have the automation in place so that when you get that new Zillow lead or that new Facebook lead, it automatically just has your year-long drip campaign in there, right? Starting off with a text message, hey, Chance, just got your request off of Zillow. Send them a video text, right? Differentiation. And then nurture. And just let the automation do its thing while you're following up and doing these revenue-generating activities, actually going to appointments and talking to people.

So that wraps it up for today. I want to thank David Anderson for taking time out of his day to be with us. I want to thank you for taking time out of your day and out of your business for coming to watch and learn. And hopefully these tips are going to be something you can take back and put in your business and help you grow. So we will see you next time on Top 5. Thanks so much.