Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
CINC Office Hours Episode 10 - Sebastian Cortes | October 8, 2025
Office Hours airs live on the second Wednesday of each month at 11am ET.
Register to watch live and ask your questions at cinccommunity.com/registerforwebinars.
Register to watch live and ask your questions at cinccommunity.com/registerforwebinars.
Office Hours 10: Unlocking Real Estate Tech Integrations with Sebastian Cortes
In this episode of CINC's Live Real Estate Q&A Office Hours, recorded on October 8, 2025, we sat down with Sebastian Cortes, a key member of CINC’s TechX and Integrations Team, to learn more about CINC's integrations and best practices.
Whether you’re a solo agent or running a team, this conversation dives deep into:
- CRM integrations that save time and boost productivity
- Best practices for syncing lead data across platforms
- Automation strategies to nurture leads without losing the personal touch
- Upcoming tech trends every real estate agent should know
If you’ve ever wondered how to streamline your workflow and close more deals using smart tech, this episode is for you.
Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube—and subscribe for monthly insights from industry experts.
Episode Highlights:
- 02:15 Why tech integrations matter for real estate agents [00:02:15 | VideoNavigation]
- 10:30 Top CRM features that drive conversions [00:10:30 | VideoNavigation]
- 18:45 How to automate follow-ups without sounding robotic [00:18:45 | VideoNavigation]
- 27:00 Sebastian’s predictions for real estate tech in 2026 [00:27:00 | VideoNavigation]
Key Takeaways for Agents:
- Integrating your CRM with marketing tools can increase lead engagement by up to 40%.
- Automation isn’t about replacing relationships—it’s about freeing up time for high-value conversations.
- Staying ahead of tech trends gives you a competitive edge in a crowded market.
Resources & Links:
- Request a CINC Demo
- Find CINC Trainings
- Follow us on Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook | TikTok | YouTube | Threads
Creators and Guests
Host
Host
Host
James Terry
James joined CINC in 2013 to help Client Marketing with a special project. He stayed on and was soon managing the build and launch of all new accounts before being asked to lead the Paid Search team. Bringing over 15 years of experience in digital marketing, James is passionate about the high growth potential of our Real Estate clients.
What is CINC Office Hours?
CINC's live monthly open Q&A with different real estate experts. Hosted by Harry Kierbow, Dan Lott and James Terry from CINC. Join us live on the second Wednesday of each month at 11am ET. Register now and submit your questions to be answered live at cinccommunity.com/registerforwebinars.
James Terry: Get to hear this, Jim.
CINC Marketing: No.
CINC Marketing: Hey, everybody.
CINC Marketing: just getting started here. Thanks, everybody, for… Joining us.
CINC Marketing: I love all these otter AI note-takers, that's cool.
James Terry: No, is that getting popular?
CINC Marketing: So yeah, got people coming in.
CINC Marketing: If you don't mind, in the chat, just let us know if you can hear us okay.
CINC Marketing: Everyone just missed a riveting story about.
James Terry: quiet you.
CINC Marketing: James.
CINC Marketing: Yeah.
CINC Marketing: I'm not exactly sure what… what just happened. In the green room!
CINC Marketing: They created a picture taken, and it ended up with him saying that…
CINC Marketing: He's always small in Dan's eyes, so…
CINC Marketing: I think he was referring to…
James Terry: on my part. Boy, Harry missed it.
CINC Marketing: Yeah, I mean, yeah.
James Terry: I love the angle that, that Dan's got on his… on his screen right now.
Daniel Lott: Well, thank you. I have it set up really high, so… to hide the… the neck fat, so you have the, double chin, so you have it a little higher, so…
James Terry: I thought it was that you were always looking up As visionaries often do.
Daniel Lott: Well, I do that also. My, the cabin picture of me.
James Terry: Just…
Daniel Lott: Just thinking about the future.
CINC Marketing: Pence of Dan.
Daniel Lott: I can't grow a beard, so that's why, so I have to have my camera up high.
James Terry: Should grow a mustache.
James Terry: Sebastian on this meeting, none of us need to even attempt a beard. Look at that.
Daniel Lott: Yeah.
CINC Marketing: Yeah, it's good work.
Sebastian Cortes: Right.
CINC Marketing: Good work, Obi. Beautiful.
James Terry: Beautiful facial accessory over here.
CINC Marketing: Alright.
CINC Marketing: It does feel like a… it does feel like a natural lead-in.
CINC Marketing: to our guest. Hey, Natalia, thanks for coming on.
CINC Marketing: Sebastian.
Daniel Lott: We haven't driven away, everybody.
CINC Marketing: No, people actually stayed, so… maybe we'll do a spin-off about…
CINC Marketing: Whatever the hell it was you guys were talking about. I forgot what it was, I was just waiting to get in to start office hours number 10, so…
James Terry: Double digits here.
CINC Marketing: Thanks, everyone, for joining us. I am Harry Kerbo, the, Senior Director.
CINC Marketing: of paid social media marketing here at Sync.
CINC Marketing: My counterpart on the Google side, James Terry.
CINC Marketing: is here, in front of many leather-bound books.
CINC Marketing: And as always, the most handsome man…
CINC Marketing: on the internet, who did use the word potting as a verb today, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.
CINC Marketing: Dan Lott.
Daniel Lott: It's happening, it's happening.
CINC Marketing: Yeah, and more on that in a minute. But before we get into all that, I do want to introduce our guest today, Sebastian Cortez. He is from the Sync Frontline support team.
CINC Marketing: And honestly, the guy that I go to…
CINC Marketing: When I don't know what people are talking about. So, he is, a wealth of knowledge on the, on the Sync CRM.
CINC Marketing: I think you said… have you been here since 2019? Is that right?
Sebastian Cortes: Yep What's going on?
CINC Marketing: Very cool.
Sebastian Cortes: Nope.
CINC Marketing: Alright.
CINC Marketing: Whoa! Waylon's AI assistant announces it's sentient.
James Terry: That's great.
CINC Marketing: Hey, Waylon's assistant, I hope you're having a great day.
James Terry: We better welcome it or something. We don't want the AI turning against us.
CINC Marketing: Yeah.
CINC Marketing: Yeah, this will eventually devolve into talking about the goof from the Matrix, but we're not there yet.
CINC Marketing: Yeah, so, Sebastian, if you don't mind, like, just kind of tell us a little bit about, you know, what you do on the frontline team, and…
CINC Marketing: You know, that kind of stuff.
Sebastian Cortes: Yep, so, so I'm kind of like a Tier 2, support,
Sebastian Cortes: It's given me a chance to really, to really expand my knowledge base about what, you know, how all of our products and features kind of interact with each other.
Sebastian Cortes: My…
Sebastian Cortes: I would think my main role is, you know, whenever clients call in and they have an issue that they report to us, you know, a bug, a request, something like that.
Sebastian Cortes: it kind of makes its way up the flagpole, and to me, where I'll kind of vet it, I'll make sure it's got all the details it needs. You know, if it's a bug, I'll make sure it's got everything that the tech team needs to look in to verify it's a bug, and then, you know, work on fixing it.
Sebastian Cortes: And then, you know, for me, it makes its way over to our tech product team, to… to do whatever the ticket
Sebastian Cortes: Requests to be done.
CINC Marketing: Very cool, yeah, I appreciate you coming on, man. Cause we got a lot of good questions.
CINC Marketing: That are more on the support side. We also got a lot of questions about…
CINC Marketing: kind of lead flow at this time of the year. And so we'll… we'll talk about that as well, but…
CINC Marketing: I see Natalia's question, it's also…
CINC Marketing: Similar to another question that we got from, Justin.
CINC Marketing: When he signed up, just around, videos. Both questions are kind of around, using videos and communication, right? So, Natalia said, how do you include video message or video inside of emails?
CINC Marketing: In Orlando… Look at that. So, is that…
CINC Marketing: Is that something that can be done? Like, what… are there best practices around it? You know, what would you say to Natalia?
CINC Marketing: Other than the link that Orlando just posted.
Sebastian Cortes: Yeah, so context on the link that Orlando posted, that's kind of a… that's one of two workarounds for including video and email, because,
Sebastian Cortes: a lot of email carriers don't like it if you just… if you just embed a video in your email. If they see that, your email is much more likely to… to land in a spam or junk folder. So that's why…
Sebastian Cortes: That's why we don't have the option to just embed a video in the email, or I actually think we do have a button to do it, but our system sanitizes that email before it actually sends to the client, and we remove the embedded video.
Sebastian Cortes: And that is to just give the email a better chance at landing in, you know, the inbox folder, as opposed to spam or junk.
Sebastian Cortes: The two… the two workarounds we have, one of them is in that… that link that Orlando posted, where you kind of just…
Sebastian Cortes: take the first frame of the video, you take a screenshot of that, you upload it into your email, and you hyperlink that image to lead to, like, the YouTube video of that, yeah, of that video.
Sebastian Cortes: That's something that, that, you know, if you include 4 or 5, 6 of those, then that also kind of ends up having the same effect as embedding video in your email, but if it's just one, you know, your email's most likely still going to go into the inbox.
Sebastian Cortes: The other option is with our video messaging feature, where,
Sebastian Cortes: You record video from within the platform.
Sebastian Cortes: It's housed in our video library, in the CRM, and then, there's an option when you're sending email or text, kind of towards the bottom of that
Sebastian Cortes: window that pops up where you type in what you want to send. There's a little video hyperlink, you click on that, it opens up the video library, you select the video you recorded, and then you can, you can send it from there, and…
Sebastian Cortes: And, you know, I don't know exactly what kind of tech magic, uploading video that way
Sebastian Cortes: I don't know why that works, and embedding wouldn't work, but but I do know the video messaging feature, is… is… it was specifically designed in a way to kind of, bypass that… that check that a lot of email carriers have for embedded video, so… yeah.
Daniel Lott: Well, they…
CINC Marketing: You know, it's…
Daniel Lott: a lot of time on that video feature. I remember, like, it was years ago, and so… and it works, it works good, and it's… it's… it does the…
CINC Marketing: No.
CINC Marketing: Sounds terrible.
Daniel Lott: But I guess, I guess, because you gotta upload in, like, I don't know, whenever I go to, like.
Daniel Lott: Whenever I go into, like, the Google system and have to, like, upload videos, I'm like, I'm not gonna do that, it's too much work. So… so I guess the shortcut is just doing, like, a screenshot, and then…
CINC Marketing: like, doing that.
Sebastian Cortes: I agree.
Daniel Lott: The other one works great, if you have time, or if you're looking for additional functionality, I guess.
Sebastian Cortes: Yeah, because that's one of the limitations with video messaging is that you have to record the video in the system.
Sebastian Cortes: So if you do have something that's already uploaded to YouTube, you know, use… just, you know, using the screenshot, hyperlinking the screenshot, that's probably going to be easier. But, you know, if you have something you just kind of want to record in the moment, then video messaging is probably going to be… yeah, it's probably going to be better for that.
Daniel Lott: So many options, though.
Daniel Lott: So that's good.
James Terry: And what a,
James Terry: an unsung piece, like you had said, you know, one thing I heard just now was.
James Terry: If you put it in this certain spot, like, we sanitize it, so the goal being that it ends up in an inbox and not a spam folder, because once you send it, you don't know where it…
James Terry: where they're seeing it, where it's being received, and so just such a background piece that we're focused on to say, we know where you want this to go, spam doesn't do anybody any good, here's something we do that I don't think we yelled from the rooftops or anything, but just something that was implemented to say, hey, you worked on this, and we want to make sure people see it, right?
Sebastian Cortes: Yeah.
CINC Marketing: Well, and the… the image… the image with the hyperlink is pretty standard practice. That's what MailChimp has.
CINC Marketing: You know, so the emails that I do for this session, where we include the…
CINC Marketing: Replay of the previous.
CINC Marketing: That is a image with a hyperlink to the YouTube channel. So, I mean, honestly, if you think about it from a, like, a social standpoint, like a marketing, like a social media standpoint.
CINC Marketing: Not social, I don't talk to people, but…
CINC Marketing: Like a social media standpoint, it's more valuable to you
CINC Marketing: to get that person on your YouTube channel, or your Facebook page, or, you know, your landing page.
CINC Marketing: Than it is for them to watch something within an email.
CINC Marketing: So, yeah, I think that's pretty standard practice. And again, like, MailChimp used to have an option to upload a video. That does not exist anymore. Their video option is just a placeholder image with a link. So I think that's pretty, pretty standard. And it's funny that you bring up all the spam stuff, because I remember…
CINC Marketing: I feel like video messaging was done around COVID.
CINC Marketing: During when that was just starting up, you know? And at that same time, it's been through so many iterations of, like, text message compliance, and spam filtering, and, like, the Can-Am, and all this stuff, you know?
CINC Marketing: Anyway. It just took me down memory lane, I'm thinking of Doug.
Sebastian Cortes: Yeah, I think that was one of the last,
Sebastian Cortes: team, like, company meetings that I had in person in the office before we started working from home. I remember that, too.
CINC Marketing: Yeah.
Daniel Lott: Yesterday. Memory lane, yes.
CINC Marketing: Memory lane. Alright, let's see. And so another question that we did have, kind of along the same lines, but I think when we talked about these before.
CINC Marketing: before the session, Sebastian, you said that this may be more of, like, a feature request?
CINC Marketing: And I don't know if you touched on this or not just now, but Justin's question, again, around videos in the library was…
CINC Marketing: It would be good… it would be nice if they could upload videos to the library to send out, versus having to record them.
CINC Marketing: in the… I guess… do they do it in the app? I'm not even sure where you record it.
Sebastian Cortes: Yeah, so, so you actually use your, you use microphone and, camera permissions to record the video, like, in your browser, on your computer, or you…
Sebastian Cortes: You can do it in the Sync Agent app, but it works a little bit differently. It works a little bit more like Snapchat there, where you record a video.
Sebastian Cortes: at the time you're composing the text message to attach to it, and then it doesn't go in the video library.
CINC Marketing: Does it automatically put a cat face on you?
Sebastian Cortes: That's another… that's another thing we can probably send up as… as.
CINC Marketing: Alright, yeah, let's see.
CINC Marketing: Orlando, I bet Orlando's on board with that.
CINC Marketing: But, yeah. Sorry, I didn't mean to derail things, I apologize.
Sebastian Cortes: But, but yeah, so you can,
Sebastian Cortes: you can record video, on the app or on desktop. On the app, it's… I don't want to say it's slightly more limited, it just kind of has a different…
Sebastian Cortes: I think it was more designed for a different use case than when you can sit down and record something a little bit longer on the desktop, so…
CINC Marketing: So yeah, that's good. I mean, we appreciate the feedback, absolutely, Justin and Natalia and everybody, for submitting questions, so that is, something we can definitely pass along as feedback to the product team.
CINC Marketing: Jemima asked, how do you go back and find emails and text messages that have been sent to clients?
CINC Marketing: Is there an easy way to do that? Orlando mentions the lead profile.
CINC Marketing: Yep.
Sebastian Cortes: That's probably the easiest way. You know, anything that you send to a lead should show up in the lead profile in the activity tab.
Sebastian Cortes: We do have some filters, you know, if you're looking from top to bottom, you see the activity tab, there should be a filters button, and you can specifically choose to deselect everything and just do text messages, emails, property alerts, and it'll just show a…
Sebastian Cortes: you know, probably a slightly smaller list, because by default, I think we have everything checked, so…
Sebastian Cortes: I think looking in the lead profile is definitely the easiest. Technically, you, you know, we have a communications inbox, too, off on the left-hand side of the CRM.
Sebastian Cortes: We do technically have a sent folder in there, so anything that you send should show up in there, but…
Sebastian Cortes: we don't have the best filtering options there, so it just shows, like, if you send a mass email to 100 leads, it's gonna show 100 emails in there. So, you know, going into the lead profile is definitely…
Sebastian Cortes: easiest.
CINC Marketing: Let's see, Angela…
CINC Marketing: is asking, recently changed my brokerage, is there a way for the templates to be updated with the new signatures, so I don't have to edit every time going forward?
CINC Marketing: So I think, is that talking about, like, auto tracks or emails going out? Is there, like, a central place to change that email signature that gets attached?
Sebastian Cortes: It… it depends. So, if it is auto-tracks, if it's email templates,
Sebastian Cortes: And you actually created the template and included your signature in there, you would have to, unfortunately, individually edit each template that that's set up in.
Sebastian Cortes: If it's just, you know, whenever you click to create an email and you see your signature in there, that's housed in your profile and settings. We have, if you click on your name in the top right, and you go to the profile and settings in the drop-down menu,
Sebastian Cortes: That takes you exactly where you need to be. There's a little signature box, and…
Sebastian Cortes: You can, you can edit it there, and then anytime you manually create an email, you get a mass email set up, then it'll have the new signature instead.
Sebastian Cortes: But, you know, going back to with, like, templates and stuff.
Sebastian Cortes: the template just kind of works with what's inside what you've created, so you would have to go in there to change it. And each template would be kind of like a…
Sebastian Cortes: Separate, so you'd have to go into every template, unfortunately, there.
Sebastian Cortes: So, yeah.
James Terry: And…
James Terry: Actually, on that, if I could jump in, Angela, I'm glad you brought this up, because this is something, like, it, you know, doesn't happen a lot, but when it does happen, as far as a brokerage change like this, like, say… I'm just gonna make a couple up, right, as examples, but if somebody goes from, like, Keller Williams to eXp, or, you know, whatever it might be.
James Terry: Let your account manager know, and let us know about that, because we have, like, branding on your website, and our team specifically, the search team and the digital advertising crew.
James Terry: will take time and go through, you know, your Google profile page, for example, and make sure, like, oh, the website
James Terry: button on your profile is still sending back to a Keller Williams, you know, page, or something like that. And just find some suggestions that you might need to update this. We can't update all of them for you, because we don't have
James Terry: just to keep with that example, access to your Google profile. But just making sure the branding is updated and looking through some of that digital,
James Terry: you know, everything you've got out there in the digital space to say, these are a couple of items you might need to check, because a lot of that stuff gets buried, and you might not think about it all the time, to your point of having to go through and update every single thing. And yeah, there's stuff within the sync dashboard, but a lot of it's just out there in the ether as well, right?
James Terry: So, something we don't get notified of a whole lot, to think, like, oh, I'm changing brokerages.
James Terry: Let me tell my lead generation team about that. But,
James Terry: From an online lead gen perspective, it's something we want to be able to make sure is still in line with your branding as you move forward.
James Terry: So let us know if that, as those things happen.
Sebastian Cortes: Yeah, I think.
CINC Marketing: Yeah, that is… Nice. I was just gonna say, that is a good call-out, because,
CINC Marketing: you know, like, if you're running team listing ads, that's based off of your office ID, and if you change brokerage, if there's a change in that in any way.
James Terry: You know, that'll remove all the listings from the ads if we don't know about it. Or there's also…
CINC Marketing: you know, Google is really cracking down on suspensions. That seems to be one of their KPIs, this…
CINC Marketing: This… this year.
CINC Marketing: So…
James Terry: And they want to make sure that branding is consistent, right, and that nobody's with eXp as they move forward, and not still claiming that they're with Keller Williams and trying to pull, you know, misleading clients and things like that. So, thank you for bringing that up.
James Terry: And I'm glad to say you've gotten it all changed up. Good stuff.
Sebastian Cortes: Yeah, there is, and this is, you know, Angela, you said you've gotten it all changed, but for anyone else who might need it, it sounds like a lot, but we do have a pretty streamlined process for it on our end.
Sebastian Cortes: So if you just email the support team and you say, hey, I changed my brokerage, what do I need to do? You know, we have a template with a few questions for you to answer, we send to you, so there's a little bit of back and forth, but,
Sebastian Cortes: But, you know, that template automatically gets you in contact with our MLS team, and they help you update all that. So, so it's fairly streamlined. It sounds like a lot when you just kind of say everything that you need to update.
James Terry: date, but…
Sebastian Cortes: But we can absolutely help you with that, yeah.
CINC Marketing: Very cool. And can you, let me see if I remember the support number.
CINC Marketing: 8… starts with an 8.
CINC Marketing: Oh, it's right up there. 855-246-2717.
Sebastian Cortes: Yeah, I guess I'll also…
James Terry: Yes.
CINC Marketing: What a great guest by me.
CINC Marketing: Or support at SyncPro.com.
CINC Marketing: Yeah!
James Terry: Taking time to type into the chat.
Sebastian Cortes: Okay.
James Terry: Actually, taking time to type into the chat reminds me…
James Terry: We didn't ask everybody, where they're from.
James Terry: The…
CINC Marketing: Oh my god. We know you're from Atlanta, James.
James Terry: No, I was gonna change it this time.
CINC Marketing: So feel free to do that if you want.
CINC Marketing: And Angela said, is this… is there a daily routine to stay on top of the database that we can follow?
CINC Marketing: Can you email us? I know, just, briefly, we have a lot of free training options.
CINC Marketing: That you can take advantage of, so there's…
CINC Marketing: John Marone's Agent Blueprint, which is a 6-week training course that goes over…
CINC Marketing: Everything, you know, from the generation of the lead to the setting the appointment and the scripting, all that good stuff.
CINC Marketing: There's this wonderful… Soon-to-be podcast.
CINC Marketing: Now, just webinar series. Office hours. Oh.
CINC Marketing: So, you know, you can take advantage of that. There's a lot of archive trainings, the support line that, is in the chat right now, the email address that's in the chat right now, so, you know, we… one of the big differentiators, I think, between Sync and other…
CINC Marketing: Competitors is,
CINC Marketing: You know, just the access that you have for free training, and then also the support side of things to talk to an actual human being.
CINC Marketing: You know, that understands what you're trying to do, and that… talking to someone like Sebastian, who's been there for 6 years.
CINC Marketing: And, you know, I've seen multiple iterations, so take advantage of that, and also sync you.
CINC Marketing: Which is a live 3-day training
CINC Marketing: That we hear rave reviews about. It's…
CINC Marketing: I think the next one is… one may be going on here soon, but I think the next one's in Atlanta. So you can find all that at synccommunity.com.
James Terry: Yeah, and .
Daniel Lott: I'm gonna ask… Are you talking…
CINC Marketing: Online can be good.
Daniel Lott: Alright. Well, I was gonna ask Sebastian, like, the question that was just asked, that seemed like a pretty common question, like, somebody is kind of like…
Daniel Lott: Like, what do I do? Like, I'm sort of… I'm extrapolating, like, maybe they're overwhelmed, like, I don't know, like, where do I… who do I call, what do I do, like…
Daniel Lott: I assume you get that phone call a lot.
Sebastian Cortes: Yeah, we did.
Daniel Lott: what… what do you… like, what is the… you know, John Marone gives the… the 6-hour answer, but what's the, you know, the 6-minute answer to the question?
Sebastian Cortes: So, I would… I would definitely say that
Sebastian Cortes: You know, obviously support has a little bit of insight, but we're primarily focused on the tech support side of things, so we might not be able to give you the best insight.
Sebastian Cortes: That being said, you know, just working at Sync, we hear a lot about, you know, the agent playbook, we see… we have, our saved filters that are… that are designed in a way to where you literally just, to start your day.
Sebastian Cortes: You know, you go to your agent launch pad, you start with those saved filters, you call who needs to be called, you follow up on reminders that need to be followed up on that day.
Sebastian Cortes: I do think reaching out to your account manager is a… is a very good, thing to do in that situation, because I think they have some, some,
Sebastian Cortes: documentation, like, I think there's specifically a PDF that we have called the Sync Agent Playbook that kind of tells you what
Sebastian Cortes: what Sync's path to success looks like, using our CRM, what you should start doing every day, you know, every couple weeks you should maybe do this, when you call somebody, what kind of, you know, we have a little bit of a,
Sebastian Cortes: what are they called? A, a.
CINC Marketing: Look, the scripting? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Sorry.
Sebastian Cortes: So, you know, there's a little bit of a script in there that you can follow, so, you know, I don't think I have that PDF, although maybe it is something I should ask, you know, an account manager for. Maybe I can circulate that through the support team so that we can have…
Sebastian Cortes: I don't know, something more that we can provide to… to account manage… or to clients, rather than just saying, you know, start by calling your account manager, but…
Sebastian Cortes: But that is currently… the best answer we have is to reach out to your account manager, because they do have access to a few more resources that the support team doesn't. So yeah.
Daniel Lott: Yeah, there are all these different filters and stuff like that, and it's… it's very complicated, and
Daniel Lott: Well, I know we have, like, yesterday, we had our, product team
Daniel Lott: like, talked about, like, what are they doing for the month? And they're, like, rolling out a whole bunch of great stuff for the month, and then a lot of it always has to do with identifying who are the people to call, like, who are the best people to call, and they're constantly refining it, making it better, so that
Daniel Lott: you know, when you have 5 minutes or 10 minutes to call your leads, or half an hour, like, we're trying to identify… we're making changes on our… in our department, too, but they are also. So, yeah, talk to your account manager.
Daniel Lott: you know, I don't know when you started, but there's probably a different place, like, oh, the agent-ready leads versus, you know, P1, or whatever they are. So, yeah, talk to your account manager. We're constantly, you know, the tech team, the product team is constantly, you know, working on, you know, refining that and honing in on who are the best people to call.
Sebastian Cortes: Yeah, and the account manager also helps you if you do want to sign up for some training with one of our trainers, your account manager is a good point of contact for that as well. If you want to go to Sync University, your account manager can help set that up.
Sebastian Cortes: you know, and of course, calling to support, we can kind of get you in, you know, started with that as well, but I do think the account manager… this is one of those things where that's… that's kind of what your account manager is there for, so they can definitely help you out, with… with getting more guidance on.
Sebastian Cortes: on how you should be working the system, where you should start, how you can find success with it. So, yeah.
CINC Marketing: Well, I think that is going back to what I said about the level of support that you get from Sync, you know, it's not just…
CINC Marketing: It's not just a line that…
CINC Marketing: you know, you can call into with people that can help on the tech side. We have people that specialize in that.
CINC Marketing: That can help you with that. But if you have questions around scripting, we have the account manager who can kind of be your hub to get you in contact with people. If you have questions about your marketing campaign, your account manager can set up a call with
CINC Marketing: you know, one of us that are on right now, and we'll have a dedicated call with you, and, you know, talk for an hour about your campaign, and strengths and weaknesses, and that kind of stuff. I mean, even as you…
CINC Marketing: purchase sync. There's a whole team that gets everything set up in the back end. There's a whole team that teaches you how to do the basic functions in the CRM before you graduate to your account manager, so…
CINC Marketing: You know, I talk a lot about the changes that I've seen at Sync.
CINC Marketing: Over the last 10 years, but I do think that is a substantial one of, you know, we've really gone from, get as many leads as we can, like, that's still…
CINC Marketing: Get as many good leads as we can, and we've put… we've even pushed cost per lead up over the years.
CINC Marketing: Intentionally, to get better leads.
CINC Marketing: Still within reason.
CINC Marketing: You know, but
CINC Marketing: You just have all these differing levels of support that you can take advantage of, so please do.
CINC Marketing: I lost my train of thought, I'm not sure if those two connect or not.
James Terry: Who knows?
Sebastian Cortes: But I did.
James Terry: the question was, like, what do I need to do next, right? Or, like, where am I at? And with several dozen people on this, you know, listening in right now, there's no… Harry, to your point, there's no one-line response that we have for that.
James Terry: the account manager can look into your dashboard and say, oh, it looks like your contact ratio's not, or, you know, your follow-up's not where it needs to be, and they can say, like, have you been spending time in the launch pad, or do you keep an eye on this? When I look at the lead's dashboard, I filter it in a certain way.
James Terry: Depending on if the client I'm talking to's been live.
James Terry: you know, been with us, or the campaign's been live for 3 months or 5 years, right? And so, say, like, here's how I look at and prioritize those things, but it's so…
James Terry: case-specific, and so that's why that answer has to be, like, somebody's got to look in and dig into your dashboard to be able to answer that question most effectively, right?
CINC Marketing: Yeah, I think the timing is really important. Like, how long the site has been around, because expectations are…
CINC Marketing: if you've been around for a year and a half, my expectation of what I'm gonna see in your CRM and your pipelines is different than if you've been around 4 months. And that's a totally different conversation, even, you know, based on…
CINC Marketing: Like, a lot of it at 4 months is probably…
CINC Marketing: You know, you should be seeing some signs of positive movement.
CINC Marketing: Where at a year and a half, like, you should have some leads that have closed, most likely.
CINC Marketing: And that maybe is a follow-up thing, but we have training for all of that.
CINC Marketing: And the big emphasis… I've picked up my train of thought now. The big emphasis over the past 10 years has been to identify
CINC Marketing: you know, yes, it's a numbers game. We want to get as many good leads in as we can and convert those as quickly as possible, but we also want to do things, you know, incremental gains in those… in that numbers game.
CINC Marketing: can mean a lot. So, surfacing people who have been in the database for a while, who are taking important activities, you know.
CINC Marketing: there's a lot of focus on that right now. There's new things coming out. So, utilizing your account manager, the training team.
CINC Marketing: I did post the, Success Playbook link.
CINC Marketing: In the chat, as well.
CINC Marketing: So that is… Yeah, Angela, that's a good thing to use as just kind of a starting point.
CINC Marketing: For a daily, daily routine.
CINC Marketing: We did just get a question from Craig.
CINC Marketing: Craig said, any recommendations or successes with lead conversations?
CINC Marketing: About the new requirement… For a buyer-agent agreement for showings.
CINC Marketing: So if I understand that right, that is referring to…
CINC Marketing: One of the changes that came from
CINC Marketing: the multiple lawsuits, I believe, of… You know, you need… I…
CINC Marketing: To work with a buyer… thank you. Yeah, to work with a buyer, they need to sign an agreement with you.
CINC Marketing: First. So I have some rudimentary thoughts on this, and then somebody can fill in with some more concrete things, but…
CINC Marketing: I do think that that lawsuit makes providers, like, sink even more valuable, because…
CINC Marketing: You look at someone like a Zillow or a Realtor.com, You're getting that lead.
CINC Marketing: Much, much further down the pipeline, like, down the funnel.
CINC Marketing: than you are from a sync lead. Of course, the trade-off is the time it takes to close it.
CINC Marketing: But I've always felt that… Those, changes to the way that
CINC Marketing: To the way that, that…
CINC Marketing: Agents and buyers have to behave.
CINC Marketing: is beneficial for someone using Sync.
CINC Marketing: Because you are capturing that person.
CINC Marketing: you know, at the beginning of their search. So, I mean, that's…
CINC Marketing: That's my… I mean, the Charleston sale… is…
Daniel Lott: you know, likely an example of that. Daniel, I know you haven't talked about that yet today, but I mean, but really, it is.
CINC Marketing: It likely is, right? You know, an example of…
CINC Marketing: Of that. So I don't know what you guys think.
CINC Marketing: about that, and I… I think there have… I feel like… I may be making this up, but I feel like we did something with one of our partners.
CINC Marketing: to incorporate… Buyer agreements into the system when this happened?
James Terry: Look at you, Sebastian.
Sebastian Cortes: I'm trying to… I'm trying to think about it, because I know that… that was… It was…
CINC Marketing: It was bandied.
CINC Marketing: bandied about.
James Terry: I knew it was… there were steps made to simplify it, right, because it was made as a requirement.
Daniel Lott: Does Orlando know? I know Orlando's in the crowd, maybe he'll… he'll…
CINC Marketing: Wow.
Sebastian Cortes: I, I…
CINC Marketing: Wow.
Sebastian Cortes: I think what you're talking about there is the SkySlope integration.
CINC Marketing: Yes!
Sebastian Cortes: Yeah, so… so we have… we kind of… because we had that in our system for a while, kind of in a different spot, but then I think when the NRA lawsuit happened, we… it was… it was a little bit after we had introduced the deals feature.
Sebastian Cortes: Which, which I think… You know, kind of helps with that, because it makes tracking
Sebastian Cortes: Those transactions in the platform a little bit easier.
Sebastian Cortes: But, but we also moved the Skyslope integration to that deals, dashboard, so it's… instead of having to, like, go through your profile and settings, click on SkySlope, and, you know, go over there.
Sebastian Cortes: now you just kind of click the actions and the deals dashboard, and you can go straight to SkySlope from there. It's not a direct integration, but we kind of moved things around to make it a little more streamlined.
Sebastian Cortes: It, and, and I, I think…
Sebastian Cortes: I… yeah, I think that's what you're talking about, right?
CINC Marketing: I'm just watching Orlando misspell Sky Slope. Let's see, third time's a charm.
Daniel Lott: Skylobe.
CINC Marketing: Everyone watch the chat!
James Terry: And I know that it would be mentioned, like, the question, any recommendations with, successes for lead conversion, came not long after we were talking about some of the, the classes and the
James Terry: everything that's available from Sync. I know the links were posted in here for SyncCommunity.com, but one that wasn't mentioned specifically is the online conversion day, where they talk about going through… it's all about, I think it's, what, 3 or 4 hours, and the power hour and the calling.
James Terry: But that's a big part of it, and it's a… it's really the place for those kinds of questions. And I look to seeing if Orlando got the…
James Terry: SkySlope spelled right, but Online Conversion Day is a great resource for this specific case, right? For this kind of a question.
CINC Marketing: Yeah, I'm looking for…
James Terry: Sure, Orlando, autocorrect.
CINC Marketing: I'm looking for that.
CINC Marketing: That link. Here's the Sync Community link.
CINC Marketing: That also, at the bottom, has a, one of the training webinars that I think was recently updated.
CINC Marketing: Was the essential training?
CINC Marketing: series that I think is done, or it is done by our training team.
CINC Marketing: So, if you go to the bottom of that page.
CINC Marketing: Past the beautiful picture of 3 certain… Beautiful people.
CINC Marketing: You'll find the essential training webinar resources, which is recordings of those, of those trainings.
CINC Marketing: So yeah, I mean, my overall take on that… It's something that,
CINC Marketing: We always used to talk about, when we talked about.
James Terry: along, you know, in the past, how, like, contractions in the housing market. I think a lot of that stuff benefits the…
CINC Marketing: The stronger teams, you know, the more established teams with the better processes, because…
CINC Marketing: You know, a lot of the… a lot of teams were likely doing something like this Already.
CINC Marketing: You know, and it's just interesting to watch, like, as…
CINC Marketing: From COVID, I know that so many people became realtors, and, you know, now it's just kind of contracting some.
CINC Marketing: It seems, naturally. I know my dad became…
CINC Marketing: He was an HR rep, and he got his real estate license during COVID.
Daniel Lott: Wow. I did not know that.
CINC Marketing: He was a terrible realtor. I don't think he sold anything.
Daniel Lott: Terrible HR rep.
CINC Marketing: He did a great HR rep.
CINC Marketing: Great HR rep.
CINC Marketing: Okay.
CINC Marketing: You can check it, there's lists.
Daniel Lott: Well, should we talk about leads? Harry, is there a question about leads?
CINC Marketing: Whoa, Dan.
CINC Marketing: That was literally.
Daniel Lott: Seasonality?
CINC Marketing: He's literally what I was about to talk about.
Daniel Lott: Okay.
CINC Marketing: Wow.
CINC Marketing: Get out of my head.
CINC Marketing: We did have some questions, a lot of questions, really, around leads, lead flow, one of the ones that I saw in particular…
CINC Marketing: that I thought, was interesting was around… False appointments?
CINC Marketing: So, people setting appointments. I'm wondering if…
CINC Marketing: So, one of the things that we've seen from leads, specifically from social.
CINC Marketing: is… so, team listing ads are listcast.
CINC Marketing: In this case, is that we ask a question of, do you want to tour this home on that ad?
CINC Marketing: If they say yes, It does… it creates a showing for noon the next day.
CINC Marketing: We have heard feedback around…
CINC Marketing: These being, you know, kind of ghost appointments, or incorrect appointments.
CINC Marketing: I see the disconnect, you know, as we look through the whole pipeline. I do see the disconnect of, you know, that person is saying, yes, I'm ready to tour the home, they don't know that a showing's being created at…
CINC Marketing: At noon, so there is a disconnect in the follow-up. Clients usually call to confirm the appointment. The lead doesn't know, about the appointment.
CINC Marketing: Even with that confusion, you know, our data has shown that those leads that say yes are much more likely to set an appointment than those that don't.
CINC Marketing: But it's creating too many appointments. So, I'm not sure if that was specifically what that question was talking about, but we do have a change in the works right now, to adjust that so that the showing request…
CINC Marketing: Is not created, but it does still show up in the, same places that it shows up in now.
CINC Marketing: So we do… that is some common feedback that we get, we get that here.
CINC Marketing: And we're making a change to address that. Just wanted to let…
CINC Marketing: everyone know… I'm sorry, I don't have the specific list of questions pulled up, so I don't know specifically who asked that, but, if you are on there, or if you are seeing that, we are addressing that.
Daniel Lott: Yeah, I just wanted to comment on that also. So it's both on the Facebook side and the Google side.
Daniel Lott: And, so, I guess Facebook, Google, on the Google, or on… just on the general, we didn't ask that as part of the, registration flow. And now we do ask that question, as of, a month ago. And so…
Daniel Lott: on Facebook, we've been asking for a couple years, and I think people… I think there might have been some more false positives, like if people
Daniel Lott: saying, yeah, I wanna… I wanna look at the house, or, like, not… so… so Harry… on that side, we're getting too many, and so Harry has made it so it's gonna be… you're gonna get fewer of those by changing some of the verbiage on the…
Daniel Lott: actually, I'm not sure if this is…
Daniel Lott: correct me if I'm wrong, Harry, but you're gonna make the verbiage more, kind of, restrictive, so it's gonna be, you're gonna get more serious, like, only serious people are gonna say, yes, I wanna do it.
Daniel Lott: And then,
Daniel Lott: It's gonna not set an appointment for the next day, it's gonna be more, it's gonna be a…
Daniel Lott: Property alert.
CINC Marketing: Property Inquiry.
Daniel Lott: Property inquiry. It'll show as a property inquiry, so it'll just show…
CINC Marketing: A note in the property that they signed up on.
CINC Marketing: But yeah, I mean, this is an example of…
CINC Marketing: We're actually dialing back the number of showing requests that we generate because it's not accurate.
CINC Marketing: You know, so… We're not beholden to…
CINC Marketing: Saying, like, oh, you're gonna get so many showing… we actually… we are looking at this kind of stuff, and we are making changes based on your feedback.
Daniel Lott: And then, on the Google side, or just on the site side, as part of the registration flow, I guess around a month ago, it was, the new flow was enacted, and…
Daniel Lott: most leads come from Google, I would say probably 3 quarters to 80% come from Google, so that's why
Daniel Lott: You probably have noticed more leads, because we're asking the question.
Daniel Lott: do you want to tour this house? And at one time, do you want to tour this house? So we're asking those two questions, you have to press little buttons. So you're getting all these leads. Again, like, people are inundated because we never asked this question before, but it's a very obvious question to ask, it's a very good question to ask.
Daniel Lott: Shows a definite… a greater intent to, you know.
Daniel Lott: want to tour a house if they actually explicitly say, yes, I would like to tour this house. But, again, same with on the Facebook side, I…
Daniel Lott: the, the product team is, you know, experimenting with different wordings and stuff like that, just to hone in on who exactly are the people who definitely do want to tour a house by, you know, making the language more restrictive, or making the buttons… I think maybe one of the buttons is pre-checked or something, I'm not sure what it is, but…
Daniel Lott: They're experimenting and doing a lot of testing just to see what Is going to result in
Daniel Lott: you know, producing a list of leads that definitely want to tour a house, and definitely should be called as soon as possible. And that's… that's kind of the, the goal. And, I think they're doing a good job with… with that. And it's a work in progress, and it's… it's always getting… it's continually getting better.
CINC Marketing: Greg Park!
CINC Marketing: In Utah! One more question, data…
CINC Marketing: What is Sync's data and average time?
CINC Marketing: from Lee… well, I want to say one more thing about the showing request. I am excited…
CINC Marketing: For this, because even though… like, if you think about the flow.
CINC Marketing: The client is getting notified that the lead wants a showing at noon, so the follow-up is not the standard follow-up.
CINC Marketing: The follow-up is, hey, I'll see you at noon.
CINC Marketing: And it seems like a lot of times the leads are saying, you know, who are you, weirdo?
CINC Marketing: So, even with that happening, Those leads are 5 times as likely to set an appointment.
CINC Marketing: So, if we keep the notification, like, it will still fall in contact requested where it is now.
CINC Marketing: I think it does merit…
CINC Marketing: contact requested, because they've taken that extra step that we've seen is more likely to set an appointment. It's just now the follow-up is going to match with the leads and, you know, what the lead expected.
CINC Marketing: So I think it'll really… I think it'll help.
CINC Marketing: I think it will increase actual showings by not creating the showing.
CINC Marketing: So… yeah.
CINC Marketing: It was deep.
CINC Marketing: Yeah, look into the, the lake.
CINC Marketing: What do you see, Dan?
Daniel Lott: Can I… can I answer a question about seasonality on LeapFlow, Harry? Do we have that one?
CINC Marketing: Hey, nope.
Daniel Lott: On the list?
CINC Marketing: How can you say, I'll see you at noon without… Right, yeah. So… If you look at,
CINC Marketing: if you look at the development of this kind… so Sync, I always say, is an iterative… platform.
CINC Marketing: So creating the showing request… a long time ago, we didn't have all the dashboards that we have now, and we also had a lot more trouble getting leads from Facebook into the site.
CINC Marketing: We do that through the real verified text now, which brings a much higher percentage of the leads onto the site, and…
CINC Marketing: you know, lets them interact with the site. So we created the showing at noon to alert a client that
CINC Marketing: Someone had expressed that interest.
CINC Marketing: Again, this was years ago. Now we have all these… the new dashboards. We do a much better job of surfacing that… that activity, so we don't need…
CINC Marketing: That's showing requests anymore, and it is a more accurate representation of what it is, and it's based on
CINC Marketing: Feedback from, from clients.
CINC Marketing: Dan?
CINC Marketing: Do you want to answer Craig's question, or do you want to talk about seasonality?
Daniel Lott: What was the question?
Daniel Lott: I don't want the knowledge of the day, Seth.
CINC Marketing: Yeah. Handsome… the most handsome man on the internet gets questions read to him.
Daniel Lott: They have to cut off. It's tough, it's so…
CINC Marketing: It's hard, yeah, no, it's hard, yeah.
Daniel Lott: When it reaches a certain age, Harry, you can't see it.
CINC Marketing: Yeah!
Daniel Lott: a little…
CINC Marketing: Yeah, I know, I know.
CINC Marketing: Ow.
James Terry: Too high up.
CINC Marketing: That's what I was thinking about today, like, is this my… is this my midlife crisis? Like, some people buy a Lamborghini.
CINC Marketing: I grew a mustache, and… Started a lightly attended Q&A webinar.
CINC Marketing: You know, I don't know. I don't know. Well, I'll tell you in 10 years. So Craig asked, what is Sync's data on average time from lead to closing?
CINC Marketing: So I can talk about this.
CINC Marketing: I can talk about a lot of things, but I can talk about this, too.
Daniel Lott: Yeah, I don't know. You can… I don't know the answer to that. It varies!
Daniel Lott: Actually…
Daniel Lott: Yeah, it varies. I know we always say, like, Harry will say some stats, but, you know, we're… we also… some of… like, we have different products, and then different ways you can, you know, sign up for Sync, and then one of them gives us a lot of visibility as to the closing dates of leads, and when the lead was generated.
Daniel Lott: And… You know, we see somewhere it's 2 weeks, you know, from…
Daniel Lott: the… maybe not the closing, I guess, but the… If it's…
CINC Marketing: I saw one today that was under 20 days.
Daniel Lott: It's under $20, so it's…
CINC Marketing: Under.
Daniel Lott: Under. So it's… Because it just makes sense. If somebody is searching, and they look at a…
Daniel Lott: Well, of course, the example we'll use is the Charleston house, the most expensive house in the history of Charleston, who they just looked at a house on our site, and then…
CINC Marketing: Who generated that lead?
Daniel Lott: That was Jeremy.
CINC Marketing: Oh!
Daniel Lott: How'd come about? Yes!
CINC Marketing: I didn't know that!
Daniel Lott: And, like, it was within, like, 3 weeks, or it was, like, it was under contract within 10 days. So… or, you will also… because we also have visibility in this stuff, it's like, or, it's somebody who's, like, 7 years ago registered, and then they finally decide to buy a house. They were… they've been busy, they haven't been, looking for houses, so 7 years passed, but…
Daniel Lott: you know, on that, I don't know, Harry, if you, or James, if you have some… some stats, but…
Daniel Lott: it can go, you know, it can be anywhere, and it's just based on the, you know, it's just the… they're just like regular people, you know? Do you need to buy a house now, or can you wait 5 to 8… 5 years?
CINC Marketing: 7 years.
Daniel Lott: 7 years.
James Terry: 7 years.
James Terry: I know Harry will have some… some stats. I was gonna say, like, we take…
James Terry: steps and measures towards trying to bring that date, you know, that down closer, right? And the way we do that on the search side, anyway, is
James Terry: By not avoiding…
James Terry: But by supplementing campaign, we don't want to avoid broad market search terms, but we want to supplement the campaign with more granular terms, like, as Dan was talking about with that Charleston lead.
James Terry: the lead was searching for historic homes in Charleston. And the client didn't say, like, I want to focus on historic homes. They mentioned Charleston, and we went in and dug down and said.
James Terry: Charleston Historic Homes gets search volume, performs well, like, people look for this kind of thing, and so we'll look into
James Terry: gated communities, you know, in certain markets, Las Vegas, there might be high-rises, get a lot of search volume, so we'll dig down into some of those more granular, and then we also use, radius targeting to say, okay, within
James Terry: Atlanta, for example, right? Homes for sale in Atlanta could be pretty broad, and people might be pretty far from a buying decision.
James Terry: But, if they're searching for homes for sale in the Walton School District.
James Terry: for example, they're further along in that, or at least that's the theory, right? By the time they're… they know where their kids are going to school, they know the price point in that area, and we can look into Atlanta and say, okay.
James Terry: here's areas within Atlanta that get search volume, that have a good cost per lead, that convert well, and we'll add those to the campaign proactively. We don't have to have conversations. We know if a Walton School District lead comes in.
James Terry: it is in Atlanta. It is an Atlanta lead, which was what was requested. So we'll take measures on our side to try and drill down and find that traffic that's searching in your market.
James Terry: that is closer to the buying decision. Now, I don't have, again, the stats towards, here's the number, you know, the average is 3 months or whatever, but but those are some of the steps that we take.
James Terry: To… to try and… Improve that number as best as we can.
Daniel Lott: But yeah, and that's another thing, is, like, Harry mentioned, just how, like, maybe foregoing some cost per lead just to get better leads or something like that. Like, at least there's… there's now an ongoing emphasis towards, like, identifying
Daniel Lott: Which, what are the ones that sell? And just…
Daniel Lott: Just eyeballing it, like, a lot of it's, you know, it's, you know, we don't have enough data, because, like, it's, you know, some clients, like, will take the leads out of the database and put them in another database, so we don't know if
Daniel Lott: who's… which one's sold, so we can't tie it back to the ad group, in Google. But so now we have some visibility because, well, for other reasons, and then…
Daniel Lott: You know, just… just, you know, a brief analysis of it shows that it is the neighborhood ad groups, it is the niche ad groups. They're the one… even though, like, those are a small percentage of the leads that we deliver, like the neighborhoods, the Walton School District.
Daniel Lott: But those… there's been a lot of…
Daniel Lott: These neighborhood ad groups, and that delivered
Daniel Lott: acquisitions that delivered actual closings. And so, that… it goes into, like, the…
Daniel Lott: micro-targeting, hyperlocal micro-targeting, and how that, you know, those… those aren't gonna be most of your leads, but those could be your best leads, and those are the ones that close faster, because they are close… they're…
Daniel Lott: Down the funnel, you know?
Daniel Lott: Or up the funnel. Down the funnel.
CINC Marketing: Yeah, as we keep watching these stats, it'll be interesting to see what, you know, what closes over the longer term, because it would make sense that someone searching for a more general
CINC Marketing: like, CitySearch would just take longer to convert.
CINC Marketing: But yeah, I mean, you hit on it in terms of…
CINC Marketing: You know, a specific expectation of…
CINC Marketing: You know, when leads close. There's a lot of obstacles to us.
CINC Marketing: being able to generate that information. I mean, you just think about…
CINC Marketing: how different people use the CRM, how different people use the pipeline.
CINC Marketing: I've seen, you know, sometimes closed means don't follow up with them.
CINC Marketing: In a pipeline, and that skews all the data, you know, if somebody has a lot of those, so…
CINC Marketing: Over the past few years, we worked to identify people who we thought used the pipeline
CINC Marketing: in, you know, the way that we would expect it to be used. We segmented those people, created
CINC Marketing: Oh, Waylon.
CINC Marketing: Oh…
Daniel Lott: Is the AI leaving us?
James Terry: The AI is…
Daniel Lott: Did I accidentally.
CINC Marketing: We're done.
CINC Marketing: But, I mean, there is a lot that, that, so we, you know, we did segment those people, we did create the data, I mean, we saw that… what we basically saw
CINC Marketing: Was that you should get closings, and you should expect closings in the first year.
CINC Marketing: Those will probably come from search leads.
CINC Marketing: Because of what Dan… You know, just mentioned, those people are actively searching, they're…
CINC Marketing: They're likely on a shorter timeline than, say, a social lead who's being served the ad proactively.
CINC Marketing: But what we did see… so we would expect closings in the first year. I believe the guaranteed sale program was based on…
CINC Marketing: you getting… you know, you're getting the amount you invested in sync at least back in year one.
CINC Marketing: And then, in year 2, we would expect more sales, so I think 2 to 3 times what you saw in year…
CINC Marketing: In year one, and what we saw in that analysis was
CINC Marketing: While search leads will probably generate your first sales, social leads catch up.
CINC Marketing: Towards the tail end of year one and year…
CINC Marketing: too, in terms of, like, closings. So, that…
CINC Marketing: But it depends so much on follow-up, what tools you're using. I mean, I know we had a client a while ago who…
CINC Marketing: you know, had an eye… they closed…
CINC Marketing: 4 or 5 in the first 3 or 4 months.
CINC Marketing: And then their ISA left and generated, you know, started their, started, their own campaign.
CINC Marketing: And they continued to…
CINC Marketing: you know, sell leads within the first few months, and the site owner's sales dropped off, so…
CINC Marketing: you know, all the AI tools that we can offer, and we're continuing to beef those up, but…
CINC Marketing: There is a human element to it, absolutely.
Daniel Lott: And I, like, Harry was kind of downplaying, I guess, the social leads. We generally,
Daniel Lott: I recommend a combination of search and social, but just looking at… we're… we're now… now we have visibility into the closures over, like, the last few months, and there's a lot of social in there, too, so it's… it's… and so it… that would be somebody
Daniel Lott: a lead came in and closed. So, those happen too, like, percentage-wise, pretty much the same. So, it's…
CINC Marketing: And a lot of Bing closings, too. So, I mean, really, like, what this exercise has showed us is that
CINC Marketing: What we always thought happened is happening.
Daniel Lott: You know, like, all of these networks are valuable if used correctly, and you want someone like Sync.
CINC Marketing: that… Knows what they're doing to do it.
CINC Marketing: you know, I think our results are… Better than… than competitors.
CINC Marketing: We have 2 minutes, Dan, do you want to talk about seasonality, or…
Daniel Lott: That's an important point, Harry. Yes. So, as you know, with, lead flow, just over the course of the year, there is seasonality, and,
Daniel Lott: by quarter by quarter, the number of leads goes down. First quarter's the best, and then it slowly goes down, and then the fourth quarter, it goes down a bit more. And, I always stress about it, it begins, like, the actual biggest decline… there's a couple avenues of decline, it's the…
Daniel Lott: middle of August, which is when the kids… the kiddies return to school, people have stopped looking for houses,
Daniel Lott: Because they're like, well, the kids are in school, I'm not moving. So, oh well. I'm here another year, alright. And then, so the cost per lead increases then, and then after the, area between, Thanksgiving and Christmas is, the worst period. So…
Daniel Lott: But I was always freaking out about it, and it's… it's not…
Daniel Lott: a huge decline, it's like 10%, maybe 20%, like, based on, like, December versus January.
Daniel Lott: 20% difference. So it's not a huge decline, but… It is… What is happening?
CINC Marketing: This is the so- this is the social.
Daniel Lott: Alright. Well, and then Harry's gonna talk about the social… it's not as apparent with the.
CINC Marketing: No, I'm just showing what you're talking about. Like, this is where we are.
CINC Marketing: And it's this normal, seasonal… boop!
CINC Marketing: That's all. I'm just agreeing. I'm augmenting what you're saying.
James Terry: Visually.
Daniel Lott: Alright, so anyway, so, you're gonna see a small drop in your monthly,
Daniel Lott: Lead flow for the next couple months, and then it will…
Daniel Lott: spike in January. It goes up a lot better, we're better at our jobs in January, as we always say, but actually it's not the case, it's just that we're doing…
Daniel Lott: What we're doing, and, you know, people… it's actually, it's funny.
Daniel Lott: it's the day after Christmas, there's… the spike begins on the day after Christmas, like, literally on the day after Christmas. And, so…
Daniel Lott: It's… so we… anyway.
Daniel Lott: So that, you have that to look forward to, but then, you know, smooth sailing. It's not as huge… I always, always was…
Daniel Lott: like, really bummed out about it, like, the decline, oh my gosh, we're doing so, so terribly, and then, like, I've just had some more visibility to what our competitors were getting for cost per lead. It's like, oh, wow, even…
Daniel Lott: that's a lot higher than ours. Even the worst of us is better than the best of theirs. So, that made me feel good.
CINC Marketing: New slogan. Sync.
CINC Marketing: Even the worst thing we do is better than the best thing they do.
Daniel Lott: Yes, so… But…
CINC Marketing: No, I… It is normal, and…
CINC Marketing: This is… I always like looking at this… this chart's always interesting, because it shows how the bottom dropped out.
CINC Marketing: during COVID,
CINC Marketing: And it's slowly come back, but it's still much better than it, this year, it's much better than it was last year.
CINC Marketing: And it's really interesting to me because, you know, the social side, the ads are being served proactively. So, I mean, this really just…
CINC Marketing: Some of it is user behavior, but it also really just indicates competition levels.
CINC Marketing: of…
CINC Marketing: you know, brick-and-mortar stores closed during COVID. They also shut off their ad spend. More people are at home more, so there's more eyeballs on the site, so CPL really drops. And, you know, competition has just kind of increased back to normal.
CINC Marketing: But this year, with a lot of the stuff that we've done, the cost per lead's actually decreased.
Daniel Lott: So… But if you look in between, like, in between those gray lines, those gray vertical lines, that's a year. So you can tell… so you can definitely notice the seasonality, and the seasonality, I think, on social is not as extreme as on… actually, it looks like it is as extreme as…
James Terry: Extreme, yeah.
Daniel Lott: But, it's going up, and then it drops off, like, right at the end. Up, and then it drops. It goes up over the course, all the year, except for COVID.
Daniel Lott: All the years, it did the same exact pattern, which is interesting.
James Terry: Yeah, and here's something that shows that cost per lead.
James Terry: This year, or so far this year, being…
James Terry: Pretty much on par, but actually less than it was in 2022.
James Terry: And I can't think of a lot of things
James Terry: that are less expensive than they were… that are as valuable as leads generated for our clients, that are less expensive than they were in 2022, right? So just, yeah, speaks to how much effort has been made, and how many optimizations that's been done to drive that cost down.
James Terry: It's a good thing.
Daniel Lott: If you would expand that to the last 10 years, you would see that's probably cheaper than…
Daniel Lott: Like, 2017 or 2017.
James Terry: 15.
Daniel Lott: like that.
Daniel Lott: Even though that price of homes has increased, so… By a lot.
CINC Marketing: Boop.
James Terry: This also does show that 2020 was just the wildest time of lead flow and cost per lead.
CINC Marketing: Yeah, and then this is just…
CINC Marketing: Just to kind of further put it into perspective, this is from my monthly report, right?
CINC Marketing: The sync CR… the sync CPL did increase month over month, but it's much better than it was.
CINC Marketing: Last year.
CINC Marketing: So… Alright, cool. Well, I think, once I can figure out how to stop sharing my screen…
James Terry: I've hit some good notes today, like some high notes.
CINC Marketing: I got really up there with this SkySlope thing.
CINC Marketing: Has anybody checked on Orlando? He never…
Sebastian Cortes: Oh, Jesus.
CINC Marketing: There's good, Skype.
James Terry: I think he had to jump on another… another deal.
CINC Marketing: Yeah.
James Terry: Same as…
CINC Marketing: Alright, well, I hope he's okay.
CINC Marketing: Well.
James Terry: Wayland's AI was pulled to another Zoom as well.
CINC Marketing: Yeah.
James Terry: Not even during a low point. Like, Waylon's AI bailed on us, like, when we were talking about something relevant and important. I thought that was.
CINC Marketing: I would call that a high watermark. High watermark of this, session.
CINC Marketing: That's why the.
Daniel Lott: Question?
Daniel Lott: Special guest stars today.
CINC Marketing: Take over.
CINC Marketing: Robots.
Sebastian Cortes: I'm sorry, say that one.
Daniel Lott: Do you have anything to add, Sebastian?
Sebastian Cortes: Oh, yeah, you know, I haven't taken a look at the participants list and, and, you know, checked to see who sent in questions, see if any of it overlapped, if there were any questions that we didn't answer.
Sebastian Cortes: I know we spent a lot of time saying, you know, reach out to your account manager for this, and… but if there's any questions you have that we didn't answer, just… just reach out to support. Support at Syncpro.com, 855-246.
Sebastian Cortes: It's somewhere in the.
CINC Marketing: 2717.
Sebastian Cortes: That's it, 2717, thank you.
Daniel Lott: He's like, that's not right! I think there's more to it than that.
Sebastian Cortes: Yes.
Sebastian Cortes: Yeah, we'll be happy to, if we can't answer the question, at least point you in the right direction to get it answered.
Sebastian Cortes: So, yeah, I, I just… yeah. I know there were a couple questions that… that…
Sebastian Cortes: that maybe came in that, I don't know if the person's here, that we didn't answer it, so…
CINC Marketing: Yeah, absolutely, reach out, thanks, everybody.
CINC Marketing: For, you know, what is now the 10th Office hours.
Daniel Lott: They never said it could last.
CINC Marketing: Clip show, clip show incoming. Clip show in coming. So get ready for that. Best of office hours.
Daniel Lott: Best of all.
CINC Marketing: Spin-offs, Dan's gonna have his own. Oh, we are, moving to Spotify.
CINC Marketing: Officially.
Daniel Lott: Who knows?
CINC Marketing: We're working on that, so…
CINC Marketing: In case you, you know, can't get enough of looking at our faces, we can talk at you in your car, or on the treadmill, or…
James Terry: I think I heard that podcast is now a category at the… is it the Emmys? I want to say, so…
Daniel Lott: Golden Globes!
James Terry: Castroenter.
Daniel Lott: Not get nominated this time, but I guess.
CINC Marketing: Yeah.
Daniel Lott: We're not on Spotify yet, so… I don't know, we'll see.
CINC Marketing: I just… I just like, pulling up the participants list and watching people leave as we ramble about nonsense an hour and six minutes ago.
Sebastian Cortes: talk, the more.
CINC Marketing: What's up?
Sebastian Cortes: trust their people.
CINC Marketing: Alright, that's enough. That's enough of this. Yeah. So, alright, I guess we should take a cue from that and sign off. Thanks, everybody, for joining.
CINC Marketing: Thanks, James. Thanks, Dan. Thank you, Sebastian. Wealth of great knowledge, really appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, and thank you again, everybody, for joining us. We'll be back next month, the second Wednesday of every month at 11am. So please sign up, send us a question.
CINC Marketing: And yeah, we really appreciate everybody coming on. Without you guys, we wouldn't have jobs, and…
CINC Marketing: be able to ramble about nonsense, you know, in a Zoom. So, thank you so much! If you love the show, be sure to tell your friends, and…
CINC Marketing: If you don't, you know… Just be quiet about it.
CINC Marketing: Have a great day!
James Terry: Appreciate you, Harry. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, everybody.
CINC Marketing: Oh, yeah.