Look:

• Jan Cotten's flyer

Listen: Marketing Call, March 14, 2002 (1hr 23 min)

Learn:

Jan Cotten, with Southern California Homes Center in Corona, spent $5 on 200 info-box flyers. Then she followed the By Referral Only info-box template to the letter with one very slight modification — she put the flyers in front of a sold listing.

Jan's results were nothing short of phenomenal — three buyers (closed) and two listings (closed and double-ended), totaling more than $40,000 from a $5 investment, a return of $8,000 for every dollar spent.

Bear in mind that Jan has been implementing and testing By Referral Only lead-generation strategies for more than four years. She knows her numbers. She first imitated the strategies, then assimilated the concepts, and finally made some minor — and powerful — innovations.

Following is an e-mail Terry Hunefeld received from Jan prior to their interview with Jan's incredible fact-filled story. After reading Jan's e-mail, listen to the Click Training to go deeper into this powerful, "free" By Referral Only client-generation strategy.

Terry,

Here are the results of the info-box flyer campaign that I did on a listing of mine that had sold — located in Moreno Valley. This tract has an association, private lake, recreation area, and has homes priced from $165,000 to $300,000. My listing was priced at $189,000.

We had lots of calls and hits from the flyer box and the Ugly Yellow Sign before the property went into escrow (another office sold it), but I decided to track just what would take place AFTER we went into escrow. So I removed the Ugly Yellow Sign, leaving just my company for-sale sign and the flyer box.

I used March 2002 Strategies in Action Kit, Before Unit, Powerful Info-Box Flyers for Realtors and Lenders and made the flyer exactly like the sample, except that I removed the ad on the back about building your own home, and just enlarged the seller lead generator.

For the buyer lead generator, the zero down ad, I used the script in MORE Document #5196, which is the LENDER script — again an experiment. I decided to approach it from the Lender angle just to see what would happen. Again, keep in mind that I changed this script to the Lender script after we went into escrow on the property, before we went in I had used the agent script but that's another whole campaign.

For the seller script I used MORE Document #5428 — even though I thought it was too long, I suspended by disbelief and recorded it exactly like Terry has written it — didn't have anything to lose and all to gain, so why not!

Here's what happened. In the 30 days that the property was in escrow, we set out 200 flyers. I had 100 hits to the "zero down" ad on the back of the flyer (which is a little low for the amount of flyers that were taken). From that, I had 10 call-throughs (again, for me, a little lower than normal). From the 10 call-throughs, I set three face-to-face appointments. I say only three because after talking with four of them I put them on a follow-up system because they all have some issues that will make them not ready for at least six months, and then after talking to the other three, I politely and tactfully "let go."

From those three appointments, one has closed escrow and the other two are in escrow.

So far: one closed transaction for $6000 gross commission
two pending for $13,500 gross commission due by March 25

(This is not counting the loan fees that will be generated, as we are also doing their loans.)

Now, what's interesting is that I checked my ART report to see the hits coming in on the ad for that particular house, and all 10 call-throughs had called first on the property ad and then had called on the zero down flyer on the back, and then called through to me.

Two of the reasons why I think that my call-throughs were a lower percentage than I normally get is that all this occurred in the month of December, so I don't think as many people were calling through at that time of year, and the house is located across from an elementary school, so there could have been flyers taken by kids, and that sort of thing.

As far as the seller script — I only had 20 hits on this one. But I had two call-throughs, one of which developed into a listing, which I then sold to one of my three people from the numbers above, and the other that will probably be a listing if their transfer goes through.

Oh, one more thing, the listing I got that I double-ended, I also sold them a house in Riverside, so all those three transactions are in escrow now, again set to close by March 18.

So from the seller script that I first thought would give me no activity — three pending transactions for total commission of $25,800.

Total income so far — $6000.

Total pending income within next 30 days — $39,300.

All from five bucks worth of flyers!

Jan Cotten

Samples/Templates:

Jan's Flyer