A Podcast | Jeremy Pound

Pete Neubig: [00:00:26] Welcome back, everybody, to the NARPM Radio podcast. And as promised, I have my, my good buddy, uh, CEO and co-founder of RentScale, Jeremy Pound. Jeremy, thanks so much for joining today.

Jeremy Pound: [00:00:38] It's good to be here with you, Pete. Good seeing you.

Pete Neubig: [00:00:40] So when, uh, when I think of growth and by the way, most of our podcast that we talk about growth are the ones that get downloaded the most. And when I think about growth, I, you know, you're one of the few people that come to my mind right away. So it's no, it's no secret. I've been trying to get you on this podcast for a while now, so I'm glad we were able to make it happen. So thanks so much for being here, brother.

Jeremy Pound: [00:01:03] Yeah, I'm glad I made it.

Pete Neubig: [00:01:04] All right. So RentScale basically, for all intents and purposes grows property management companies is that can I say that like is that kind of what we do?

Jeremy Pound: [00:01:13] Absolutely, absolutely. You might want to clarify a little bit. We specifically grow it on the client acquisition side. You know, sometimes there's some great strategies out there about just taking the clients you have and adding fees or tweaking your business model, you know, getting better, like in growing the capacity to manage. We're talking about brand new owners coming in the door or the owners that you have, buying more properties are referring you more business. So client acquisition side is what we focus on when it comes to growth.

Pete Neubig: [00:01:41] Got it. But not purchasing new property management firms?

Jeremy Pound: [00:01:44] Correct. Correct. Yes. Organically going out and getting your own clients who are expecting to do business with you and creating those contracts.

Pete Neubig: [00:01:52] Awesome. And so that is probably 95% of the people that are listening, right? And most. Look, let's be honest, right now, most PM firms are are contracting. They're not growing right now. So you've been working with lots of clients for many years and you help PM companies grow. So give us a couple. Give me your top 2 or 3 ways on you help companies grow. What are some of what are some of the trade secrets that if I was behind the RentScale curtain, what are some of the ways that we grow the business?

Jeremy Pound: [00:02:25] So you find if you follow any of our content or work with us, um, you know, we're going to start less with the tactics that are easily, easily reproducible things that kind of seem cheap, but like little growth hacks, as they might call them. And we focus more on, you know, fundamentals and foundationally creating the kind of brand that people want to do business with, building a list of those owners. And that all starts with, um, knowing, you know, knowing your niche, you know, uh, what kind of properties do you manage and what kind of owners are you best built to serve? And then we help everybody tell the best story about how the way that your company does business, the practices you have, why it's materially different, and the best way for that type of owner or that type of property to be managed. So we're helping them tell their sales story best first, because that's the tip of the spear. If you've got a really sharp story that resonates with people, that doesn't make them gloss over. And by the way, that doesn't just sound like what everybody else is saying. You know, it's not 1 or 2...

Pete Neubig: [00:03:24] We have integrity. We care about your property...

Jeremy Pound: [00:03:26] Exactly. We manage the properties like it's our own. We can go through those all day, you know, so it's actually, you know, a unique and compelling value proposition. Then from there, everything else is just about distributing that message. So rather we're helping you with lead gen programs where you're going out and you're getting referrals or you're meeting new owners, you're building a list or you're courting those people over time. And of course, obviously, one of the things we're known for the most is actually helping property managers hire a full time salesperson who's going to be managing this, as the industry calls it, a business development manager or a BDM who will be setting up these programs and following through. And then, of course, we have all kinds of programs on training them how to convert those leads, because really sucks when you pay for leads and you spend money on marketing and you generate leads and then they're not buying, you know, you're the also ran or the third place person because, you know, unlike sports or any other game you play, Pete and sales like there's only a first place trophy, it's not really a you don't get paid at all for being in second place. So we help our clients know how to make sure that they capture that. Um, and then from there, we've got some newer programs that we're helping clients really proactively turn their clients into investors and bring on more properties, transition properties from one owner to another. And as we kind of reach that silver tsunami, or we look at the aging population that everybody's talking about, we know portfolios will be changing hands and making sure that those portfolios change hands within your company.

Pete Neubig: [00:04:57] So I know, um, you know, there's a there's a there's a difference between marketing and sales now with RentScale. Do you help with the marketing piece of it or do you guys concentrate and say we we just handle. We just focus on the sales aspect of it?

Jeremy Pound: [00:05:13] Yeah. We really we really call ourselves or we name ourselves focusing on the sales. But when you think about client acquisition, marketing inevitably comes into play. And when I talked about sharpening the sales story, one of the things we find is that even though we're not hired to do this, I hear this all the time. When our clients get into our program and we we craft their sales story, the immediate knee jerk reaction is we got to go back and fix all of our marketing. So I think that there's a huge spillover effect when we do that now. Marketing. You know, my last business, Pete, we talked about this was a marketing agency. So for seven years I grew an internet marketing agency. Marketing is a big word, just like sales is a big word. So within marketing there's multiple disciplines. You've got your reputation management. We always talk about, you know, web presence and reviews and you've got social media marketing. You've got branding. You've got community outreach. You've got, you know, PR but within that there's also like hardcore lead gen, straight lead gen. And that's what fuels a sales person and a sales engine. So we do help our clients with that very narrow niche of marketing which is just lead gen. How do we get the phone to ring? How do we get a list of people that we can nurture over time, and how do we create more at bats for the salespeople? So 90% of what we do is really focused on the actual sales side, and the remaining part is a necessary need to create lead gen.

Pete Neubig: [00:06:36] And I think it's brilliant. I think you have to be niched, you have to be really focused. You actually talked about on the PM side, what's your target? And you guys have a great target. Your target is PM firms that are that are looking to increase sales. Right. So you're practicing what you preach there? Um, so. So. All right, so one of the things that you teach is how to generate more leads for the sales team. And how the sales team can generate their own leads. Is that is that correct?

Jeremy Pound: [00:07:02] 100%. Yeah. The way we're doing that is changing all the time. Pete, as you know, um, and that's what is both fun and hard about running RentScale, uh, is we have to constantly be keeping up to speed on what's working today, what's not. Ad prices are changing. It's amazing how this works in one market, but it doesn't seem to be as effective in another market. So we don't always have all the answers. In fact, some of what we were teaching five years ago is less effective today. Naturally, right? I mean, anybody look at any business, you know, things just don't work the way they used to. Um, there's a reason newspapers used to own all the buildings in downtown, and now you never see them anymore. I mean, this changes over time. Um, but what's really cool on that is we've got, um, what I believe is the largest community of sales professionals in the industry. Definitely North America, all over US and Canada. And so at any given time, we're working with 100 companies and we're all masterminding and we're sharing what's working and we're trying things. And then that information is feeding back in. And that's just just something that's really unique to the property management industry. And I think NARPM is the catalyst for that. And I know you know this, Pete, but you know, the easiest way we get a client is something, you know, a client in Fort Lauderdale doesn't compete with a property manager in Pittsburgh who doesn't compete with a property manager in Chicago. And so they all want to help each other with best practices. We just kind of have a sped up version of that within the lead gen and the sales role. And then, of course, we've got amazing coaches and people that just really understand sales and marketing, kind of, you know, kind of reading the label from outside the jar and saying, you think this is what's working for you, but it's actually this or here's the way to do that repeatedly. So it's really a collaborative process where we're bringing new ideas in. We're learning ideas from the community, and then we're perfecting them together. And so everybody wins.

Pete Neubig: [00:08:51] That is brilliant, especially right now. Community and masterminding are some buzzwords I've been around NARPM forever. I'm seeing it bleed into other industries now where people pay big money just to be part of a mastermind these days.

Jeremy Pound: [00:09:06] So if you don't mind if I just add to that, Pete, what we've found is because I, you know, I'm not part of a couple entrepreneur masterminds, and there's kind of the hosted, facilitated mastermind like we have, and then there's just the peer led mastermind. So I think what's just, you know, what I really am proud of is we've got the peer to peer people masterminding, and you've got real subject matter experts kind of overseeing that and helping them maybe fill in some dots with some techniques or tactics or some technology that they didn't know about. And so that's just what I want to say is it's really it's a special thing when you can have a hyper focused mastermind with some experts kind of assisting everybody along the way.

Pete Neubig: [00:09:48] Yeah. And great ideas come from anybody, right? It doesn't just need to be. Oh, it's all Jeremy. And he pushes it down. No, this great mastermind, you have all these people contributing. He had great ideas from from everyone. Everybody involved. Yeah. Speaking of that, what are a couple of great ideas that you've seen in the last, you know, six months or a year? And maybe they work for some people, didn't work for others, but what are some, some things that you see that some people are starting to do now.

Jeremy Pound: [00:10:13] So what's great, you know, talk about full circle here on the podcast. Um, so many of our clients have launched and grown podcasts. Um, it's an immense amount of effort in the beginning with very little payoff. But if you think about, you know, uh, if we a lot of us know who Mark Ainley is in Chicago with the Straight Up Chicago Investor podcast.

Pete Neubig: [00:10:33] Great job. Yep.

Jeremy Pound: [00:10:34] One of the first ones. I was there at the beginning because he didn't know how to start a podcast, and I had one. And so he reached out and I said, oh, you got a great production crew, and he just ran with it. He never even called me back. And the next thing I know, he's got a podcast launch like two weeks later, because that's how Mark is. Um, I've been fortunate enough to fly out to Chicago for his 100th episode live, uh, recording that went back for his 200th episode party. I told him I can't keep coming because he sped it up, and now he's like, I feel like he's having parties every three months. But it was. He was a celebrity. He's brought together the Chicago community every like I flew in from Florida, but I couldn't even get near Mark. Everyone's like, it's like, almost like they're asking for autographs. You know, you had, like, mortgage brokers in the room and real estate agents, investors, uh, a ton of people in the commercial space. Chicago's a very unique market, and he just has created an audience. And, you know, he also has all these ancillary things around the podcast, like tools that are free for investors to use and newsletters that keeps people updated. And he just literally we have like ten clients in Chicago and the other nine. Their number one lead source is referrals from Mark. It's just business. He can't take on either because it's not in his area or it's not a good fit. And I may be exaggerating, but only the tiniest bit. He literally these other clients are like, Mark's my number one source. So that's more of a spectacular one that I think is great.

Pete Neubig: [00:11:56] I think the concept that you that you've just laid out really is amazing, right? If you know your target client, which you've alluded to, and let's just say your target is going to be, you know, investors and then you and you become the expert in your area. So not every podcast has to be Joe Rogan, right? I mean, heck, even in our podcast if we get a thousand downloads, but it's a thousand downloads of people that are niched into this in this industry. Right? I'm not getting plumbers to download this or just straight business people. We're getting single family management companies to to listen to this. If you can become the expert in your area. So I'll just pick on Houston. That's where I'm at. If I just had a podcast and it was just about real estate inside of Houston geared for people who want to invest inside of Houston, that's an incredible lead gen. And then, like you said, you literally create products around that, right? Free tools and newsletters. Brilliant. I think that alone right there is worth the price of admission of downloading this podcast right there, brother.

Jeremy Pound: [00:13:00] I completely agree what I've watched him do, which by the way, copy and paste that. That's just building an audience that could be on YouTube, that could be through a killer newsletter that you do. Um, so a lot of us know about, like Richard Rich Drake, who was down in Houston at Renters Warehouse OG when I came into this industry, he used to have investing meetups that people would drive all over the state of Texas to go to right back in your neck of the woods. So like, yes, don't get lost on the word podcast. That's how Marc executed it. But building a community is still the number one like undefeated long term success. Now those are the big, big ones. So let's kind of pull it down to something smaller. Um, oh, so here's something that, you know, just started popping up that is really exciting. Clearly, we know how little inventory there is on the market for investors, right? I think that's one of the reasons you said a lot of property managers might be contracting. Well, not the only reason, but one of the leading, you know, uh, headwinds is that there's just not a lot of inventory for investors and flippers and wholesalers to just be passing around because that immediately creates need. Um, so we all know that the only new inventory, the only inventory in the market today, I shouldn't say we all know what I've seen is all the inventory in the market is new construction. So we've got a lot of our business development managers. This is a great way that you can use sweat equity if you don't have a lot of check equity, which by the way, that's all lead gen. Pete, you got to ask yourself do I do I want to invest money? Do I want to invest time. That's really those are the resources we have to grow our business. Um, sweat equity is going out and meeting these builders, finding not only don't even think your giant tract KB homes, but definitely approach them every one of those sales offices once a property management solution because the investors that are buying them are probably out of town and maybe even out of state. But also think about your micro projects. There are so many fill in projects that are happening where people are building six units in the middle of a populated area because they're tearing down other properties, and these are going to investors. So that's another, you know, new solution that we're seeing really pick up traction where they're using networking, but they're doing it in a very specific way, where they're going right to the inventory even before it's bought by the investor. And they're attaching themselves to it. So they get that deal. So those are, you know, kind of two ideas on opposite ends of the spectrum.

Pete Neubig: [00:15:19] I like that. I'm going to ask you about another one. Where do you come out on buying lists like an eviction list or an investor list or a, you know, unoccupied homeowner list, anything like that.

Jeremy Pound: [00:15:31] So I kind of, you know, mentioned if you if you zoom out and think about what I said around Mark, you know, list building is kind of the undisputed champion of long term strategies. Mark is organically using an inbound list. Right? He's putting out killer content and people are coming to him and they're signing up. Amazing. There's also the outbound list building. So I guess the you know, I'm a fan is the is the punch line, Pete, but only if you know what you're going to do with the list. So good list building and prospecting is not I buy 10,000 people and I send them one postcard and it either works or it doesn't. It's not, you know, I'm going to get, uh, 30 eviction lists or 30 people on eviction in this neighborhood. And I'm going to call them all once. And if it doesn't work out, I'm just going to move on. Right? I think that it's the long play. So the list is the beginning, right? Getting them on the list. But then the follow up and the killer killer message and the killer offer, like we talked about knowing what you have to offer, like knowing what problems you solve for them and why it's different and how you can help them. And that's the thing to think about. Lead gen is people forget the way, the ways that we become leads in our real life, our own life. When you're the business owner and you're thinking about generating leads, you think, I'm going to call someone up and they're either going to buy my product or they're not. But real good lead gen that we all experience is a little bit more like the cliche, you're going to have a free trip because I'm going to sell you my timeshare while you're there. Like, they're they're selling us on what's in it for us? What's in it for us is a free trip to Vegas. But while we're there, we are now a lead with an opportunity to be sold. Some will buy, some won't. Right? It's a tale as old as time. But that's what real good lead gen is to me. So it's Mark, you know, sending out his tool and his calculator. It's, um, you know, another client of mine who just sends out, like, a deal of a week to investors. And over five, seven, nine years, they've accumulated that email list into thousands of people that just want that deal a week. So that's my my long answer is it depends what you're going to do with the list. But I'm a fan.

Pete Neubig: [00:17:32] Okay. So let's switch gears here. You talked about BDMs. I have a two part question here. Okay. Um, when you are looking to hire a BDM, what are some of the qualities? Maybe it's a disc profile or just what are some qualities you're looking for? And then my second part of that question is what are the KPIs or what are the numbers that we should look at. So when we're building a job description I'm looking at what's the what's the personality profile and what are what's the scorecard. Right. You mentioned that earlier. What's what's the scorecard. So what are a couple of things that that you can teach us on that. Great.

Jeremy Pound: [00:18:08] So the the first answer is going to be a lot of things. But we speak about this a lot in our events. We've got a whole we've got lots of guides and videos we've given away and we've got a whole, you know, kind of guide to hiring and training a BDM that we give away because, you know, honestly, sometimes people call us and they're just not ready for our service, or they're already in the process and they just want some help. So the first thing I want people to focus on, and again, this is not everything. This is just the first thing is imagine like two dimensions, right? Like crossing over, um, on your x axis, you have um, their, uh, their, their natural leadership ability in a conversation. So if you get on a call like this, you know, are they just sitting there waiting for you to ask them a question and they're giving you very simple answers, or are they answering you? And then they're asking you questions are they're saying things like, what else do you want to know? Do they have a natural kind of propensity to lead the conversation? You can find that out from the very first phone call with that person, and you might have to give them a little time to warm up. And there's ways that you can do that. The other dimension is called the y axis. Is their appetite to follow a system. What we want in our property management companies is not the cowboy gunslinger, the rainmaker. The hard part about that is very often the person who starts the business like me is the cowboy rainmaker, and they want to do it differently every time they're attracted to novelty. They forget about following processes. They don't always dot the I's and cross the T's. It's an amazing way to start a business. But that's not what you want long term. You want someone who's going to show up consistently and put in the work and reliably hit your sales goals. That's one of the things we look for. So if you imagine that access, right, if you can have both like a pretty high leadership ability, they don't have to be off the charts. We just want them in the upper 50 percentile, and they have a natural appetite for following process. That is the person that you want to know more about. That's the person you talk to about their their goals. That's the person you would make sure you know is presentable and can, you know, learn about property management and wants to go out and do the things. It's the other people that have very, very low leadership ability on the calls and very low appetite, almost allergic aversion to following a process that you don't want. So that's just kind of the first like tip that's probably easiest to take away on a podcast that we are always teaching people. And then from there we're going to look at background, we're going to check references, we're going to look for, you know, just like we're going to do some personality profiles. But I think it is as simple as that. That's the first thing I look at if you call me and you said, hey, um, I've got a BDM, I'm not really sure if they're working. They don't seem to be closing any business. You know, I'm just going to have a conversation. I'm going to be like, are they even in those two categories?

Pete Neubig: [00:20:44] Interesting. When when we were hiring, we used disk and we were looking for the ID, you know, the I is the outgoing people focused, the D is the guy who actually will actually ask for the sale, and we found was that the salespeople need a little bit of, of C, right? They need some detail, they need to follow the system. And what we found was it's hard to find that person. So we hired virtual team members that were high seas and partnered them up with the salespeople and the salespeople. All they had to do was literally just go from, you know, from meeting to meeting to meeting. Yeah. And then they just had to, like, get the information to just the basic information to the virtual team member who would then create the PMA, do the CMA, whatever it was that needed to be done, put all the stuff in the in the CRM system. Uh, do you have a favorite CRM system that you that you guys recommend or is it?

Jeremy Pound: [00:21:38] Oh, yeah. Yeah. Um, and I just want to say you're absolutely right. We're looking for somebody with D I N C if you if anybody listening knows DISC. That's the thing is, I think the common thing everybody teaches is you want the high I and some D. And that may work in different sales roles. But I'm telling you on a consistent needing to sell like you and I were talking about the uniqueness of the property management business, and it's the constant low sales that are recurring revenue. And it's the follow up. So you nailed it. The D I C if you can get that one person is the one you want. If not, I like I like your approach how you you kind of bolted together to do it because it's the follow up to the C is the follow up. So, um, yes, Uh, the CRM question, we work with a lot of them. You know, the obvious answer is cliché. Everybody says like the CRM, the best CRM is the one you use because they're amazing. But, you know, when I had the agency, I worked in Salesforce all the time and HubSpot and Zoho and in too many other ones, Pipedrive to mention. And, you know, obviously I'm in this business because Jordan from LeadSimple found me and brought me in. And when when Jordan showed me what LeadSimple did out of the box, I laughed because I'm like, clients pay me thousands of dollars to go into Salesforce and turn off features and then to integrate text messaging and like I would have to piece together like, and this was again five years ago, but I'd have to integrate like six programs just to do what LeadSimple did. And by the way, LeadSimple was out of the box and it was like a ninth of the price. So we love LeadSimple. We can't we cannot promote it enough. There's other good ones, but that's just the one we know. And we love those.

Pete Neubig: [00:23:11] And LeadSimple has free training on the VPM platform. So we actually need simple training.

Jeremy Pound: [00:23:17] They do a lot for the community. I got nothing bad to say about those guys.

Pete Neubig: [00:23:20] They sure do. All right. So so we kind of have the qualities of that BDM. Now, how do I know if that BDM is doing, um, is doing a good job? Right. Um, so what are some of the KPIs? Um, do you look at actions or do you look at results, or do you look at a combination of both?

Jeremy Pound: [00:23:39] That's a great question. We do look at a combination of both. And the answer is it's the proverbial. It depends. Um, we do have clients. Um, you may be one of them listening. You may hate them if you're not, but we do have clients that are just. They've been in business 15 years. They're natural. Search engine ranking is off the charts. They've got referral sources out the yin yang, and they're just they like Mark jokingly, jokingly turning away leads. They are only focused on conversion and follow through because that's the other thing that's really, really important. I think that we all have this fantasy that we're going to get on every single call, and this perfectly silver tongued salesperson is going to close every deal on the very first call. But the reality is people are gathering information. They're making decisions. It's a very high stakes educational conversation. So we actually talk about this a lot. It's important to point this out. It's a good concept for every owner to know. The sale is far more high stakes for the prospect than it is for you. If you get the deal, it's one door and hopefully it's one door out of 100 or 200 or 500 that you're managing, this may be their most expensive asset that they own. It may be the first time they're doing this, or it may be the one of five properties, but they just lost their shirt because they had a terrible manager in a different part of town. So you just have to remember that the the stakes are much higher for the owner. And that's going to mean a sophisticated sell with follow up with empathy and follow through. And so for some of our clients, it is just a conversion rate for many of our clients. They're looking for them to build that list to follow through. And it's it's 90% activities, just like you said they got we got a plan for them. We got 30, 60, 90 day. When you onboard that's really more focused on your learning and your ramping up ability. After the 90 days, it's a little bit more of a recurring calendar. And it's are you are you prospecting? Are you doing follow up? Are you following up with old leads? Are you networking? Are you on social? Are you you know, some of our BDMs are really heavily involved in managing the content plan. And then it becomes activities for most of our clients. It's like turning a dial. It's a little bit of both. So answer depends. But both of those are very important.

Pete Neubig: [00:25:49] Um, so I think it's a brilliant answer by the way. So um, now when I'm looking at what are the KPIs I'm looking at. So if it's activities, great. That's, that could just literally just be activity. And an activity could be an email, a phone call, a text message, a posting a like it could it could be anything like that now you got a lot of. We got some inbound leads, let's say. And from there I have an inbound lead and it could be a lead or an opportunity. Do you, do you do the hot, cold, warm thing or do you do opportunity and lead or how do you break that up. And then what are some of the things, um, conceptually that you can tell our listeners like this is what a lead is versus a hot or a warm or an opportunity.

Jeremy Pound: [00:26:35] This is a fantastic question. And there's so much information out there about this. I have really been focused on this for a long time. So I have these like very, very black and white opinions that may work for for some people, but it's what we teach. So we like the lead versus opportunity. Um, and there's also target by the way. So a target is you know who they are right. You have their name and address. So you said, should we buy a list. So I could give you a list. And I can say, hey, these are ten investors that were just at a meeting that all owned property in your neighborhood. But we don't know if they're interested in a property manager, So I call those targets.

Pete Neubig: [00:27:09] Got it.

Jeremy Pound: [00:27:10] I know that there's intention there. Like they filled out a lead form. They've called us that. I need their name. I need their contact info. And I need to know they're at least interested. Right? Then they're a lead. But I don't know if they're qualified. If I speak to them. And I know they have a property, and I know the property fits, and I know that they fit and that they understand what I'm, you know, the process now, they're qualified. So I like very it's really funny coming from the sales guy who's definitely on a high I on the on the disc profile. I actually really crave certainty when it comes to this. What I don't like with so many people talk is like like an opinion of a ranking of a lead. So what happens is they say, hey, rank it on 1 to 10 or rank it like red, yellow, green or you know, you know, cool, medium hot. I think that in human psychology, like we just are overestimating that we get it. I mean, I think we can all relate to that terrible conversation we had with a client who's never going to buy, and they call us back and they're like, where do I sign? And then we have those conversations with people that are like, man, I was vibing with that guy. He is definitely going to be a client. Like that is perfect. He's probably going to buy ten properties with us over the next year...

Pete Neubig: [00:28:22] You don't hear from again.

Jeremy Pound: [00:28:22] Ghost you, right? He just never calls back. So I don't like the. And I also feel like it burns unnecessary like mental calories. Right. If you're doing this at a high volume and you're not just working on one deal a day, but you're you're juggling deals, you're prospecting. I want to keep the, the, like, decision making to where it really matters. I mean, decision making matters. And so I want to save those decisions for the things that matter. Like what's the follow up that it's going to take to get this guy's attention and get him to get back to me? Or how can I position this objection he has as something it's not really a negative for him or her. It's actually a positive. I want my salespeople's mind focused on things like that.

Pete Neubig: [00:29:03] Yeah. You know, we had a marketing team and we had a sales team, and we always hear about the sales versus operations, especially in property manager where sales might sell something that operations can't handle. But we had an issue with marketing and sales, and sales was trying to say everything was a lead, right? And marketing was trying to say everything was an opportunity. Yeah. And so what we had to do is, is we had to really define what a what an opportunity, what a lead was. And a lead was just like what you said. So I thought your definition of a lead was spot on. Anybody who basically fills out a form or reaches out to you, that's a lead. The opportunity for us was anybody who was looking for us to manage a property that we would manage, right. So not an apartment complex in low income area, but maybe a class B property in a class B area in the next 90 days. And so we were pretty definitive. Now we can't get all of that information right from the get go. But you have to have a couple of conversations. You can flip a lead to an opportunity to flip an opportunity to a lead. And our goal was 50% of all, um, leads were supposed to be opportunities. And then our conversion rate was supposed to be 50% of the opportunities we get converted, which is pretty high to get. But that that was kind of a high level.

Jeremy Pound: [00:30:21] Uh, but you guys had you had momentum, you had reputation, you had lead flow, you had experience. I believe that from what I heard about your company, uh, you guys were still operating when I started. I believe that those were reasonable targets. If you've got that kind of momentum going.

Pete Neubig: [00:30:36] Yep. So. All right, so what is a good, um, conversion rate then? Um, based on you're talking about opportunities leads. Yeah I know obviously it's going to be less, uh, a less conversion rate on leads and a higher version of opportunities. But what do you what are you seeing in the industry right now on a decent medium?

Jeremy Pound: [00:30:57] That's great. By the way, I just want to backtrack on one, not backtrack, but I want to put the icing on the cake of what you and I talked about when I said that when they go from a lead to an opportunity, it was qualified. I actually forgot to say timeline. You remind me with the 90 days thing right there. That's the other thing. There really an opportunity if they'll admit a timeline, even if that timeline is in the crazy future, like if they'll actually admit their timeline, like, oh, I'm definitely going to make a decision. That is what you want on that first call. So you just I would be remiss if I didn't just piece that in there. So that was great. So I you know, it's I may not be the best person to answer this call. I'm sorry, this question, just because I'm not actively coaching the BDMs every single day. Obviously here, these numbers, we talk about it a lot. I've got two amazing coaches that are working directly with the BDMs and another two that are working with the owners, and they're looking over this every time. So I'm going to try to get you some information and send it to you, but it might become dated anyway. I know people might be listening to this thing for a couple, you know, a couple of years from now. So here's what I would say is, um, you want to focus more on cost of acquisition than just conversion rate, right? So it depends where their leads are coming from. So nothing wrong if you're getting dozens and dozens of cheap leads a week and you're only closing a couple very different than if you're getting 4 or 5 very expensive leads a week and you're not closing any. Right. So I like to focus on cost of acquisition. I also like to remind my clients that, um, you should not expect your conversion rate to be, uh, elastic or scalable. So we, I love when I get calls from owners and they're like, I don't know if you can really help me, Jeremy, because I have a I have a 75% closing rate. And I'm like, great. Well, tell me about your lead flow. You're like, well, last month I got three leads. It was my mom's boss. It was my old college roommate. It was, you know, my next door neighbor. And I'm like, well, maybe you do need my help because I should have been 100% close rate, you know? So I chuckle, but like, you know, you can't take, uh, you can't take a referral or I know you conversion rate and apply that to cold traffic or apply that to bot leads. Right. So we teach and this is it's not everybody has the appetite for this. But in LeadSimple which we talked about. You can actually see your conversion rate for every lead source. I think it's one of the I think that the marketing reports and LeadSimple are the best kept secret that nobody is using. I said that last year at LeadSimple University. I think that the marketing reports are amazing. I just don't think every owner, because they don't have a marketing manager like you guys did, has the appetite. But I would look at each lead source by conversion.

Pete Neubig: [00:33:30] I'm gonna I'm gonna let you in on a little secret.

Jeremy Pound: [00:33:33] Yes. Please do.

Pete Neubig: [00:33:35] When we were spending an awful lot of money and I use the word spending on purpose, we were spending an awful lot of money on marketing early on. And when I finally took over marketing, I ended up doing cost cost per lead, per strategy. And by doing that.

Pete Neubig: [00:34:08] Early on, we were spending money on marketing, and I used that word on purpose. Because when you spend money and you don't invest it and you don't know your numbers, it's spending. Right. And so when I took over marketing, I ended up learning how much money we were spending per strategy, and we were learning how many leads were getting per strategy. I cut my spending down from 20,000 a month to 2500 a month. Okay. Now, when I was doing 20,000 a month, I was getting 100 leads and 50 opportunities. When I cut it down to 2500 a month, I was getting about 80 leads and 50 opportunities.

Jeremy Pound: [00:34:45] Amazing. That's amazing.

Pete Neubig: [00:34:47] So when you know the cost per lead, per strategy, like Jeremy's just saying you can dramatically change those levers and reduce it and increase investment, not spending on those strategies.

Jeremy Pound: [00:35:02] Yes. And so as we talked to circle back, we said some things that work five years ago don't work now. Only if you're isolating each strategy like you're saying. Do you know when one is falling off a cliff or one is actually accelerating? Right. So even more of an argument on why you don't want to just be bundling all your lead sources when you're looking at spending or investing reports, as you call them, which I love that. Yeah.

Pete Neubig: [00:35:24] I'll give you a great example. We were doing radio commercials in Dallas. Yeah. And so I'd asked my marketing guy, I'm like, hey, how much is the radio commercial in Dallas? It's X dollars. Great. How many leads you get? He goes, I don't know. I go, what do you mean you don't know? He goes, I don't know. I'm like, why do we not have a separate number or a separate, um, you know, squeeze page or whatever. How do we track that? And so I said, because you don't know, you just lost that, capability. Cancel the commercial tomorrow.

Jeremy Pound: [00:35:54] Wow. That's great.

Pete Neubig: [00:35:56] Yep. And so we cancelled all of our commercials because. And we realized, you know, a month later that it had no bearing. We weren't getting any leads from it because it didn't change our our lead.

Jeremy Pound: [00:36:06] Yes, it's above the scope of this conversation, but let's just tell the audience it is easier than you think to track this lead source. There are so many tools and so many easy ways to reach out to any marketing agency or any person who's in marketing, and they'll blow your mind at how easy it is to track leads pretty well.

Pete Neubig: [00:36:24] I'll give a I'll give a shout out to my my business partners on VPM. They own Geekly Media, give geeklymedia.com and call me at RentBridge. Michael, the Park are great folks.

Jeremy Pound: [00:36:34] There you go.

Pete Neubig: [00:36:34] We are up against it. But I do want to ask you one more question, right? Because I know a lot of people are, are are kind of, you know, probably waiting for me to ask this question, how do you compensate a BDA, a BDM?

Jeremy Pound: [00:36:47] Great. So there's a lot of ways. We have a very we have a comp model that we, you know, without taking up too much time, uh, just reach out. I can assure you that there's a lot of thought behind this. I would say that the majority of the industry that you and I know is using our comp model because we've been giving it away for five years. So if you do reach out to me, we'll give you our our comp model because it works and we've proven it over. I think we've hired over 300 BDMs. We just did a webinar this year. Um, and we've trained a lot of other ones. So we like a mix of base and commission. So we want it depends on what you're paying them. It depends on your area. There is no one number. Everyone's like, well what's the base? I promise you.

Pete Neubig: [00:37:25] That's gonna that's gonna depend on where you live and where and where they live. Right.

Jeremy Pound: [00:37:28] My client's in Saint Louis are not paying what my clients in San Diego are paying. They're very, very different. So we want a blend of base and then per door commission and our model, the couple cool, subtle things about it is it's like I call it an escalator. So maybe the first five doors you get and this depends. This is a variable. We had a client there like, look, I have so much marketing. If I'll triple over ten doors a month, I'm like, okay, fine. So your first range is 0 to 10. Some of our clients aren't really closing yet. Maybe their first range is 0 to 5. Your first five doors might get paid 50 or $150 per door. Maybe the next ten get 250 a door, maybe the next ten get 450 a door. What that does is it allows you to have an exemplary comp model for the the fantastic person who's going to come in and blow the doors off your business. So if they say, well, would you pay somebody $100,000 to be a BDM? And they said, absolutely not. And I'm like, well, what if they close 250 doors a year? They're like, I'd pay them 150,000. So the thing is, is they they're thinking small. And if we're attracting a talented person, we need to think big, but we don't need to give the farm away. And that's why I love this model, because it kind of starves out the also rans and the people that are just happy to get by and it golden handcuffs the people that are going to come in and blow you away.

Pete Neubig: [00:38:48] The last thing you want is to hire a BDM and they are focusing on their base salary.

Jeremy Pound: [00:38:53] Yes, exactly. So depending on how big it is, it could be anywhere from a third to half of their on target earnings. That will change. Again, rural areas, you know, maybe it's going to be a little bit more. But if you're in a really big area, it might only be a quarter or a third of their model. And here's one tool that I want to give away that we use I love it. It's so relevant for the industry. Everybody's like salary calculators and things like that. They talk to recruiters. I feel like that information is like a year old. And just like we've seen, you know, salaries have gone up. They've the market's changed. What I love like when you when you rent an apartment and you're setting the price on the apartment Pete what do you do. What do you go look at.

Pete Neubig: [00:39:32] A lot of CMA.

Jeremy Pound: [00:39:34] Yeah. On current comps. Recent comps, not comps from a year ago.

Pete Neubig: [00:39:39] No. After six months, they're they're no good. Yeah. Yeah. So did you know that maybe 90 days. Mhm.

Jeremy Pound: [00:39:44] So there's actually comps for jobs by market which is amazing. So there's this great tool totally free. I hope it's still I hope it's around forever because we use it like crazy. Go to go to talent.com/salary. Super easy talent.com/salary. You put in business development manager. Or maybe you put in sales associate. And then you put in Saint Louis or Orlando or you know, whatever you're putting in Houston and it's going to give you a bar like a bell chart of the lowest, the median and the highest. But just like when you run a comp, you're going to actually see all the jobs that are these are jobs that are listed today, which is why I'm saying they're comps. You're going to want to take you're going to want to take an introspective look. Because if it says, you know, all these jobs are like 90,000 a year, but then you start clicking on them and they're they're business development managers. They're managing 15 employees. They're doing rocket science work. It's not a relevant it's not an apples to apples. I mean, yeah, it's not an apples to apples. So I love talent.com/salary. Run your comps and then when you it's do yourself a favor because then when you're in that negotiation meeting and you've made an offer and they say, I think I should make more. You're just going to go be like, well, here are the three jobs I base this on. Now that almost never comes up, but you should be prepared for it. So I just wanted to give that away.

Pete Neubig: [00:40:58] So early on. When I started Empire, I was pretty adamant that I would not hire BDMs virtually. I've since come. I've since come on the other side of that. And now for VPM. My my sales team is actually virtual. Where do you come on inside of that?

Jeremy Pound: [00:41:13] We, we get asked this a lot and we've we've adjusted just like you for sure, Pete. Um, because it's property management and because it's real estate, our preference is that you can get boots on the ground. It's just not required. Maybe two years ago, we were kind of a little, like a little more closed minded to it, even though I've got a ton of international and global talent on my team. But we knew that there was a competitive advantage to knowing this side of this street is a different market than that side of the street or, um, being involved with all the real estate agents or knowing how to get involved in the community or knowing what the market is doing. So our preference is so what I tell an owner is just know that you're giving up these things. If you get somebody who's not local, because you can get somebody that's not local and you can fly them in once in a while, or you can educate them, you can teach them things. You're just going to be giving up, you know, kind of the in-person opportunities, some of the networking opportunities. And if you got a good enough strategy that those things weren't even part of your game plan, you're gold. That's the way we handle it. We just want to kind of advise them on what they're giving up. But we've seen it work.

Pete Neubig: [00:42:22] Man. I can sit here all day and ask you questions. You're, uh, got tons and tons of nuggets people got. They're going to they're going to be able to they're gonna have to listen to this like 2 or 3 times to, uh, to really get all the, all the knowledge that you're dropping. We're going to take a quick break. I'm going to put you in a lightning round and then, um, and, uh, we'll be right back, everybody. We'll be right back. More with Jeremy pound. Killed it, brother. We'll be right back, everybody.

Jeremy Pound: [00:42:46] Thanks, Pete. This is fun.

Pete Neubig: [00:42:50] All right, welcome back, everybody. All right, Jeremy Pound, you are in the lightning round. Are you ready?

Jeremy Pound: [00:42:57] I am hydrated, I'm ready to go.

Pete Neubig: [00:43:00] That sound effect every show. People must get freaking so upset with me now. Like, dude, stop with the. And then I use the same joke. My joke is twice. No, it's it's it's a it's a free podcast. So that's that's my budget for, uh, for sound effects. Sound effects. All right. Here we. Here we go. What is one piece of advice you would give someone who's just starting out in the PM business?

Jeremy Pound: [00:43:25] Mm. Uh. Market and advertise more than you think you need to.

Pete Neubig: [00:43:32] If you went out boozing one night, which I know we don't do that the next day, you had to hit a fast food restaurant to absorb some of the alcohol. What's the what's your go to?

Jeremy Pound: [00:43:41] Well, the next day thinking, well, they're all good. Uh, if I'm in the right area, which I don't live in that area, but I'll just say my dream fast food restaurant to recover would be White Castle.

Pete Neubig: [00:43:54] White castle? Oh, yeah. It's an oldie but goodie, man.

Jeremy Pound: [00:43:57] Don't have them here in Florida, so I don't get it often.

Pete Neubig: [00:44:00] All right. What was your first job?

Jeremy Pound: [00:44:03] Uh, it was selling luggage in the mall. This is a funny story I've told on sales guy.

Pete Neubig: [00:44:08] Let's hear it. I gotta hear this story. That's the.

Jeremy Pound: [00:44:10] Funniest story. We all get into sales on accident. I went through the mall and I gave all my applications to the cool places like the Gap. And, like, all the fun places. The only place to call me back was the luggage store, because I had a friend that worked there and I ended up selling in the luggage store, but I taught me everything I knew about sales in the beginning.

Pete Neubig: [00:44:25] Oh man, if you can sell luggage, if you can dodge a wrench, you could. You could dodge a ball. If you sell luggage, you could sell property management.

Jeremy Pound: [00:44:31] Sound like 4000 luggage sets? That $4,000 luggage sets when I'm like 17 in the mall at Christmas. It was hilarious.

Pete Neubig: [00:44:37] Never even went. You never even went anywhere yet?

Jeremy Pound: [00:44:40] Never. I didn't know what it was, but man, I could tell you all about the zippers and the leather and how it was dyed. They gave me all the training.

Pete Neubig: [00:44:46] Oh, man. All right, well, let's let's go there. What is your ideal vacation?

Jeremy Pound: [00:44:50] Oh, that's. I got a lot of them. Um. I love the mountains. Uh, I was just there, you know, getting into the fresh air, getting out of Florida, out of the heat, getting in the mountains. Man, I love that. And then the Greek Islands are just top of my list. I love it there.

Pete Neubig: [00:45:04] Nice. Both of them are very nice. Does pineapple belong on pizza?

Jeremy Pound: [00:45:09] Yeah, it doesn't work for me. Those. Those don't seem to go together.

Pete Neubig: [00:45:13] I gotta say, I thought you were going to be a pineapple guy. I'm glad you're not.

Jeremy Pound: [00:45:16] I'm giving it a try with an open mind, and I just. I can't get into it.

Pete Neubig: [00:45:20] What is something that most people don't know about you?

Jeremy Pound: [00:45:24] Uh, okay. I had a high school band called Soilent Green, and I had the Kurt Cobain haircut that was down to my shoulders. And each week it was a different color. Sometimes it was purple, sometimes it was green. It was crazy. But I learned about...

Pete Neubig: [00:45:37] Lead singer would?

Jeremy Pound: [00:45:37] You know, I was I was the guitar player, but I wrote all the songs and I was the manager. I got us all the gigs, so I learned how to market when I was doing. 

Pete Neubig: [00:45:45] Born into sales. Look at that. Right from an early age. Do you still play today?

Jeremy Pound: [00:45:49] Very rarely. Every year or two I break it out and I'm like, and then I've got I don't have the calluses, I just get busy. But yeah, I mean maybe, maybe I can play like 2 or 3 songs if I really had to.

Pete Neubig: [00:45:59] Nice. All right. If you could have dinner with anyone alive, who would it be? Oh.

Jeremy Pound: [00:46:06] I'm just for the sake of speed. Uh, the first person that came to mind was Richard Branson.

Pete Neubig: [00:46:12] He's on my list, too, I think. Yeah. Unbelievable. All right, you're in Florida. What's the Disney character you most associate with?

Jeremy Pound: [00:46:20] Scrooge McDuck? Is that a Disney character? I don't know. You know what it is?

Pete Neubig: [00:46:26] Yeah, I think it is. Yes.

Jeremy Pound: [00:46:28] I grew up watching DuckTales with my dad before school every day. We loved it.

Pete Neubig: [00:46:31] Alright. And what do you prefer, dogs or cats?

Jeremy Pound: [00:46:34] Uh, dogs. I got two under the desk right now.

Pete Neubig: [00:46:36] Dog guy. All right. Jeremy. If somebody wanted to learn more about RentScale or reach out to you, what's the best way they can? They can, uh, they can get to you.

Jeremy Pound: [00:46:45] You can find us at RentScale.com. That's easy. If you want to talk to us as a company, uh, you know, Pete knows I'm on all the socials, so I'm just Jeremy Pound everywhere. Find me, you know, all all a lot of the property management, Facebook groups. I'm always out there. Um. Easy place. Uh, we got we got a couple cool things you can check out. Uh, I don't even know if you know about this, Pete, but, you know, when we have our, uh, this week in PM. So I do a live show every other week called 'This Week in PM'. Um, if you check out strategic PM on any of the social channels, that's the magazine that we've launched in the brand. So we have strategicpm.com. You can find it. You can sign up for free. We do quarterly issues. We basically capture the best case studies of the fastest growing property managers in the industry. And then we have a more relevant show where which will have you on sometime soon, Pete. We just kind of talk about what's happening right now, like trends, you know, just things like that that are happening. But what's really cool is every episode or once a month, not every episode, every other episode. We actually share our scorecard from the business development community. So we share the average number of leads that this community is getting. We show the top five markets where they are and how many doors they closed, and often the leaders in the 30s and the 40s, which is amazing. And then we show the average of the whole community and the average of the top 50%. The reason for that is because the whole community often involves people that just got started, like last week. So they're going to bring that average down. So if you go to RentScale.com/scoreboard uh scale.com/scoreboard, it's all there. You can see the whole last year which is really cool if you want to see what's happening in our little, you know, microcosm of the industry, then you can check it out. And you can also find it on this week in PM. So got a lot of content to share with you guys. Totally for free. And then I think we have the best event for property managers who really want to grow on the client acquisition side. Every year it's in December. We're doing it in Austin this year, it's December 6th, on Friday 2024, in case you're listening to this in the future. But we do it every year. Um, you can go to SalesMastery.live, or you can go to our website and it's going to be an amazing event one day event all about how to attract leads, convert them and multiply them. And what's really cool is it's the same week as LeadSimple University. So LeadSimple University is Tuesday through Thursday. We're Friday. Uh, we have a few joint tickets we just released today. By the time you hear this, they'll probably be gone. But you can go to both events. Or you can send one team member to one and another to the other. And you guys get to enjoy Austin in December.

Pete Neubig: [00:49:15] I think we lost them. So. Looks like we lost Jeremy at the last second here. Um, looks like my internet went down, but, um, go to, rentscale.com, and you can see where he's going to be at. Um, you can get all those free resources. And if you are not a NARPM member, please go to NARPM, narpm.org or call them at (800) 782-3452 and become a member. And if you are interested in virtual team members and you want to learn more, please go to vpmsolutions.com. Or you can email me directly at pete@vpmsolutions.com. Thanks so much for listening to this. Sorry for the technical difficulties and we'll see you next time.