This week on The Info podcast, Cole VP of Marketing, Bryce Curry is joined by Kyle Whissel of Whissel Realty Group to talk about best practices for building your brand as a real estate agent, insurance, or home services professional.
In the episode, Whissel shares his wisdom and experience building his brand identity as an agent, and a recognizable brand for his agency. A leader in the real estate sales sphere, Whissel and his team have been ranked the number one team in San Diego County, and ranked among the top 100 real estate teams by the Wall Street Journal.
Whissel also explores ways to build a brand identity for yourself or your agency as well as the importance of implementing time-tested strategies for building meaningful relationships with clients and social media’s role in your marketing.
If you’re new to selling or wanting to grow your business, you’re not going to want to miss this episode.
Watch the episode on YouTube or listen on your favorite podcast platform.
YouTube | Spotify | Google | Stitcher | iTunes
You can find Kyle Whissel at:
- Whisselrealty.com
- @kylewhissel
- TheWhisselway.com
Building Your Brand with Kyle Whissel | Episode 5
AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT
Bryce Curry:
Are you swimming in a red ocean or a blue ocean? Are you posting more on Instagram Stories than making actual prospecting calls? Welcome to The Info, a podcast that encourages and equips sales leaders to prospect smarter. I’m your host, Bryce Curry, VP of Marketing at Cole Information.
In this episode, my guest is Kyle Whissel, Team Leader at Whissel Realty Group. Kyle and his team have been ranked the number one team in San Diego County, and ranked in the top 100 real estate teams according to the Wall Street Journal. He is a great longtime customer of Cole, and has offered so much wisdom to our customers over the years. I got to say, Kyle Whissel is a leader in his space. The wisdom he gives us in our conversation applies to producers in insurance, real estate, and even home service pros. Make sure to check out the links in this episode’s description to learn more about Kyle, and how to grow your career through systems, structure, and support. Kyle, thanks for joining us.
Kyle Whissel:
Yeah, man. I’m stoked to be here. We’ve been working with you guys for a number of years now, so I’m excited to get on here and share a little bit about what we’re doing.
Bryce Curry:
Yeah, I really appreciate you always working with us, and sharing different thoughts around prospecting, and what you guys are doing as a team. Now, your team is one of the top teams in the country. I know you’re number one in your area. But also, I think top 100 in the nation. But either way, you’re really up there.
Kyle Whissel:
Something like that, yeah. Last year we sold just under 400 million here in San Diego.
Bryce Curry:
That’s amazing.
Kyle Whissel:
We built a group around the country within eXp, where our group’s selling over 10,000 houses a month.
Bryce Curry:
Wow.
Kyle Whissel:
Which is pretty crazy.
Bryce Curry:
That is. That’s cool.
Kyle Whissel:
So, we’ve built some pretty cool things.
Bryce Curry:
I looked at your website and I got to say, your website, Kyle, is on point. I’ve been in marketing for 20 years. Most of my focus is on digital marketing across big logos, B2C, B2B. We get asked, from time to time, through our support team, “Should I have a website? Should I spend time with my website?” I’m just curious what you guys’ approach is.
Kyle Whissel:
Yeah, for sure. There’s a few ways that people can go when it comes to building a website. The good thing, in our real estate space, there’s a lot of amazing providers out there that have done free websites, whether it be AB Core, whether it be MyLobo, or there’s a ton of other companies out there that you could literally sign up today and, depending, your MLS has to approve your site and all that, but you could have a website tomorrow, assuming you can get approval quickly on that. So we’re fortunate in the fact that there are companies that build websites specifically for the real estate industry. So, we love that.
The thing we don’t love is that most of these companies, everybody’s website is identical. They all look the same. They’re the term, homogenous. There’s no differentiation between my site, and your site, and his site, and her site. So we decided we didn’t just want to have a site, but we wanted something that really fit our brand identity, and was congruent with all of the other marketing that people are going to see from us, so that when they get a postcard from us and they land on our website, there’s no question that this is the same company. When they get a business card from one of my agents and they go to their website, there’s no question that they’re at the right place.
The print marketing that we do, the outdoor signage that we do, literally everything that we do all has the same look and feel, or the same brand identity across all types of mediums. So I think that’s really important. Far too many people, they just use all off-the-shelf products, and there’s no congruency between the different things that they do. So we really wanted to make sure that everything they get from Whissel, we built our own the brand and identity guideline for the company so everybody knows, here’s the color codes for our gray, here’s the color codes for our orange, here’s the color codes for our green, here’s the logo in the various different formats, here’s how to use the logo, here’s how to not use the logo.
We really put some time into that, because I think brand is something that people massively undervalue. A lot of people are far more focused on building their brokerages brand than their own brand. I think that everybody should build their own brand. Even if you’re on a team, your name is your brand. Whether you stay on that team forever or you build your own team doesn’t matter. As long as you brand your name, you can do anything you want with that. Even if you want to get out of real estate. If you’ve built a big enough brand around your name, you could do anything.
Bryce Curry:
Right.
Kyle Whissel:
Grant Cardone, he’s pivoted multiple times on what he does, but he’s Grant Cardone the whole time. He can do anything with that name. So I think that realtors don’t put enough emphasis on that brand, just that brand recognition. They don’t understand why, usually. That’s why they don’t do it. But the why is, if we’re using your system, if we’re using Cole, and we’re making outbound phone calls, if I make that call and I say Whissel and they’re like, “Oh,” they automatically click, “I see that everywhere. I see your name everywhere.
Guess what? My probability of conversion on that conversation shoots through the roof because there’s that brand recognition. If I’m calling expireds and they get 20 phone calls, and they don’t recognize 19 of the names, but they recognize our name, we get a front-of-the-line pass. So we’ve just put a lot of effort into the brand so that, when people see something of ours, it automatically clicks to them and it increases the conversion rate for us.
Bryce Curry:
It’s so important. There’s so much wisdom in what you’re saying because, at first, someone might think, “Oh, branding, the creative side, okay. I get it, but I don’t necessarily have time, or know where to start with that.” If you’re cool with it, I’m going to link your main website in the description of our podcast because I want our audience, even our solar clients, to take a look at what you’re doing.
I got to be honest with you, after I was looking at the website, watching your videos, which we’ll talk about a little bit, I was like, “Man, I want to move to San Diego.” There’s a consistency here that is really cool, and that foundation that’s laid is so important because it’s exactly what you were talking about. That is, when you do your outreach, when you start doing your funnel development, you have that foundation. People know the brand, they know the individuals, they know your name. Even things like the color scheme and the consistency of that, it all matters.
Kyle Whissel:
Yep, a hundred percent.
Bryce Curry:
If you think about new agents, we work with a lot of new real estate agents, new insurance agents, that are just getting started with their career, and they have a perspective of what they want to do and what they want to achieve. We talk with mid-level agents that are looking to break through to the next threshold of deals. What advice do you give agents when they’re first starting out? Should they start with the branding? Should they start with developing a sphere of influence? Or, is it all part of it? [inaudible 00:07:49].
Kyle Whissel:
I would say, if I was brand new, I would start by joining a team.
Bryce Curry:
Okay.
Kyle Whissel:
I think too many agents try to be the brand from day one, and I think this is a career that you’re probably going to be in for decades, in a perfect world. [inaudible 00:08:08] wanted a career that’s not a physical labor type career. We’re not a digging trenches, where you can only do that ’til you’re a certain age.
Bryce Curry:
Sure. Sure.
Kyle Whissel:
There’s realtors that are still very successful today that are in their 80s, 90s. We’re very fortunate, so play the long game on this. Where I see agents make the mistake is, they try to be this big brand from day one. Honestly, nobody gives a damn who you are until you actually start selling some houses.
Bryce Curry:
Right.
Kyle Whissel:
Once you start selling some houses, people are more willing to listen to what you have to say. Well, what’s the quickest way to get into production and selling houses? I would start out on a team. Even today, me knowing everything I know, I’ve sold over 4,000 houses, if I moved to a whole new city, new state, I would join somebody’s team, at least for a year, bare minimum for a year, and I would piggyback off of their brand to build my personal brand.
But my personal brand, I’m not trying to brand some name that’s fancy. I’m not trying to brand a Google. That’s so freaking hard to do. Just brand your own individual name within that team. The more homes you sell, the more brand you’re going to build around your name, and people are going to start to recognize your name. Maybe you stay on that team forever. I’ve got agents who’ve been on my team for over 10 years, but most agents are on the team for a period of time, one year, two, three, four, five years, and then they decide, “Hey, I’m going to start my own team now.” Great.
Well, if you’ve sold a lot of homes and you’ve put your name at the forefront, then if you decide to go from being Kyle Whissel on the Gary Ashton team, I could be Kyle Whissel, Whissel Realty Group. I branded my own individual name. So I think the key is getting onto a team that has brand, piggyback off of their brand to build your own personal brand. Then, when the time is right, when you’ve learned everything that you need to learn, you feel confident and you actually want to build your own team, not everybody does, ’cause I got a lot of gray hairs that I didn’t have before I started a team, once you’re ready to start your team, you can just piggyback off of your own personal name that you’ve built, and there’s a brand attached to that.
Bryce Curry:
That’s super critical when you think about brand equity, and authenticity, and stuff like that. You’ve been out there, and making the deals happen, and have the credibility behind that. So that makes a ton of sense to join a team, and lean into that team, and then build from there. Speaking of teams, you have a good size team. What’s your approach to coaching up your team as far as lead gen? What’s your guys’ approach?
Kyle Whissel:
I find that agents, especially when they’re new, they’re very easily influenced and they get pulled in a million different directions, so they’re trying to generate leads from 62 different things, and I think that’s a huge mistake. What we’ve done with our team is, we’ve established what we call the core four, and it’s the four primary pillars we want people to build their business on that are non-negotiables to be a part of our team.
Number one is sphere. When I say sphere, we’re referring to anybody and everybody that you know. That should be the foundation of your business, is anybody and everybody that you know, that have some level of relationship with. That’s the number one non-negotiable. Because, at the end of the day, if you survey 1000 realtors who’ve been in the business for 20 plus years, I promise you sphere, referrals from their sphere, all that stuff is going to be their number one source of business. I promise you that. So, that’s number one.
Number two for us is open houses. We’re a huge fan of open houses. They work. Now, there might be some markets they don’t work. Here in San Diego, they work phenomenally well. We sell over 100 homes a year just from open houses. It’s a really good way for agents to get out there, meet people, shake hands, kiss babies, learn markets and all of that, and build a name for themselves. Number three on our list is social media. We really want to make sure our agents know how to do social media right. Then, number four is working the leads from the team.
So, we keep people focused on those core four, and then we recommend they add one to two additional pillars from that. So maybe one of those pillars is circle prospecting. Maybe one of those pillars is door knocking. Maybe one of those pillars is networking events. Maybe one of those pillars is calling expireds. There’s so many other pillars, but we don’t want to force any of those on anybody. But those core four, those are non-negotiables to be a part of our team. Then we just want you to add one, maybe two, more, that’s it, on top of those core four, and then just stay focused.
It comes from, people go to conferences and they hear 50 different people tell them all the different ways to be successful, and they come back from a conference and say, “I got to do this. I got to do this.” “No, just focus on your core. Quit worrying about all this new stuff.” One of my buddies put a post out recently that was talking about how silly it is that agents aren’t calling the leads that are in their database because they’re spending time trying to generate leads to put in their database so that they can’t call them. It’s the silliest thing in the world. What the hell are you doing?
I was just talking to one of my agents today, and he was talking about how he doesn’t have any business. He’s talking about the expired phone calls that he’s making, and how he’s getting his kicked. He’s literally connecting with two out of 100 people. 98 of the dials are going to nowhere. I was like, “Let me pull up your CRM.” He has 445 leads in his database, he made 39 dials last month. He’s spending all of his time doing dumb stuff, like calling expireds, and he can only get 2 out of 1oo people on the phone, but he is got 445 people that he has a relationship with in the CRM that he’s not calling. It’s so silly how people do that.
Bryce Curry:
From a marketing perspective, I always say that, a marketer, “Your starting line in the race is being ignored, trying to get the attention of the consumer.” It depends on what you’re marketing of course, and stuff like that. But, in general, the human brain, as it’s going about its day, is just trying to thrive and survive. My goal in these podcasts is to feature individuals that have developed structure to their prospecting, just like you’re describing. Because, at the end of the day, what you’re trying to do is stay top of mind, and get noticed and be noticed at the time of need. How do you approach, for your agents and for yourself, to generate that momentum that feeds your lead gen?
Kyle Whissel:
I’m a big Darren Hardy fan, and he talks about, when you start somebody new, you want to start them with some easy wins. So one of the things that we implemented after hearing that from Darren is, we always have new agents start. I think we have around 80 agents right now, and they come in each month. We have a class, there’s 5 to 10 people per class. One of the things we do is, we actually just had this last night, we had a party. We call it graduation party for our new agents. So when they’ve finished training, they’ve officially graduated out of the training program, and they now become full-fledged agents with our team, and we do a graduation party.
Well, who comes? Well, my goal, “Call your mom, call your dad, your brother, your sister, your aunt, your uncle, your niece, your nephew, your high school bff. Call the people you already know and invite them to your graduation.” Guess what that does? It gets them an easy win, because now they’re calling all people they know, they’re very close with, they’re naturally going to call the easiest ones. But they’re going to call those people and all these people show up. What it does is, it immediately builds an association with the phone that’s positive.
Far too often teams start people out and they’re like, “All right, kid. I got this database of all these leads. They’re like 20 years old. We’ve never talked to them, see if you can convert any of them.” Now people start out, and they’re just getting their ass handed to them left and right. How does that motivate you to want to be on the phone more, when you get your ass handed to you over and over again? So if you can do things to start out with an easy win, that helps massively. So, I’d say that’s one big piece of advice.
Then the second is, you got to schedule this stuff first thing in the morning. People will like, “Oh, I prospect at 4:00. I want to have everything else done, and I can focus on prospecting.” I don’t know about you, but by 4:00 I am fried. I’ve got no gas left in the tank. I just want to go sleep. So what ends up happening? One of two things, I either don’t make the calls because I’m fried, or I make the calls and I’m not very effective because the tank’s empty. So I’m a big fan of, somebody told me this one time, “The phone gets heavier as the day goes on.”
The phone gets heavier as the day goes on, so the earlier you make your phone calls, the lighter the phone is, the easier it is, the more likely you are to do it. The longer you wait, just like the gym, it’s so hard to go work out. At least for me, there’s some people that like workouts. But if my goal is, “I’m going to work out at 6:00 every night,” there’s days where I get my butt kicked so hard at work, I’m like, “I don’t want to go to the gym. I want to go to the bar at 6:00.” That’s where my mindset is sometimes.
Bryce Curry:
Yeah, for sure.
Kyle Whissel:
I’m the same way with exercise. I get that done first thing in the morning. Before anybody else in my house is even awake, my workout’s done. I just want to get it done and over with, nothing’s going to get in the way, I’m good to go. Same thing with prospecting.
Bryce Curry:
One of the questions we get asked quite a bit, and I’m curious about your perspective on it, Cole traditionally is in the PropTech space where we have property information with homeowner information, contacts, and so forth, to help with just listed to sold prospecting, circle prospecting. There’s all different terms and campaigns that you can do with that. But it’s interesting, and I’d love your opinion on this, the balance between, “Hey, what should I do? Should I be a part of the Zillow leads, purchase web leads, FSBO expire versus generating my own prospects?” At what point do you lean into those? Again, I’m not trying to say one is necessarily a bad thing, I’m just getting at, what’s the mix? Have you found an optimal mix for your team? Is there a time and place for a certain type of lead?
Kyle Whissel:
I would say most agents, when they’re newer, they can’t afford some of those courses. Here in San Diego, if you were buying leads, or more specifically connections, from Zillow, you’re spending $1000 a connection right now.
Bryce Curry:
Wow.
Kyle Whissel:
It’s crazy. That’s for just one phone call. That’s just not viable for the majority of agents. So I don’t know that that’s a fit for everybody because, what happens in this industry, you either have time or you have money, and these things fluctuate. So if you’re newer in the industry, you probably have a lot of time and maybe you don’t have a lot of money, so you’re not going after those Zillow leads. But you got all the time in the world where you could circle prospect crazy around sold listings.
But then, as you start to get money, maybe you want to balance that out or flip it in the other direction because the conversion rate on these Zillow leads are $1000 a pop, it’s high. The conversion rate circle prospecting is low. But you don’t have the money, so you can’t afford the high converting lead. So you get to a point where you find where that balance is, whether it’s all of this, all of that, but ultimately find that balance. So I don’t know that there’s a right or wrong.
What I do is, there’s a book called Blue Ocean Strategy. Zillow is a red ocean, and a red ocean is where everybody else is. It’s hyper-competitive. People are fighting over everything, and it’s bloody waters. It’s a red ocean. I look at circle prospecting much more as a blue ocean. There’s very few people doing it. More importantly, there’s virtually no people doing it consistently and effectively. So I look for blue oceans, where can I go and swim that’s not bloody waters full of sharks? Where can I go swim in this tropical blue ocean? I think circle prospecting is one of those places, especially for new agents.
Bryce Curry:
Our podcast is focused on hopefully informing sales professionals, business owners, whether it’s the operations side or at sea level, we have a pretty wide audience. One of the questions I have, and you’ve already touched on it a little bit, if you were in front of 10,000 sales professionals, what would be some advice that you would give them? What would be some encouragement you’d give to sales pros out there trying to make a living at selling and get noticed?
Kyle Whissel:
The biggest thing is, quit practicing on your clients. That’s my best advice. Far too many people are literally learning in the field. They’re practicing with real people, and I think that’s a huge mistake. I think that there’s not enough time, energy, or effort put into role playing. If you think about the NFL, some of the highest paid athletes in the world, a NFL player trained somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 to 3000 hours a year.
Between being in the gym, watching film, practicing on the field, all of this preparation, all of this practice for 17 games a year, and they’re only on the field for less than half of that time period. So for eight and a half games a year, which a game is an hour, so 30 minutes, eight and a half games, so for about four hours and 30 minutes a year of actual game time, they practice 2000 to 3000 hours.
But here we are, salespeople, we don’t want to practice. We’re going to go practice on our clients. Tom Brady didn’t get to the level he is at ’cause he practiced on the field with his opponents, he practiced with his teammates. He put the time and energy in, in the weight room. He put the time and energy in the film room. He put the time and energy on the practice field, so that when he saw the other team lines up in this formation, he knows to call that play. When the team lines up in that formation, call this play.
We need to do that same thing and put that same level into our practice that a football player in the NFL puts in, because we have the ability to make NFL money if we put that same level of NFL effort into it. I think people just don’t practice enough. They’re just going out there in the field, and they’re just royally screwing it up and making mistakes when, if they’d just a little bit more time into their practice and role play, they could convert a substantially higher rate.
Bryce Curry:
One of the things I forgot to talk about was, I noticed in some of your videos that you do the state of the market. You’re doing different things, and it’s out there on your YouTube channel. For our audience, we do get asked, believe it or not, even though we’re in the PropTech side of marketing and prospecting, “Should I be on YouTube?” Go out, and I’m going to put it in a link in the description here of this episode to Kyle’s YouTube channel, because his videos are great, they’re super informative, quick. I just think it’s a great example of an individual and your team using a medium like YouTube. It’s great for consumer search. There’s all kinds of organic leads that are generated from that, but it also establishes that consistency of brand. So, I’ll link those up in the description as well.
Kyle Whissel:
Cool. Yeah, we look at video. Every video that I create, to me, is like an employee. As soon as I shoot a video and release, it’s an employee that starts working. The beauty is, those employees work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year forever. They don’t talk back. They don’t file harassment claims. They don’t try to milk me for overtime. None of that. They just work. The beauty is, every time I create a video, that’s one more employee I’m putting out there that’s working for me.
So in the 30 minutes that we’ve been here, I’ve had videos working for me. So it allows me to duplicate myself, triplicate myself, be in multiple places simultaneously, whereas some other activities don’t allow me to do that, like my door knocking. While I’m knocking, it’s effective. But as soon as I stop knocking, the effectiveness is gone. Where the videos, if I could put that same time into it, that video’s going to keep working for me even after it’s done being shot.
Bryce Curry:
You had mentioned at the start of the episode, a little bit, about social media is a part of the mix for you and your team. Could you unpack that just a little bit? We get questions from various agents in stages of their career of, “What should I do? It seems to always be changing. Who should I turn to?” Any tips there on how an agent or sales producer should be using social media?
Kyle Whissel:
Yeah. I’ll tell you how you shouldn’t be using it, as an excuse to not make phone calls. If you’re listening to this, watching this, I want you to have a real conversation with yourself right now. If you’re posting more stories, or videos, or whatever else, on any of these platforms in a day, then you are having phone calls, you are royally screwing this thing up. If you’re posting 10 stories a day and you’re making four phone calls a day, you are screwing this thing up. You’ve got to make phone calls. I don’t care whether you’re in real estate like me, you’ve mentioned solar insurance, all these others-
Bryce Curry:
Yeah, absolutely.
Kyle Whissel:
If you’re not having conversations with people, you’re screwing it up. So we need to stay focused on actually building relationships, and having conversations, and less on social. Nobody needs to be a TikTok star. Like my guy, who has 445 people in his database, and only dialed 39 of them last month. Last thing he needs to be doing is creating a video. Not until he’s got his sphere of influence down, then he can start thinking about being a TikTok star. But make sure you have your foundation shored up first before you do those things.
But, once you do those things, they can be massively impactful. So don’t use them as an excuse to get away from the phone, you still got to be on the phone. Then you can supplement the phone with the social media. We’re huge fans of it. Again, you can follow me @KyleWhissel on all the different platforms and see the stuff that we’re doing. I think it’s very important, where a lot of people make mistakes is, you go on their social and all it is is new listing, new listing, just sold, just sold, open house, open house. There’s nothing about them.
I integrate my family, my pets, my life, my world into my post so I can humanize myself, so that when somebody lands on me, I’m not a real estate robot. I’m a human. I’m Kyle Whissel. I’m a father of two girls. I’m a husband. I have pet pigs. I go out and go off-roading. I want people to see who I am as a person, and that’s done via my social.
Bryce Curry:
I want want the audience of the info to really key in on what you’re talking about throughout this episode. There’s been just a ton of wisdom given, and I really appreciate your time in unpacking some of the different strategies and different approaches. Again, I got to say, when I was prepping for our time here, looking at your website and your YouTube channel, I was just like, “This is just great examples for across all our verticals at Cole, for all our customers and end users to look at as examples.” I appreciate your time today. We’ll put your socials and link to your website.
Kyle Whissel:
Yeah, for sure. If you guys want to stay connected, you can go to thewhisselway.com. We’ve got our podcast and YouTube channel on there.
Bryce Curry:
Nice.
Kyle Whissel:
You can join our referral network for all the people leaving California, and then you can get into our private Facebook group and our email list where we share a lot of the tips and tricks, stuff we’re doing on our team. Then if you want to go deeper on video, we have a course where we teach all that stuff, so all that stuff is on thewhisselway.com.
Bryce Curry:
Whisselway.com. All right. We’ll put that in there. That’s awesome. Kyle, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for your time and-
Kyle Whissel:
All right. Sounds good, man. We’ll talk to you later.
Bryce Curry:
I hope this episode provided value to you as a salesperson. If you enjoyed our content, please like, subscribe, and leave a review. Make sure to join us for the next episode of The Info by Cole Information.
