Going Back to School on Sales

Tom Nixon (00:02.344)
Welcome back one and all friends to the Bullhorns and Bullseyes podcast. Curtis, I’m glad that you have a lot of friends because you keep bringing a lot of friends to the Bullhorns and Bullseyes podcast.

Curtis Hays (00:12.076)
This is, I’d say one of the most favorite things about doing this podcast is almost 20 years here consulting in, you know, one way or another in Detroit. And I had some experience in working in Chicago too, and I’ve met a lot of professionals along the way. And so that’s, that’s probably been the biggest joy from doing this podcast is just introducing the world to all these people that I’ve met along the way and letting them share their stories. So yeah, it’s been fun.

Tom Nixon (00:42.216)
it’s great when professional relationships can turn into personal relationships, which is great and sometimes it happens the other way around. Why don’t you introduce our guest and tell us how you met Kate Simon?

Curtis Hays (00:54.348)
Yeah. So about, six years ago or so, when we were living in Birmingham, Kate and her husband, Andrew moved in directly next door to us. And, we had two little girls at the time and got to know Kate and Andrew and, their, their cat when they went away on vacation, my girls love to watch their cat for them. And, so just, just had a great relationship with them and, had a lot in common. We had a great block.

to just a lot of really good people that lived on that street. And so it thought it’d be great to bring Kate Simon on the show today. Kate is the director of coaching, I think at Glover U. So she is, I don’t want to date her here, but probably getting close to 20 years experience in real estate. I think she was Jeff’s first inside sales associate.

Kate Simon (01:42.35)
Close, yeah.

Curtis Hays (01:45.548)
it’s been working with him since her college days and also went to California for a little bit, in my brother and sister’s neck of the woods in orange County lived in Laguna area and had a very successful real estate business there. Came back to Michigan and, and I know it seems when I’m following around on LinkedIn and social media and what you’re doing, you’re doing a lot of great things at, Jeff Glover and associates and Glover you. And so.

Really excited to have you on the show today and talk about sales and marketing and everything you’re doing over there in real estate.

Kate Simon (02:21.646)
I’m excited, thank you so much for having me.

Curtis Hays (02:23.82)
Of course.

Tom Nixon (02:25.128)
Yeah, Kate, for those of us like myself, I saw the Jeff Glover billboards like a few years ago pop up and I’m like, this is interesting, right? because I’m used to residential real estate being the guy that you know or the cousin that you have and somebody, you know, close relationship. I’m like, this is interesting that he’s taking this approach but Glover. So, now, it’s a household name. I feel like in Southeastern Michigan. Glover U is

Kate Simon (02:50.574)
Which is by the way, his tagline. I don’t know if you knew that. It’s literally, well, the tagline is house sold name. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (02:53.48)
the household name. See, I have a household. Yes, the household name. I’m a sucker for puns. Please pass the log back. Congratulations. but Glover U is a arm or subsidiary. Explain what Glover U is.

Kate Simon (03:02.894)
Of course.

Kate Simon (03:08.238)
So GloverU is a sister company to what’s now called Glover Agency. And actually, that’s an interesting story on why Jeff decided to go from Jeff Glover and Associates to Glover Agency, you know, centering a brand around himself versus centering it around the agents. And there’s a lot of success in that decision. But GloverU, it’s a sister company that’s meant to coach and train.

other real estate agents within the industry, whereas Jeff Glover and Associates, Glover Agency, that’s real estate agents helping the consumers out there. And so what we were doing when Glover Agency was being built and having success over the years is we had a lot of different agents around the country asking for God a minute, can I come shadow? How did you guys build this? How did you guys build that? And we really discovered that.

What we were doing with Glover Agency is something that can be duplicated in other markets so long as they follow a certain formula. Now, of course, entrepreneurs, they have their own flavor. So we find a way to take the Glover Agency pillars, the pillars of GloverU, the sales system, and teach it and train it to other brokers around the country to help them hit their goals. So that could either be a solo sales agent who wants to increase their personal sales and income, or it could be a broker, team leader, and owner.

who wants to increase their recruitment, retention, profitability, stuff like that. So it’s pretty wide scope, but we’re helping real estate agents, brokers, and team owners.

Tom Nixon (04:34.376)
And it’s grown because when you started, it was just an idea that you and Jeff had. I’ve watched it, by the way, this wonderful video, which we’ll link to in the show notes. It tells your whole story from even before you graduated college and where you’ve gotten today is impressive. So give us a sense for where it is today. So it started around 2018 ish with just, you know, a couple of people in an idea. And now what is it?

Kate Simon (04:45.134)
Yeah, gosh.

Kate Simon (04:52.526)
Yeah.

Well, you know, Glover U itself was an internal concept, meaning all of the agents within Glover agency had access to this, right? It’s part of our value proposition. It’s part of why people come and join us. And what we were doing every year is every January we would do what we would call like a team advance, spend two days at a hotel. Jeff would bring in speakers. We would do business planning and we would help the agents set their year off right. And so in Jeff’s mind, he’s like, well, if I’m already doing this for my team,

we should open it up for others out there as well. Now, of course there’s, you know, a strategy in mind there, but we knew long -term that there were people out there that needed what we were doing and that we were going to be positioned to be coaching and training them. So it started off as an idea. And if you ask Jeff, he would say that it’s been an idea that’s there the whole time, but he wanted to spend 10 years earning credibility, earning that household name.

For instance, the team, we sold a thousand houses a year. He wanted to be able to say he’s done it and is doing it so that he can earn the credibility of our clientele.

Tom Nixon (05:58.344)
And so today, it gives a sense for how the scale of what it is. How many I know that you’ve amassed 7 ,500 coaching hours, one to one. How big is the team or how big is the clientele?

Kate Simon (06:06.638)
Yeah, yeah.

Kate Simon (06:11.246)
So it’s a, it’s a good question. We have a couple different like levels of involvement. And I would say the two easiest ones are going to be our group coaching. And then we have our one -on -one coaching. Our group coaching programs probably have around 350 to 400, routine, you know, people every month. And then our one -on -one coaching bench is about 250 right now, meaning those are.

250 people that we consult one -on -one every month. And so it’s myself and we have a team of 18 coaches now that carry anywhere between 12 and 20 clients depending on their personal wants and needs.

Tom Nixon (06:46.728)
Curtis, it’s always great to get somebody who focuses their career and their practice on the art of sales. Because I consider myself and probably you do too more on the marketing side, but we’ve talked in this podcast about this like gaping chasm that for whatever reason exists between the marketing functions in the marketing or in the sales functions to the point. Sometimes it becomes at worst adversarial, but at even in the least, what’s usually happening is this lack of reporting.

or lack of like the closed loop. I mean, how would you explain what we’ve covered in the past in terms of that, that gap.

Curtis Hays (07:22.988)
Yeah, well, we’ve talked a lot about that gap and that, there is an alignment between what the sales teams are doing and what the marketing teams are doing. I mean, I love this concept of you guys getting the sales teams together and getting alignment and setting goals at the beginning of the year. What we’re focused on is trying to get marketing to, first of all, be aware of what those goals are.

What are you establishing as the KPIs of where you want your organization to go to? And then what’s the expectation of how marketing is going to support those goals? And so now we have the opportunity to create alignment around the activities that we’re doing. But what we’re finding is that in a lot of organizations, that communication that should exist in leadership between sales and marketing, you know, isn’t there that while there might be the larger corporate objectives everybody’s aware of when it gets down to the departmental level.

We don’t have alignment. We don’t have shared terminology. You know, what you think certain stages of the funnel are and what we think certain stages of the funnel are. We’re using different words. We’ve got different stages and we just don’t understand how those things relate to each other. So I’m interested in Kate and I don’t know if you have a question for Kate, Tom, but I mean, you know, I am interested in how you guys are approaching that.

Tom Nixon (08:48.104)
Well, Kate, I mean, the thing that I always are often here is marketing will, you know, pull up these monthly metrics and say, look at all these leads that we’re sending to sales and sales that is in a separate meeting saying we’re not marketing is not sending us any leads and the ones that they do send us are garbage leads and then they ask the marketing team. Well, they’re not they’re saying they’re not getting get any leads. Well, here’s a lead who followed up on this one.

Kate Simon (09:04.526)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (09:11.688)
We go ask sales. Well, nobody followed up on that one. That’s sitting in the CRM. Has it even been assigned as a task? I think so. So it’s like we can’t even get the teams to cooperate. Why do you see that there’s this like in Curtis’s words, there’s this misappropriation of terms at the base level and now nobody’s even talking about the same thing.

Kate Simon (09:30.862)
So it’s a really good point and I’m gonna try to be as…

brief as I can, because I honestly feel like I could talk about this longer, but the first thing is vision casting, right? So whether it’s the CEO, whether it’s the leader of wherever we’re all going, it’s their responsibility to vision cast to the organization, where we’re going, how we’re going there, whose role is what, and get their buy -in that we’re all going in the same direction. And so from there, what we do as an executive team is they meet more frequently, they meet weekly. I meet with them once a month. And the goal here is to make sure that we’re all on the same page.

page with what our rules are, but what people don’t understand is like those meetings are sometimes an all out brawl on who thinks they’re right and what’s going on. And we have to flush it out on like, Hey, here’s what’s going on at this level. Here’s what’s going on at that level. How can we get the sales team to see this? And so to your point, by the way, one, I’m like smiling when you say the leads, you know,

these aren’t leads here because I think that one of the most common complaints of any salesperson is that the leads are weak, right? We kind of chuckle and think about the old Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross movie. And so number one, there’s an issue in the industry right now.

where people don’t understand what it means to be a salesperson and create value and find that need, and ask really good questions. Most people think sales is, hi, I have a product and I’d like to sell you. Do you want to sell? Do you want to buy it? And when they say no, they’re like, that lead sucks. And it’s like, okay, so before we can even determine the quality of a lead, let’s determine the quality of the conversation you’re having. And then we can determine the quality of the lead. Now,

Kate Simon (11:11.246)
Going back to your other question around like, where is this disconnect? Oftentimes what we’re seeing is a disconnect in the maturity of a lead at a different point, right? And so Bullhorn’s and Bullseye’s, you’re one to many and one to one. And so for any marketing and sales organization, you need to figure out what your sales funnel is. And what I mean by sales funnel is we have a graphic that we use where it’s literally a sales funnel.

And at the top of the sales funnel, we have, what is the message that everybody, regardless of price point, regardless of area, regardless of income, what is that message and how do we make it accessible to them? In the middle, we have, you know, medium commitment, medium buy -in. And at the bottom, it’s, we have our client, we can help them high ticket price, high commitment. And so it’s really important that the sales team understands.

which marketing, which marketing campaign is filling which level of the funnel. And it’s really important for a director of sales to understand at each level, there’s a different followup process. There’s a different conversation. Okay. Now when I’m talking to real estate agents, it’s, it’s the same equivalent of, let’s say you have a super hot 30 day out lead. That’s like, I got to list my home tomorrow. Come on over. And then you have people that are browsing on Zillow and it’s like, I don’t know, six, nine months, maybe.

Well, here’s what happens if you treat the red hot lead of 30 days or less with the same casualty or the same, not casualty, the same casualness as the six plus month out, they’re going to be turned off because they want the motivation of the person that they’re working with to match their motivation. Alternately, if you follow up with somebody who’s clicked on Zillow once and you’re like, all right, Hey, when do you want to set an appointment? They’re going to be like, this person’s not hearing me. And so.

Sales funnel number one, you need to understand like for what the marketing team is working on, where in the process of a lead is this falling and what is the appropriate communication strategy? And then the director of sales needs to come together and say for each level, these are the types of conversations you should be having. These are the types of questions you should be asking to get them to that next level. Does that make sense?

Tom Nixon (13:20.456)
I absolutely love that answer. We have our short. We have our first short for the YouTube channel. By the way, subscribe to the YouTube channel if you haven’t already, but we mentioned the billboards, right? So my first brand impression of anything in that entire organization was a big red billboard with Mr. Glover’s face on it and a household name, which was a great pun, but not true because I never heard of this company before, right? And so, but…

Curtis Hays (13:25.26)
You

Tom Nixon (13:48.968)
I didn’t call him that day and say, hey, I’m thinking of moving. do you want to be my agent? Right. And so this going back to the bull horns, bullseyes thing, and then aligning it with the sales funnel is brilliant because the intent of that billboard, I would guess was not to sell a house that day. Right. It’s so help our clients. Cause I get this question all the time, even from friends and family, like do billboards work like, or why did somebody spend a million dollars on a Superbowl ad or why is that bank?

Kate Simon (14:04.622)
BLOND

Kate Simon (14:16.558)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (14:18.248)
the question is, why are they putting their name on that football stadium? Does that work? So, please educate these people so I don’t have to.

Kate Simon (14:23.79)
Yeah.

So I will be honest, Jeff is a marketing master. Like he can answer this way more detailed than I am, but I’ve asked him this question, like, because I’m a numbers person and it makes me nervous when I’m seeing, okay, we’ve got billboards, we’ve got these, we’ve got magazines. And I’m like, how do you track this? And to answer your question, does this work? It’s yes, with the asterisk of an additional plan. This is where we talk about marketing for the sake of marketing and an actual marketing and branding strategy. And so.

What I’m assuming you didn’t notice about the billboard strategy is that it actually cycled three months on, then he went to radio three months on, then he went to radio. And so he’s taking his marketing budget. And while I’m sure there’s an approach to just flood the market, you cycle it through who you believe your target audience is. And so.

The goal of the billboard was never to sell a house. The goal of the billboard was market credibility. And what we noticed after we leaned into mass advertisement and media is that the amount of call -ins that we would get and the amount of, you know, we could have an agent on the team who got licensed six months ago. We give them a company generated listing. They go knock on the door in Roseville to list this house. And they, what was literally happening is these homeowners were.

giving them the listing paperwork back fully signed and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I see you guys everywhere. Just list my house. And so what the billboard’s doing is building credibility in the same way that if you’re a, you know, an entrepreneur right now, like you should probably have a website, you should probably have social media, not because that’s where business is going to be done, but because any and all consumers are going to be savvy now and they’re going to look online. They’re going to look to see who they’re, who they want to hire. And so what it did for us is really elevate our credibility to a pretty high level pretty quickly.

Tom Nixon (16:08.328)
in it. Yeah. In in terms of whether it works or not, Curtis, you have real life data, real world examples of clients who are running Legion campaigns either with high level branding support or without. What have you found? Unsurprisingly.

Curtis Hays (16:24.204)
Unsurprisingly, yes. I mean, we have a lower cost per acquisition on our lead campaigns when there is.

the cycle concept you talked about Kate of running thought leadership, running educational content, building the brand and building trust. It’s a marketing activity, but it’s doing part of the selling. It’s educating the client. It’s building that trust and credibility that you talked about. And then when they’re in market and you put an ad in front of them for them to call you to fill out a form, something.

They’re 50 % of the way there. They’re 60 % of the way there. Of course, it’s going to be much easier for sales to close it at that point. So that is a warmer lead and the cost per acquisition, at least in that campaign is going to be lower. I think the issue we run into with a lot of our clients is patience. So do you have patience enough to do all of that warming in your marketing, all that education and building trust?

So that when you do go and run these, what are typically more expensive types of campaigns, the lead gen, because that’s what everybody’s doing. Everybody wants leads. So when you go to run lead gen type campaigns, you’re going to be 10 times the cost per click that you’re going to be in, you know, a branding type campaign and awareness campaign. So, you know, just understanding your investment and understanding your marketing budget, and then figuring out how to allocate it and test along the way, measure what you can.

and find what works.

Tom Nixon (18:02.12)
right? I mean, I put myself if Jeff Glover 10 years ago would have knocked on my front door. Do you think I would have taken? Alright, but now it’s like, my god. I’ve seen you. I’d probably invite him in for a cup of coffee. It’s like this is cool. I’m meeting a celebrity but I just but there’s you know, that’s the going back to my friend who asked me why is a bank putting their name on a on a football stadium. The first thing in that sales funnel is getting from unaware to aware.

Kate Simon (18:16.398)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (18:27.304)
So, that’s what those billboards were doing and so you can’t get down to the bottom of the sales funnel if you never go into the top. Speaking of the bottom of the sales funnel, I wanna ask somebody who coaches folks on sales a question that Curtis and I as two introverts might give us both the shivers and that is tell us what people need to know about cold prospecting because the thought of cold calling or cold anything is like again, shivers. Pun intended.

Kate Simon (18:49.806)
Yeah.

Kate Simon (18:55.054)
So for point of context, that is the number one thing I hear from any and all of our clients. We send them a needs analysis, what are your sources of business? What are you open to doing? And there’s some people open to cold calling, but I would say 80 % of our clientele, heck no, I don’t want to do it. And I’ll unpack a little bit of what options that would leave. But for point of context, I started my career cold calling. I didn’t…

understand that it wasn’t something I should like. I was 18 or 19 years old. Jeff threw me in a cubicle. It was 2008. So if you know anything about the market in 2008, it was pretty devastating here in Metro Detroit. And every day I had a stack of 150 homes that didn’t sell. And it was my job to go through a script and earn an opportunity to get in front of them. And so my daily target was 40 conversations and one or two appointments set. And so that would take me anywhere from

six to eight hours a day. And then when I built my business in California, it was all cold doors. It was cold doors and open houses. And so I would spend the first two and a half hours of every day hat on, podcast, tennis shoes on, and I would go door knock. You know, Hey, your neighbor’s home just sold in the area. We know when that happens, two or three more will sell right away. Who do you know that’s next to move? And so I think that first of all, you have to have a really strong why to be willing to be that uncomfortable.

right? to, to go knock on a stranger’s door, to go walk on streets that you don’t, you know, you’re not familiar with. So you have to have a really strong why as to why you’re doing it otherwise. And there’s no shame in this. Everybody wants to be a referral based business. They just want to do business with people where their phone rings in word. I get that. And that is a position you earn over time and build a database where you service the database. And then we can start to predict when the phone calls are going to come in. But unless you have a business that’s giving you,

50 deals a year, you’re probably gonna have to supplement with an activity like cold calling. Now, it doesn’t have to be cold calling, but what I’d encourage you to think about is what is your mindset around the conversation of cold calling? And just tell me what’s on your mind. When you think of cold calling and calling a stranger, what comes to your mind?

Tom Nixon (20:58.216)
I’m definitely afraid that they’re going to say no and hang up on me and I’m going to feel like a fool.

Curtis Hays (21:02.572)
rejection.

Kate Simon (21:02.734)
Okay, but what does that actually mean about you?

Tom Nixon (21:07.112)
That I’m not good. I can’t sell.

Kate Simon (21:09.966)
But when you walk into, I don’t know, Nordstrom or a store and you walk through the door and immediately you’re greeted by somebody and they say, hey, can I help you find anything? Even though you haven’t found it yet, what is your first answer?

Tom Nixon (21:25.096)
I’m just looking or I’m all set or something.

Kate Simon (21:26.542)
Okay, and how much time and thought did you put to the salesperson who asked you that?

Tom Nixon (21:31.08)
Well, just to clarify, if I walk into Nordstrom, they usually ask, what are you doing here? And then so so then I go to the gap and they’re like, welcome. No, so, you know, it’s a rote answer. They probably expect that it’s coming, right? I guess because they probably hear that all day that, you know, I’m just looking or I’m all set or whatever, right?

Kate Simon (21:34.894)
Okay, I know, I was like, maybe that’s not the best example, but, grab some supplies, here ever!

Kate Simon (21:50.606)
But ask the consumer, honestly, and try this over the next week. How much space does that salesperson rent in your mind? Like when you’re at the store, when you get in your car and drive home, are you thinking of what an idiot that salesperson was for asking you? Right? And so part of the fear behind cold calling is a story we make up around what it means if somebody says yes or no to us, and if they’re rejecting us. Now our relationship to rejection, which is probably a different podcast, is something else, right? And we have to ask ourselves, is somebody saying no to us and rejecting us as a human being?

Tom Nixon (22:02.216)
No, no.

Kate Simon (22:20.654)
Or are they saying no to the product and service that we’re offering now as a salesperson? If you believe you can help somebody, you genuinely believe you can help somebody. It is your job to find a way to deliver a message in a way that’s going to cause people to say yes. So when I was prospecting in 08, 09, I don’t know if I ever talked to a happy prospect. They lost 35 to 40 % of their equity. They hired an agent that.

that overpriced their home and unfortunately what they were doing is chasing the market down every single month and they were pissed off. Now some of these people were either going to lose their home, short sale their home, or they were going to just take it off the market. And so there’s a skill in communication that we practice which is matching and mirroring. And so if you’re angry and frustrated and you’re desperate,

And a salesperson came to you all cheery at the door and was like, Hey, Curtis, how can I help you? And Stephanie, you would probably want to throw me through the window because there’s no empathy there. There’s no, I can see you. You can see me. And so what we were trained to do in these conversations is Mr. Mrs. Seller, I am so sorry what you’re going through. You know, and we don’t despair, you know, talk disparagingly to other about other agents, but Hey, I’m really sorry. Your agent did you a disservice. And I’m just curious.

If you had somebody that could help sell this in the next 30 days, is it worth a 15 minute conversation? In a lot of the times, like we have to be willing to see somebody at their worst when they’re scared, when they’ve been sold by somebody who didn’t give them a service and sit with them and earn that credibility that we can actually help them. Now, one of the things Jeff taught me, and we talk about this all the time and he said,

or he said, Kate, what do you believe the differences between a salesperson and a con artist? Because a lot of times when people think of cold calling, they think sleazy used car salesmen. And we were kind of talking about it and he said, the answer is intent. So if you genuinely know that you can help these people, how uncomfortable are you willing to get to put yourself in the middle of the problem they’re having and the solution you have to offer?

Kate Simon (24:23.598)
Right? Now, if you don’t have that solution, then yeah, that’s a different conversation, but you have to genuinely believe in the product that you have and be willing to get uncomfortable with them to bring them forward to a solution together.

Tom Nixon (24:36.456)
Yeah, that’s great. And I did take some sales training. I took Sandler amongst other things. But one of the things I really took away from that was they preach focus on the behaviors, not on the outcomes, right? The outcome that you want is that you did the behaviors, right? So you did the cold call. You did the prospecting. And so, Curtis, I’m just wondering is Kate’s talking. I’m drawing this correlation between cold calling and the lead gen stuff that we do online, right? There’s.

It’s okay to hear a lot of no’s where you’re not hearing directly no when you’re doing lead gen activity, but you’re getting clicks that aren’t converting, right? So don’t we have to bake some of that in as acceptable waste is the wrong word, but expected and acceptable failure so that we can continue the behavior so that we can get to the ultimate wins.

Curtis Hays (25:20.716)
Yeah, I think we have to ask ourselves why, right? Is it the, is it the wrong message? And that’s not resonating with people. Is it the wrong audience? Maybe it’s the right message, but it’s the wrong audience. There’s, there’s oftentimes a number of different factors that can lead into that. And you’re certainly going to put yourself into a bad position if you just try to keep doing the same thing over and over again, and, you know, expect to get a different results. Like, well, Facebook didn’t work. So let’s go try that same thing on LinkedIn.

that didn’t work. Let’s go. Maybe Google will work. Right. I think that’s, that’s oftentimes an issue. Or if you think that one message on one platform is going to work for you, you know, that’s also a recipe for failure. Right. So I think meeting, meeting that consumer again, where they’re at and having a message that’s going to resonate with them that what I heard Kate say is, and we’ve,

Tom Nixon (25:48.904)
Right?

Tom Nixon (26:04.552)
Yeah, also like it.

Curtis Hays (26:15.372)
This word has been coming up a lot in our conversations, Tom, is authentic, right? That if you can come across with authenticity and that mirror match, they feel comfortable then having a conversation with you. Okay, now you’re just turning into a problem solver. You’re just helping them get through the mess that they’re in today. I know in real estate, it’s not always a mess. Sometimes it’s like, it’s a different stage of life. I’m going to sell.

this home and go to my retirement home and put some money away. Right. So they’re excited about selling their house and the opportunities that are there. And so you’re meeting them where they’re at with that, with that excitement and then they’re trusting. Okay. Yeah. You’re, you’re the person that’s going to help me get to where I want to go next.

Tom Nixon (26:59.784)
I think there’s…

Kate Simon (26:59.822)
Curtis, you said something really important. I’m sorry for interrupting. And this is the difference between sales 1 .0 and sales 3 .0. Sales 1 .0 is the salesperson is selling to their end result. Sales 3 .0 is the salesperson is selling to the consumer’s end result. So what that looks like in real estate is, you know, Hey Kate, I see that you had your home on the market.

you know, when do you want to set up a time for me to come over and list your home, AKA I get another listing. Whereas if you can say, Hey Kate, I see that you wanted to move to Grand Rapids to get closer to family and a job transfer. How soon do you want to meet so we can help you get your on your way to Grand Rapids?

It’s the same conversation, but it’s focused on the client instead of the actual salesperson. Like, let’s be clear, at least in real estate, nobody’s excited to list their house and have strangers come through. They’re excited about what it frees up on the other side. And there’s so many elementary salespeople that spend the time focused on what they bring to the table and not where in the process for the consumer this is. The end goal for them is not buying or selling real estate. The end goal is a different experience than they’re having now. And you’re just a piece of it.

And so there’s so many salespeople that don’t understand that where the real estate transaction or where this transaction falls in the consumer’s ultimate goal.

Curtis Hays (28:15.212)
We have the same problem in marketing, right, Tom? Okay, well you say it, we’re thinking the same thing.

Tom Nixon (28:15.688)
And I was just gonna say there’s a lesson to take. Yeah, and I’m glad you did it, buddy, because I was gonna make the point, but then you just illustrated it first, which is that there’s a lesson to be had there in terms of how you apply the messaging, right? The person isn’t looking. The customer isn’t looking to split a six percent commission two ways. The person is looking to change their life in some way. And if you could focus on that in your messaging at the top of the funnel and then reinforce it at the bottom of the funnel, man, that’s just that’s where the magic is.

the other word you mentioned or didn’t mention, I thought you were going to mention when you said the word we keep hearing a lot is patience. Cause you and I had the conversation about, you know, there could be an expectation that lead Jen or cold calling or prospecting or sales and marketing activity of any kind is works like a gumball, right? I’m going to our gumball machine. I put 50 bucks in the LinkedIn. I pull the lever and outcomes lead. And then I just go take the lead and convert it in that 50 bucks is not worth 5 ,000. So, urging patients, Kate, so.

Do you sell homes anymore? Are you focused full time on coaching?

Kate Simon (29:20.622)
pretty full time on coaching. I get referrals here and there and I welcome them by the way, but depending on my personal load, I usually refer them out to somebody on my team. Now I’m the mom of two young girls and so it takes a lot to kind of pull me out evenings and weekends, which is of course when consumers want to buy and sell houses. But I do have a team that I’ve worked with for years that I send referrals to.

Curtis Hays (29:44.3)
I want to hear the story, Kate, which I don’t think I’ve heard is like, so you’re in real estate, you’re knocking on doors and you’re doing that whole thing. When did you realize and what was that like when like, no coaching is for me, like helping other people is what I’m meant to do.

Kate Simon (30:00.206)
Well, okay. And so this is like a, it’s a vulnerable story, but I’ve shared it and it’s like, so, and this is why honestly, my messaging now, Curtis, I’m so passionate about leadership and making sure that, you know, when we have entrepreneurs that sell 50 houses, all of a sudden they’re a real estate broker and they’re a leader. And it’s like, okay, well, those two things aren’t the same. And so I had a mentor who invited me to move out to California and I lived with him and his girlfriend at the time. And,

He was really successful out in Malibu, California, selling real estate.

But when I got there, you know, of course I’m used to working with Jeff, right? And, and every, you know, everything’s pretty systemized. You know what to expect, you know, how many calls you’re going to make. And, and I sat there on the first day and I was, I was kind of like, okay, well, where’s the onboarding? Like where, where’s the stuff I need to know? And he’s like, you just follow me around. And I was like, okay, this doesn’t seem right. And so I spent about three months just following him around. And I realized that I was going to go broke. I was going to have to pack my stuff up, move back to Michigan. Like this was not working. And.

I didn’t have a path that I was being trained on. It was sort of like, well, hopefully you get it. So I aligned with a different broker who had a plan, AKA, this is the importance of vision casting. If you’re a leader and you want your people to trust you, you have to have a vision that you’re selling them to trust in a pathway they can follow. This person did, but I was down to 60 days living expenses. I was like, and in California, it’s pretty steep. Okay. Like I was in trouble. So there were…

I personally believe you have to master something before you coach in it. And so there was only one area of the business I felt like I could truly master at that time. And that ironically enough was cold calling. And so I would wake up at 4 .30 in the morning, California time, and I had one client every morning, it would be 7 .30 in like Metro Detroit or the East coast. And they would be cold calling. I would be on the other side of the phone and I would literally be telling them what to say.

Kate Simon (31:56.526)
I would be live prospecting with them. And so I had a roommate at the time, so I would literally sit in a parking lot, pitch black, 4 .30 in the morning, and I had two or three clients every day. Then I would get up, shower, and then I’d start door knocking and I would do my day. And I did that for a while, but I started charging clients a nominal amount, I don’t know, two, 300 bucks a month, just to help them live prospect and cold call.

from there, I got fortunately busy with real estate. And so I was like, okay, I’m not into the coaching thing right now. And then circled back with it, of course, once, Jeff’s vision aligned with mine. So, yeah, so I technically started coaching on accident because I needed to make sure I could feed myself.

Curtis Hays (32:30.572)
That’s awesome.

Tom Nixon (32:37.224)
Nice. Good. Well, that’s how most great entrepreneurship starts. So, good for you. Well, this has been great. Where can people go to learn more about Glover U?

Kate Simon (32:47.886)
Gloveru .com, of course, there’s a lot of information there. We’ve got, you know, I’m easy to reach on Facebook. I share a lot of free content on Facebook. We also have a Gloveru YouTube channel. So if you are actually in real estate sales, there’s a lot of good content there, but there’s really good entrepreneurial content in there as well. So Gloveru .com, Gloveru on YouTube. And then of course you can personally find me on Facebook, Kate Simon.

Tom Nixon (33:13.096)
Okay, not LinkedIn, but more Facebook.

Kate Simon (33:15.118)
You know, you guys will have to talk to me about LinkedIn. I have not taken the plunge into LinkedIn. Believe it or not, I do better on Facebook because it’s more disarming than LinkedIn, at least in my industry. More social.

Tom Nixon (33:28.328)
Yeah, sure. Sure. Cool. Any final words? Somebody who is maybe right in your wheelhouse for who would be a good student of Glover U and they’re thinking, what am I going to get out of it? What’s the biggest piece of value as your final thought Kate that people are going to get out of enrolling in Glover U?

Kate Simon (33:47.726)
you, if you have a direction that you want to go and you’re not there yet, follow somebody who’s walked that path and has a history of walking other people down that path. I will say that it’s, it’s really sad when I see somebody with a lot of potential and they’re attached to the wrong leadership. They’re attached to the, they, they it’s attached to the wrong vision. And so be incredibly,

Diligent in your research on who you want to follow why you want to follow them and then stick to it because the other thing we see is I’m gonna follow this person for a month I’m gonna follow this person for a month and it’s like okay you pick one person or at least one concept for duration of time Go all in and and let us do the heavy lifting for you You

Tom Nixon (34:35.72)
I love it. Well, Curtis, we get by with a little help from your friends. So, thank you for introducing us to Kate and got anyone else back there?

Curtis Hays (34:44.14)
Well, it was my pleasure inviting Kate. We could invite Andrew on the show, Kate. What do you think? His background is Kate’s husband, Andrew. He’s kind of in marketing, sales, finance side of things. So we could always invite him on the show.

Kate Simon (34:52.206)
Yeah.

Kate Simon (34:57.71)
Yeah, yeah.

Tom Nixon (35:03.176)
There you go.

Kate Simon (35:03.534)
Yeah, he’s a fun one. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (35:05.8)
cool. Well, stay tuned everyone. That might just be on the horizon at Bullhorns and Bulls Eyes. Until then, we’ll see you. Giddy up.