Subscribe via:
Show Summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast, host Kristen interviews Clay Lehman, founder of Lehman Strategic Partners, who shares his extensive experience in the real estate industry and the importance of business development and marketing strategies. Clay discusses common mistakes in marketing, the significance of having a clear path for clients, and how to balance entertainment with credibility in content. He emphasizes the transformative role of AI in enhancing marketing efforts while maintaining authenticity and personal voice. The conversation concludes with Clay offering insights on how to connect with him for further guidance.
Resources and Links from this show:
-
Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode
Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Clay Lehman (00:00)
The biggest mistake that I see over and over is a lack of a path. And what I mean by that is, marketing is intended to bring someone from where they are to where you want them.you have to know who your client is.
What questions are they asking And then give them a path to follow. Everything you create and everything you post should have a goal.
biggest mistake I see made over and over again is a lack of calls to action in people’s content.
Kristen (01:56)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Kristen and I’m here with Clay Lehman, who is the founder of Lehman Strategic Partners. He’s gonna help us all with AI, kind of like explain what’s going on in the marketplace, what we should look out for. And he really helps with marketing and business development strategy for real estate professionals. So it’s great to meet you, Clay.Clay Lehman (02:15)
It’s nice to meet you as well. really appreciate you having me on.Kristen (02:17)
Amazing, so let’s get into kind of how you started leaning into the real estate industry.Clay Lehman (02:23)
So about 20 years ago, my first job in real estate was at Pulte Homes here in central Florida as the controller. I’m an accountant by trade, or not by trade anymore, but by training. And so I came to Ocala, Florida to run the accounting group for Pulte. And so that was my first introduction. I transitioned from there to run the REO department for a large.mortgage lender here locally. then from there, that was when I first started my own business, initially managing foreclosures for hedge funds, but then that branched into a real estate brokerage, then a property management business, and then most recently, ⁓ a title company. guess that’s not most recent anymore, just before I started layman strategic partners, which is my most recent venture in real estate. But that’s kind of the path that I’ve taken to get here.
Kristen (03:12)
Wow, so you have really well-rounded experience. What did you, as you’ve been kind of going to all these different areas of the industry, what did you realize was missing?Clay Lehman (03:14)
Yeah.Well, for me, and well, I mean, think for a lot of people, it’s, just the business development side of it. ⁓ we get into, you know, and again, my path was through being a realtor. you know, you receive training on a lot of things when you, you know, do the education courses that are required to get your license, but you never learn how to, ⁓ build your business. So it took me a while, a number of.
false starts in a quote marketing strategy. And I use the air quotes for that because I never really had a marketing strategy. I would just see things other people were doing and say, I should do that too. And it wasn’t until I started, you know, really diving deep into ⁓ reading books on business development and marketing. And then I worked with a couple of coaches in that area that I started to understand the critical nature of having a true strategy.
when you approach business development for it to be effective. I just, that’s when I started to realize how important it was. And then I committed my whole being into transforming myself from an operator, because I always considered myself a really strong operations and accounting person to focusing on becoming a strong business development person. I mean, I’m a big believer that when you own a business, you don’t.
You shouldn’t do everything. You’re not the best at doing everything, but I like knowing a little about everything in my business so that, you know, if worse comes to worse, I can step in if needed. And the business development was that piece that I really dove deep into. And now it’s what I’m passionate about. I just love, you know, looking at people’s funnels and their strategy and how they’re attracting clients and then helping them understand the psychology of bringing a client from where they are.
where you want them to be.
Kristen (05:07)
Yeah, and you’re still using your analytical background because there’s, mean, it is a lot of operational things that you’re doing, not necessarily coming up with the creative of the social, but the backing.Clay Lehman (05:17)
Sure. Well, you nailedit. One of the things that surprised me as I learned more about and in particular marketing is that creativity is important. That wasn’t a surprise. Creativity is important. What was a surprise was the analytics are almost just as important because if you don’t know how to analyze the performance of your marketing channels, then it’s hard to make adjustments. And so that was a big surprise and has come in handy. mean,
I still struggle a little bit with, I don’t love sitting down and just looking at numbers, but it’s important. And I guess maybe having that ability, where I’m going with that is just, was a surprise to me how valuable it was to be able to look at numbers when it came to marketing.
Kristen (06:48)
Absolutely. So you look at a lot of people’s funnels as is, what are some of the same mistakes that you see over and over?Clay Lehman (06:55)
Yeah, that’s a great question.The biggest mistake that I see over and over is a lack of a path. And what I mean by that is, and I used a particular language a minute ago very deliberately. I talk about it a lot. Marketing and business development, but in particular marketing is intended to bring someone from where they are to where you want them. And if you think about
Like if you were talking to somebody on the phone and you needed to direct them where to be, know, first you’d have to understand where they are. And then you’d have to understand how you would get from where they are to where you are. And it’s the same thing in marketing. You have to think about the client’s path along the funnel. So first you have to know who your client is. And that’s the first thing we dive into is going really deep into who your ideal, your ICP, your ideal client profile. Then you have to understand.
What questions are they asking that you can answer to help demonstrate your value to them? And then once they start becoming more interested in you, you have to give them a path to follow. that’s so the biggest mistake, and it took me a minute to get there, is a lack of calls to action. Everything you create and everything you post should have a goal. And it’s a different goal for the different things you create. For example, when you’re creating social media posts, your goal should be
to attract people that aren’t aware of you. So you’re trying to move them into the awareness stage. And to use another analogy, let’s think about dating. If someone calls you and says, hey, I’m Clay and I saw that we met through so-and-so and I think you’re pretty cool, let’s get married. And that’s your first phone call. It’s not exactly the way to accomplish your goal. You’re a little too far down the path. And that’s the same thing.
your first interaction with a client is, hey, nice to meet you. Let’s sign a contract. What it should be is, you know, your social media posts or your goal is for them to become aware of you. Then you want them hopefully to click on your name to see your profile. And if that’s what you want them to do, then your post should say, hey, check me out. Look at my profile or hey, follow me or subscribe.
Then when they check you out, that should have your next marker on the path telling them where to go next. You should have a profile banner that says, you know, whatever that next step is, download my free lead magnet and then have a link to your lead magnet. You want to tell them where to get, you want to tell them what’s the next step to take to continue down the path to connect with you. And you want to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. So the biggest mistake I see made over and over again is a lack of calls to action in people’s content.
Kristen (10:01)
Yeah, and is it, I mean, does it exist where the call to action is kind of just entertainment or information to kind of establish credibility?Clay Lehman (10:09)
Absolutely.Absolutely. Because at the end of the day, I love the framework or the idea that, you know, people want to do business with people that they know, like and trust. And the reason I love that so much is it’s simple and it’s easy for me to remember and it’s easy to understand and it’s easy to put yourself in those shoes and think about who you like doing business with. So the first word in there is no. And so, you know, they have to know you, they have to become aware of you.
Kristen (10:21)
Right?Clay Lehman (10:36)
And then the next word is like. And so to be very clear, not everybody’s gonna like you, but guess what? That’s a good thing because we’ve all worked with people that weren’t a good fit and it’s not the best experience in the world. I don’t care who you are, there’s enough people in the world that you can get the know and the like that you would enjoy working with that it’s okay to scream some people out. In fact, one of my favorite books ⁓ is Content Inc.And one of the things I learned from that book is how important it is to narrow your audience. And to me, that was very counterintuitive, especially because I’m in a small area. And to me, what that meant was I needed to try and specialize in everything. So my content covered everything, which made it very watered down. So it appealed to no one. And that’s the point in Content Inc. is narrow your focus. So,
What you asked is, there ever a call to action that’s just information entertainment? should want your content should almost 100 % be all about value to the recipient, to the user, to the viewer, and very little about promotion. By sharing value, by sharing information, by being entertaining, you are promoting yourself. So there’s absolutely not just space for it. It really should be the focus. I would say.
depending on what you do and what you’re trying to accomplish with your people, it would be more focused on information, but it’s also important to do things like behind the scenes type content or blooper reels or, you know, things that show your, your, your personality. Like my title company, you know, it’s a group of really, really fun people and you don’t normally associate, fun with your title professionals, you know? And so last Halloween we did a,
a series of reels where we dressed up like the Scooby Doo gang and ⁓ solved a title mystery. And we got so much amazing engagement from that. It was incredible. It so much fun. And we’re planning this year’s and I can’t reveal I’d be unfortunately, I’m sworn to secrecy. I signed a binding NDA with my team. I would love to tell you, but there are legal consequences. But anyway, stuff like that, you I don’t think
Kristen (12:21)
Yeah.Clay Lehman (12:41)
And our title company is great example. I think if we posted things, silly things like that every single day, it would undermine our authority or our credibility. But if we only posted, are the new regulations as it relates to your homestead exemption. You know, nobody would engage with that either. It’s got to be a mix of those things.Kristen (13:00)
Absolutely. I mean, I think that’s a really good point. There is a balance in establishing the credibility and get people to get hooked to the marketing file. And I know one of your specialties is you’re really, you’re utilizing AI to its fullest potential. It’s like, I would love for you to talk about the opportunity there and kind of where you see it going.Clay Lehman (13:08)
Yeah, for sure.Yeah,
in fact, I’m not even real. I’m this. am an AI like this is okay. All right. No, I would go much better. Look, I would get like the hair and the so AI is not a coming opportunity. It is an opportunity that is here and now and the thing I love about it is it’s really unlocked my own personal creativity and my ability to create content at scale and very engaging content. mean, obviously
Kristen (13:25)
youI’m there.
Clay Lehman (13:49)
I’m biased, but you know, I feel like it amplifies your skill level. That’s one of the interesting things that happens sometimes when I’ll post about AI and some of the groups that I’m in, and in particular, real estate groups, almost invariably someone posts a skeptical comment. And I welcome that. Like I enjoy having these conversations, you know, where, well, I’d much ratheruse my voice to speak to people. And my point to them is you are. It is your voice if you’re doing it correctly. And it’s something that can take you from having the capacity to do, I don’t know, six, eight hours of work in a day to doing 12 or 14 hours worth of work in that same six to eight hours. So it’s something that you can use as a lever to then amplify your expertise.
I did a series of posts once about how you can use AI to demonstrate that you are the market expert. And some of the skeptical comments that I received were, yes, this is what I don’t like about AI. Someone can fake their expertise. And I don’t disagree with that entirely, meaning someone can go on to an AI tool and say, hey, make me look like an expert in this area.
Kristen (14:51)
youYeah.
Clay Lehman (15:02)
but it’s notgoing to take them very far. The people that will be successful in leveraging AI are the ones that have the wisdom and expertise for AI to amplify. ⁓ I’m in an AI mastermind and it’s interesting to me. I would have expected the average person in there to basically would have expected to skew younger because AI, you perceive that as tech and technical and whatnot.
Kristen (15:12)
Yeah.Clay Lehman (15:28)
younger people tend to, younger people like me, tend to be the early adapters. And in fact, in this AI community, the average age is 53 or 54. And the guy that leads it, who’s in his mid fifties, he says he believes strongly the reason that is, is because of AI’s ability to take what you know in your experience, in your wisdom. And he says, I feel like it’s for people like us.that have experience and have been through it and then can take AI and AI can just amplify that. The other thing that AI does is it just helps you grow your knowledge. It’s almost like one of my favorite topics to learn more about is, and yeah, I’m a bit of a nerd, but it’s the democratization of information and knowledge. And so if I’m going on too long, just…
Give me the time out. I’ll just throw this out there. There’s a great story that I read. can’t remember which book I read it in, but it might have been. Well, I’ll skip that because I really don’t remember. But it’s about Henry Ford. So Henry Ford at the time, richest person in the world or one of the richest people in the world, a newspaper published an article that effectively said that he was dumb. And so he sued them for slander. And in the course of the trial,
Kristen (17:05)
at all.Clay Lehman (17:28)
the defendants called Henry Ford to the stand and started asking him factual questions. So, you know, like how many acres was Louisiana Purchase? Just things that were, you know, things, pieces of knowledge that maybe a well-read, well-educated person would know. And Henry Ford said, listen, you keep asking me these questions. I don’t have to know the answers to these questions. He says, I have a device on my desk with 12 buttons on it.I can press any one of those buttons to connect with the person that has the answer to any question you have. And what struck me about that was he was the richest person in the world and he was able to demonstrate, I have access to knowledge because I have access. Guess what? We all have far like exponentially greater access to knowledge and forget AI, like just through the, power of the internet, the po you know, the, people on the planet that are the furthest from being the richest people in the world.
have this device in their pocket that has access to the world’s information library. Now you layer AI on top of it where it’s like you don’t just have access to the knowledge, but you have access to assimilating the knowledge and what can you do with this knowledge? And it’s the opportunities that AI present to us are mind boggling, but you have to engage with it. And that’s one of the things that I’ve, you know, and this isn’t my quote, someone else said it.
But I feel like it’s really accurate. You’re not going to lose your job to AI. You’re more likely to lose your job to someone using AI. So you be the person using AI. So that was a little bit of a diatribe.
Kristen (18:59)
No, I mean it’s really fascinating and what would you say to somebody, you know, as it pertains particularly to their marketing and social media and blogging and all that, that think that AI kind of reduces authenticity or reduces your personal voice?Clay Lehman (19:14)
It can, it can a hundred percent, but that’s up to the user. The way that you lose your voice to AI is when you seed too much of the creative process to AI. So like for me, for example, I’m happy to share that I write two blogs a week and I write them with AI tools. I’ve built my own sort of AI tools trained on my voice and my area of expertise and my ideal client.And each week, you know, I’ve built a content map so I know what I’m going to be writing about over the course of the next few weeks. And each week I come in and I write with AI, but the key word there is the word with. I write with my AI. I don’t have my AI write for me. I go in and like, let’s say for example, like a lot of my clients are real estate agents and you know, maybe they’re ideal clients, a first time home buyer. If you were to go in and say to chat GPT, write me a blog.
⁓ with tips, five tips for first time home buyers in my geographic area. It would write that for you and it would probably be a pretty good article, but it wouldn’t have your voice if that’s the only thing you gave it. So what I train my clients to do is one, we build them a model that they can use that’s trained on their voice. But even with that, I have them go in and when they want to write a blog about the five tips for first time home buyers, I encourage them to sit down and say,
What are your tips for first time home buyers? Even if you don’t have five, what’s one, two or three? And then what are some stories that you can add about, Hey, I was working with, you know, Billy and Sally and they were this really sweet couple and they thought they had to put 20 % down to buy a house, but I was able to show them a program with the USDA where it was 0%. They had no idea. They cried. It was beautiful. They cried. I cried. It was beautiful. That kind of thing is so critical to include in your stories.
Did I, is that a process that takes time? Yeah, but maybe three minutes, like, you know, not an hour. And that’s the difference. Like if I were to say, Hey, you need to sit down and write a blog. Like for me, for me, for example, like I said, I write two blogs a week. You know what I was doing before AI zero, zero a year. And so now I can do two a week and their topics that are relevant to my clients because I used AI to help me understand my client and what they want to hear about.
Kristen (21:04)
Right.Clay Lehman (21:24)
There are topics that are relevant to me because I cross-reference that to my experience to build my content map. And then when I write my stories, or I’m sorry, when I write my blogs, I interject, okay, so like, cause I’ll write about the topics that, know, like knowing your ideal client. And so my blog might be, okay, you know, what, what are the, what comes out of knowing your ideal client? And then I’ll share how, well, before AI and before I use this prompt,I thought I knew who my ideal client was, but then afterwards I learned that what keeps them up at night was very different than what I expected. And I’ll share that with the model, which then imbues it with my authenticity. And so it’s just really a matter of contrasting what done by AI is and what done with AI is. What I advocate is doing things with AI, not handing over control of everything to AI. And that’s the biggest distinction.
Kristen (22:14)
Absolutely. I mean, it really does matter how you’re using it. And I think that a lot of people don’t take the time to really understand how to use it. So their first impression is like, well, that’s not my voice. That’s not good enough. ⁓Clay Lehman (22:27)
That’s exactly right.Kristen (22:28)
Yeah, this is also fascinating. I mean, it’s very obvious how you help people build their businesses and make them stronger. So I think that you’ve given a lot of good info on both AI, but also kind of the mistakes that maybe people are making in their marketing funnel. I would… Yeah. I mean, I would love for you to tell everybody where to find you and how to work with you.Clay Lehman (22:43)
Well, it’s easy for me to know the mistakes because I made them all.Sure. mean, the easiest thing to do would be you can go to my website, which is www.imclaylayman.com. And I also have my Facebook group, which is ⁓ Unstuck AI for Real Estate Professionals. If you type in Unstuck AI, it’ll come up. And I host live trainings in there every Thursday at 11 a.m., 100 % free. And I share, you know, this week we’re going to be talking about,
Last week was knowing your ideal client. And then this week is how to attract that person where I’m going to talk about, you know, finding where they are, providing things of value, and then leaving little bread crumbs to bring them to where you want them to be.
Kristen (23:29)
I mean you practice what you preach. You’re giving the info to your people. Great. Well thank you so much for being here, Clay. I think that people learned a lot from what you had to say.Clay Lehman (23:33)
Absolutely.I really appreciate it. I’d love to connect with anybody here, you know, in terms of like, I’m happy to engage with anyone. So find me and let’s, let’s talk.
Kristen (23:48)
Amazing. Well, I encourage everyone to please look for Clay and get a hold of him because I think that you’ll, you know, have a lot of value added to your business. So thank you everybody for listening. We will see you back next time. Bye.Clay Lehman (24:00)
Thanks,
