Stop Losing Real Estate Leads: How Investors Use Carrot to Convert More Sellers Online

Trevor Mauch – Carrot.com (00:00)
Yeah, one of the biggest ones that I hear a lot Michelle is people are always wanting to get more leads or I was talking with a coaching client on Tuesday and his main issue that he brought up was like, man, I need more leads. And so we were digging into that, which that’s the part that’s the part that Carrot takes care of. But I would say at least 70 % of the time that I talk with people where they say they need more leads, they actually don’t need more leads. They actually need to follow up better. They need to take the leads that they’ve already gotten, actually do something with them. They need to answer the phone calls of those leads that are coming in quicker.

Michelle Kesil (02:01)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil. Today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, Trevor Mauch, who has created Carrot.com, which helps real estate investors generate consistent, high quality inbound leads online. So really excited to have you here today, Trevor.

Trevor Mauch – Carrot.com (02:24)
Michelle, appreciate you. Good to connect with you and I’m excited to chat with you.

Michelle Kesil (02:27)
Perfect, let’s dive in. So first off, for those not familiar with your world, can you share what your main focus is?

Trevor Mauch – Carrot.com (02:36)
Yeah, we started business in 2014 and ever since then we’ve helped our clients mostly flippers, wholesalers, land flippers.

I generate a lot of inbound leads so if you were to Google something like sell my house fast insert any city or state in America or Canada. You’re probably going to find 1238 Carrot sites controlling page one in Google and now a lot of our sites controlling the chat GPT references to so we help we help you get in front of all the flood of motivated house sellers online.

Michelle Kesil (03:06)
Awesome. And is this nationwide?

Trevor Mauch – Carrot.com (03:09)
Yeah, it’s shoot. It’s funny if you were to pull up what a motivated house seller would search in any city pretty much in America, you’re going to find Carrot sites in those markets control on the top. So nationwide, a lot of our clients are up in Canada too. But believe it or not, in a few over in New Zealand and South Africa. we have flippers flipping South Africa successfully getting leads online right now too.

Michelle Kesil (03:31)
Awesome. And what made you create this platform?

Trevor Mauch – Carrot.com (03:34)
Yes, I got started in real estate myself in 2004. was a 21 year old college kid had no money, no credit that literally the the infomercial story. I watched the Carlton Sheets infomercial. My dad actually had bought that thing years prior. It sitting on the shelf and he kind of made a bet with me and he said hey if you can have that course and don’t have to pay me for it if you buy a property in the next year. If you don’t buy a property in the next year and you take this bet then you’ve got to pay me $500 for that course and I

took the bet. was his no money down course, bought my first four unit building up there by my college for no money down and I still own that property today, cash flowed from day one. So that kind of got me started, Michelle, in the real estate side. But then what I discovered for myself anyway is I wanted to then flip and wholesale and my wife and I, we got married after college, moved up to the big city in Oregon up in Portland.

And I tried to wholesale and flip and I just realized for me what I love the most was the marketing side. I’m like I enjoy the marketing side but I personally didn’t want to do the daily activity of the wholesaling or flipping business and I think that’s one of the beautiful things is you can find the part of the business that you love the most and go all in on it. And for me it was marketing. So I melded real estate marketing

I learned how to launch my first website shortly after that. I would have been probably 2006, 2007 and since then we’ve helped more

people in real estate generate more motivated seller leads and close over a billion dollars in deals over the last 10 years. So that’s where it started. It started in real estate. Realized I wanted to do, I loved marketing, paired the two together, and I just found that the internet is just increasingly so such an amazing spot to be able to get in front of your best customers.

Michelle Kesil (06:03)
Yeah, absolutely. And what would you say differentiates your platform from others?

Trevor Mauch – Carrot.com (06:09)
Yeah, the big thing that we started with years ago, it still doesn’t just prove to doesn’t just prove true today, but we’ve doubled down on his performance. Michelle when when we were getting going out of the gates in 2013 2014, there’s a million different ways that you could launch a website just like there is today with AI. You anybody can go to AI go to versell or to go to base 44 or go to Claude and launch a website right launching websites is not hard. But what we found was people would get online, but they were losing leads and deals.

because that website wasn’t dialed in from a performance standpoint very well. Even when they would hire a local web developer and that person would say that it was dialed in for performance, I would look at it and we would see little tweaks that would actually make the conversion rate go up. And we were starting to find that people in an industry like this, where one deal can net you 10, 20, 30, 50, $100,000, if you lose one lead, one deal because of a performance issue on your online marketing, that’s a big deal.

And so we doubled down on that. just said we’re not going to be the most flexible designer in our software. We’re not going to be the software that’s going to give you all the options, but we are the software in the company that will give you the best performance. We’re going to put the most money in your pocket.

And so we just doubled down on that. Now recently we’ve baked AI into our platform a lot. So we’ve taken the things that were hard about the site build out and the content editing and some of the other things before and we’ve made it way easier with AI. But yeah, it’s performance Michelle. We’ve been like, we are going to make it so I don’t care if you’re the biggest investor in the country or someone who’s just getting going. So you don’t have to worry about are you losing leads and deals because it’s not fast enough, because it’s not set up for conversion or because there’s some SEO.

issues happening.

Michelle Kesil (07:51)
Yeah, amazing. And so how does an investor utilize this platform in the best way?

Trevor Mauch – Carrot.com (07:57)
Yes, so in investors, let’s say you’re a house flipper or land flipper. We have a lot of land flipping people use our software or we’re going into other markets to the investors have business in businesses. And so a lot of our flipper clients have construction companies or electrician companies. They’re using Carrot for those two. But what you essentially do is I always say all offline marketing drives online demand. So every bit of marketing already doing if you’re doing direct mail, if you’re doing cold calling, if you’re doing radio or TV or billboards or

of those things. All of those create online demand because when someone gets that direct mail piece or they see the billboard, what do most people do? They’re gonna pick up their phone and Google your company. They’re gonna look up your website if it’s on there or Google your name or even the phone number in that advertisement. And so the very first thing a Real Estate Investor is gonna do is we say that you need to own your online credibility profile, right? Build that credibility hub and when you do a website right, it’s your true credibility hub of your whole business. So that’s the first thing is we start

there, you’d launch a high-performance site, you’re leveraging our framework, but then go through and do some customizations and add your credibility, add your, you how many years you’ve been in business, talk about how many deals you’ve done, talk about the specific situations of the types of people you’ve served and don’t just say I buy houses from people who went through probate, show the example, right? Show it, show the real picture of a house that you worked with and here’s Johnny in Duluth and Johnny went through this situation and

here’s his actual house I helped him buy I helped him sell his house in 30 days. So that’s the first thing is nail the credibility profile. The next thing that Michelle is even if all people did was that that that’s going to increase the ROI and from all of their

right all their offline marketing is going to perform better now because you’ve nailed the credibility hub. But what a lot of our clients will do is they go great I but I want new leads coming to me I want new leads coming to me that are from the internet that don’t know about me yet from Google searches from paid

ads, things like that. So the very next thing that people will do, like some of our biggest clients like Nick Perry, he’s one of the biggest wholesalers in America, he just moved his Google PPC landing pages over to Carat because our speed is the fastest in the industry and the flexibility to build the landing pages is there and we bring our data of what’s working across thousands of thousands of websites and millions of leads. We say these are the pages you should be launching for PPC. So that’s the second

Second thing is they use this for launching really quick, highly effective landing pages for their paid ad campaigns. But what we’re most known for is getting you ranked in Google and now AI Search in front of the people who are actively looking for solution. They would use our software, use our platform, use our services to be able to go get ranked at the top of Google or now get mentioned in ChatGPT.

Michelle Kesil (11:19)
Yeah, that’s amazing that you were able to create this platform and help people get their names out there.

Trevor Mauch – Carrot.com (11:27)
Yeah, for sure. For sure.

Michelle Kesil (11:29)
And what do you feel have been some of the main keys that have allowed your business to be able to grow and run successfully?

Trevor Mauch – Carrot.com (11:37)
Yeah, I I think early on and same thing, you know, in the second season, we’ve been a business for shoot 30 almost 13 years now, which is wild to say. I think the things that helped us grow the best is number one, you focus on one thing and get insanely good at it. I think the companies in my past and the companies I’ll see today that that kind of fizzle out is they don’t master one thing. They try to be really, really good at seven or eight or nine things. And so I think for us, we just said we’re to get insanely good at

We’re gonna we’re gonna make it so our websites perform so well That there’s nobody that can beat us here and that the value of that is really really high for the people who are serious about their marketing So that’s the first thing is whatever you do if you’re a real estate investor Find one thing you can be the best at right? Can you know the market better than anybody else? Can you know the construction costs better than anybody else so can make more accurate offers? Can you? You know be the most local

person you’re always gonna be at every meeting you can be the most can you be the most responsive build the whole business around responsiveness right just find one thing that you can double down on and be amazing at the next thing I would say Michelle is is be human

⁓ That’s something that in the in this day of AI. I think one of the biggest challenges we all have is let’s put AI into everything. Let’s automate put AI into this put AI into that. I think that we’re at a spot where so many people are trying to automate the human away with AI that those companies that get ahead and actually say no we’re gonna get we’re gonna we’re gonna go back to human before before the trend is there. I think everyone is gonna be craving for the human touch within 12 to 18 months craving for

for an actual human on a phone, craving for an email that actually tells a real story, not something that looks like it’s AI slop. So those two things for us have been a big deal. Focus on one thing and be the best at it. Just go deep, deep, deep, and then be human and connect with people.

Michelle Kesil (13:34)
Yeah, definitely. mean, relationships are important in this space and that’s AI just can’t replicate.

Trevor Mauch – Carrot.com (13:39)
Yep.

no, 100%. 100%.

Michelle Kesil (13:44)
And what are you most focused on solving or scaling to next?

Trevor Mauch – Carrot.com (13:49)
Mm.

Yeah, so going back to the AI topic that real estate investors that we work with, I’ve got a coaching group called Epic and that group, it’s like Investor Fuel as well. There’s a lot of people in there that are crushing it, but the problem is a lot of them are working a lot as well. And we’re in a season in this industry where margins are getting squeezed for a lot of the businesses, where ⁓ it might be harder to get some of the properties sold or some people are having a harder time closing deals while others are having their best years ever. And at the end of the day, I see a lot of busy.

And so the big thing that we’re focusing in on

is how do we remove as many possible tasks from your whole marketing stack? So AI can do the things that AI can do really well. So you as the human can do the things that only the human can do great. Whether that’s actually just have more free time or whether it’s actually spending more time with your prospects, with your sellers, whatever it is. So we’re doubling down Michelle on baking AI and data into our products to remove as many as many manual processes as possible from

your marketing.

And our hope is that we can save you 50 to 80 % of the time you’re currently spending in marketing. We want to trim that down. One of the things we’re starting to bake in right now and dream up how it’s going to go into the platform is when you log into Carrot, we want it. We want to make it so all of your marketing is housed in one spot. So if you’re doing direct mail or Facebook ads or Google ads or any of those types of things, how do we make it so all of your data is one spot and then our AI machine is able to look at that and give you insights to dramatically

down the amount of time that’s going to take you to make decisions on marketing. Those are things we’re working on now. But yeah, the biggest thing, Michelle, is I think when people in a part of the industry that we’re in right now where you have to run more slim, you have to run in a way that is tighter, probably fewer people to be able to really go compete now in some of the markets until the market picks up big time, you’ve got to be really choosy where you spend your time. So we’re to see if we can’t trim 50 to 80 % of the time that you’re spending on your marketing sequence.

go focus in other spots that’s important.

Michelle Kesil (16:30)
Yeah, amazing. And how does the service work? Is it like a subscription base or what does the structure look like?

Trevor Mauch – Carrot.com (16:39)
Yeah, it’s it’s a it’s a software as a service and and I would even say that we’re we’re almost even kind of move into into a services software. Here’s what I mean by that, but yeah, you come join. It’s a monthly subscription or an annual. There’s a discount for that. We do have the software which is the base and it’s got the websites, the marketing tools, amazing support training, things like that. But then we’ve realized a lot of people. They’re just like I don’t have any time to go do any of work. I’m not going to go go through the training.

I’m not going to click the buttons even with the AI tools. I’m not going to go add this picture to my website. So we do have services that can pick all that up for you. So basically you can choose. Hey, I’m either willing to invest time into customizing this and going through Carrots training and using the software to get the result or I can invest money and accelerate it through Carrot services or the marketplace that we have of other vendors in there that can help care customers too. So monthly or annual subscription. But then you choose how much or how little work you want to do.

and then we connect you with the right vendors to make that happen.

Michelle Kesil (17:40)
Awesome. And as far as other integrations or support, where else do you feel investors should be spending their time and resources in conjunction to Carrot’s marketing process?

Trevor Mauch – Carrot.com (17:54)
Yeah, one of the biggest ones that I hear a lot Michelle is people are always wanting to get more leads or I was talking with a coaching client on Tuesday and his main issue that he brought up was like, man, I need more leads. And so we were digging into that, which that’s the part that’s the part that Carrot takes care of. But I would say at least 70 % of the time that I talk with people where they say they need more leads, they actually don’t need more leads. They actually need to follow up better. They need to take the leads that they’ve already gotten, actually do something with them. They need to answer the phone calls of those leads that are coming in.

need to put people into better follow-up sequences and if they were if they were to spend more time there I think that their marketing would dramatically improve and so That that’s the biggest thing is people are so focused on getting more in the door But then they drop it at shoot my job now is 80 % done once I got them in the door Look at it the other way treat it as as marketing Your job is only 20 % done once that lead comes in the door 80 % of the work now

Should be happening of following up caring for that person because they came to your website or they called you up because they have a problem They want to solve right they came to you and they have a problem that they want to solve then I think if investors treated it the way like if they imagine that if that was their grandma or their aunt who truly had a problem and And if they’re if their aunt or grandma reached out to somebody to get the problem solved and that person would not Follow back up with them to help them solve the problem their aunt and grandma would be in a hard spot

And so I just want investors to go take the leads you already got. I don’t care if you have to use a tool like our Carrot CRM where we have an AI lead manager where we can converse with those leads by text and email with you if you want to to set up a call with you. They can book calls for you or if you just need a carve out two hours a day and make it you know text and call that the leads that are in there yourself or you need to hire somebody to do it. Go through your lead database and see what’s already in there and serve the people who already need help.

Michelle Kesil (19:51)
Absolutely. And you mentioned a few times that you do coaching. that like, what does that look like?

Trevor Mauch – Carrot.com (19:59)
Yeah, so on the coaching side of it, it’s more of a labor of love on my end. It’s something I just enjoy doing. We had these events for 10 years, almost called Carrot Camp. Actually, I’m wearing a Carrot Camp hat. So we had these Carrot Camp events. And it’s up here in Roseburg, Oregon, town of 25,000 people. We’ve got the mountains and the rivers.

And we would get 15 to 20 people out here two three times a year talk business mastermind then we take him up in the mountains and just kind of get him get away from phones and get him connecting with people and connect with nature. So that’s where it started because people started coming their second and their third and fifth and one guy came to eight or nine Carrot camps and people just kept saying hey this is amazing on the business unlocks out of things because I would I would always teach how do you build a business that that frees you how do you build a business that that is one you don’t want to retire from how do you build a business

that

doesn’t require you to work 60, 70, 80 hours a week to drive it. How do you build a business that does the three things that I think a business should do for you? I think business should give you work that interests and energize you, number one. You should be interested and energized in your work more often than not. Not every hour, none of us, I don’t care what type of job you’re in, no one’s gonna be pumped about their job every hour, but we should be pretty interested and energized about the work that we get to do, whether we own a business or work in a business.

⁓ more often than not 70 80 percent. Number two is it should fund your vision so we should have some level of clarity on what it is that we’re working for.

Because if we don’t have a vision what we’re building this business for, we’ll usually just put our heads down and keep on working, keep on growing and trying to grow it even bigger. Because we’re in a mastermind and everyone else around me, there’s some people with a bigger number and I guess I just need to have a bigger number too. And the problem is Michelle, there’s always a bigger number. Numbers never end. And so if we’re basing our business growth off of I just need to grow to a bigger number because that’s where I feel valued and that’s where I feel valid, we start to hit this phase that I

called anxious striving. And that marks, I would say, most entrepreneurs at one point in their life, if not all, are in a massive period of anxious striving, where you keep on wanting to move forward, but there’s this general lack of consistent peace at the base. And there’s just this little kind of ⁓ string of anxiousness in there. Like, I feel like I need to keep pressing. But when you really press into people and ask, well, why? Most of time, they don’t have a vision for what they’re actually building.

second thing we should have a vision and the business should fund that vision. Number three, which to me is the most important but also probably the easiest one for us to lose is you should make an impact that you’re proud of. And I think it’s easy for us as entrepreneurs to go, yeah, I helped that customer, that’s, yes, we should feel proud about the impact we’re making with our customers specifically. But asking the question, how would the world or your community be worse off if your company didn’t exist? And if you can’t answer

that

question, how would the world or your community be worse off if your company didn’t exist, then very likely we’re building the business potentially for the wrong reasons. So those are the three things I work on with people. Michelle’s is to build a business that gives them work that they’re interested and energized by, to build a business that funds the vision. I hope we create a rock-solid vision. Then number three is to help them make an impact they’re proud of. And we just make it so people have the systems, the coaching, the support structure to be able to do all three.

Michelle Kesil (23:20)
Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing.

Trevor Mauch – Carrot.com (23:22)
Yeah, for sure. Definitely.

Michelle Kesil (23:24)
Well, before we begin to wrap up here, someone wants to reach out, connect, learn more, where can people find you?

Trevor Mauch – Carrot.com (23:30)
Yep, a couple easy spots. So Carrot.com is where we have lots of free information, free tools. Go to Carrot.com so you can learn about our websites or CRM, the solutions over there. But on the business side of things, so I have a podcast called the Entrepreneur Freedom Formula. Entrepreneur Freedom Formula, you can find it on YouTube, you can find it on whatever podcast listener you listen to. And that’s where I just dive into kind of my journey as an entrepreneur, but also teaching some lessons along the way of building six, seven,

eight-figure companies along the way and how do we build those businesses like I said that give us the freedom to be able to go out there and do what we want to do and make the impact. So entrepreneur freedom formula podcast you can find me on Instagram Trevor.Mauch that’s M A U C H or Carrot.com for our solutions.

Michelle Kesil (24:14)
Perfect, well appreciate your time and your story. Thank you so much for being here.

Trevor Mauch – Carrot.com (24:20)
Yeah, I appreciate you hosting number one and being able to be here together. Thank you for the platform and the ability to reach out to people.

Michelle Kesil (24:28)
Of my pleasure. And for those tuning into the show, if you got value, make sure you have subscribed. We’ve got more conversations with operators like Trevor who are building real businesses. And we’ll see you on our next episode.