How To Multiply Your Sphere

Christine Sparks:
I think by the time I signed up for Platform, I probably was close to 60/40, 40% listings, 60% buyers. The vast majority of the early years, it was mostly buyers. And then last year, I was probably 50/50. And then right now this year, I'm 80/90% listings myself.

Tim Chermak:
This is The Platform Marketing Show where we interview the most creative and ambitious real estate agents in the country, dissect their local marketing strategy, and get the behind the scenes scoop on how they're generating listing leads and warm referrals. We'll dive into the specifics of what marketing campaigns are working for them, how much they're spending on those campaigns and figure out how they have perfected what we call, "the Platform marketing strategy." This is your host, Tim Chermak. I'm the founder and CEO of Platform. I love marketing and I talk too much. So let's dive in. Hey guys, it's Tim Chermak and welcome back to another episode of The Platform Marketing Show. I'm here today with Christine Sparks, who's an agent near Knoxville, Tennessee, and actually just a couple weeks ago, I was driving through Knoxville and I realized, "Hey, you know what? Christine's been a client of Platform now for several years.

Tim Chermak:
And I've never really got to meet up and hang out with her." Platform is a small enough company where it's not like we have tens of thousands of realtors working with Platform. So, I always try whenever I can, to meet up with clients and make an attempt to get to know them, because that's why we have this sense of community that people started calling, "the Platfam" for Platform family. So I was like, "You know what? I've never really had a long conversation with Christine." So, as I was driving through Knoxville, I just shot her a last minute text. And I was like, "Hey, I'm actually in Knoxville this morning, do you want to do breakfast or coffee or something?" And you were like, "Sure." And you had some time in your schedule and it just worked out, and we had coffee for a couple hours. And I always knew Christine, that you were doing well, that you were a successful agent. I didn't realize how well you were doing. So, Christine is an agent in Knoxville and Christine, how long have you been selling real estate for now, total?

Christine Sparks:
18 years.

Tim Chermak:
18 years. Okay. And she's only been with Platform for the last two years. She signed up about two years ago, almost exactly two years ago. And when she signed up two years ago, her previous year before Platform, you did about 16 million in sales volume. So to be clear, you were already a successful realtor, because most agents would probably kill to sell 16 million. Like that's their long term goal. And you were already there and yet, in the last two years, Platform has helped you build the marketing foundation where you brought on a team member and just you and that single team member... so I want to be clear, Christine doesn't have a team of like 10 people or something.

Tim Chermak:
So I'm about to share this number, realize that this is not like a team's production of 10 people or something. Just her and one team member are on pace to do somewhere between 30 and potentially even 40 million this year, where just two years ago she was at 16 million. So, that's pretty awesome. I had no idea until I met up with you for coffee a couple weeks ago, in person in Knoxville, I did not realize that your business was at that level. So take us way back, Christine, to when you were first starting in real estate, what were you doing years and years before Platform, what were you doing for marketing back then, that got your business to 16 million in the first place? How did you build that business even before Platform?

Christine Sparks:
Really slow and steady. I started off as a buyer's agent for a couple of lead agents here did a lot of open houses. I've always felt more comfortable face to face in building relationships and getting back to people, getting people information that they felt like would be helpful to them. And each year I would just build off of the prior year's success I've had. I would say every year, even still today, probably 80% of my business is repeat and referral. So, there've been probably at least 10 different families that I've worked with 5, 6, 7 times.

Tim Chermak:
Wow.

Christine Sparks:
So, a lot of it is just people that I've developed a very close rapport with, that they've become friends and even for some of them, they've since had family members or other close friends that have become realtors and they've just been very loyal to me. So, a lot of it for me, feels organic, even though there is a lot of work behind the scenes. I worked very hard for those people for that loyalty. But for me, there's a very seamless flow to my business and it's enjoyable, because I get to work with people I like. So, that part I've been very blessed with.

Tim Chermak:
So, the fundamentals were sound because that's what I'm hearing as you share that, is that you got to work with people, they often referred people to you, and then they came back to you, even if sometimes in the meantime, one of their cousins or something had become licensed as an agent, they still came back and worked with you. So, the fundamentals were sound in your business before you ever started spending any money or resources on what would be called marketing. And I think that's something that it's a trend I see with a lot of our most successful Platform agents, is that they tell us, "Yeah, I'm regularly getting referrals."

Tim Chermak:
So, if you add marketing to that solid foundation of the fact that you're already getting referrals, because your clients genuinely like working with you, then that's when Platform can do really cool things. But if you're not regularly getting referrals and your business isn't growing organically a little bit every year, just because of that alone, you need to look yourself in the mirror and be like, "What am I doing wrong that I'm not getting referrals?" Because real estate is obviously, very much a relationship business. No one is working with you because of the brokerage you're with. No one cares what your logo is. Even though it goes against the NARs Code of Ethics and blah, blah, blah, that you're not supposed to talk about commissions, let's be honest, everyone pretty much charges the same commission rates and they're all negotiated independently. I'll just add that caveat, so I don't get sued.

Christine Sparks:
Really good agents hold their commissions.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah, sure. But I think it's a pretty open secret that all agents for the most part charge, approximately the same commission. So people are working with you because they like you, because they trust you. And so, if your business isn't growing a little bit every year, just because of those referrals, something's wrong. And adding marketing to that, isn't going to solve that core problem. It just increases the amount of people coming in, but it's like someone walking in the front door and leaving out the back door. So if you, however-

Christine Sparks:
Plus you're creating a business that's harder to manage because you're constantly recreating a relationship instead of just really taking good care of that relationship. And then from there-

Tim Chermak:
You're picking up where you left off.

Christine Sparks:
I did a lot of the work the first time, the second and third and fourth time I work with people, they're like, "Here's the keys? Where do I sign? I know you're going to do what you need to sell." And so now, it feels easy.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah, because you're constantly having to work with new people and you're constantly having to build that rapport from scratch over and over again. Yeah, you're totally right. So, I see this trend again, over and over again with Platform clients, that if they already had a successful business where they were getting lots of referrals and they tell me, "Yeah, my business is really great from an organic perspective." Then when you add Platform to that mix, that's when really cool things happen, because we just accelerate the number of people that are getting to know you and seeing you. And we really accelerate the number of referrals that you're getting.

Tim Chermak:
But if you don't already have that going, you could spend all the marketing dollars in the world and it's not going to change that fundamental fact that... I don't know if you have to be nicer to your clients or spend more time with them or whatever it is. If you're not getting referrals, you need to look yourself in the mirror and be like, "Maybe I'm not in the right business," because it is absolutely a relationship business. So, you've established that things were going well. At any point in the previous 15 years that you slowly and steadily built the business up to 16 million a year in volume... again, this is by yourself. So, when we say 16 million, it's not her and three people it's just her. Christine, had you ever spent money on marketing before? Had you ever done direct mail or billboards or Google ads or BoomTown or Sync? Had you ever spent money on marketing or was that just all organic referrals?

Christine Sparks:
I would subscribe to something and oftentimes either not stick with it maybe long enough, something like direct mail, not stick with it long enough to really let it get some teeth or not really need to work. Sometimes I would add a PPC lead campaign because I felt like that's what you were supposed to do. And then I didn't need it for me, for my business. And so, they weren't being followed up on as well because I was focused on the business that was coming in. I think there's a false security to hoarding leads, even though you don't always need them, especially if you're not going to work them effectively.

Christine Sparks:
So, I had done things but never with any long term success and it was always just kind of trial and error and letting something go. I also was kind of on a self exploration of what type of business I wanted and what message I wanted to give clients. And I've always been a big proponent of coaching. And a lot of times when you're in these big coaching groups, they tell you to do a lot of lead gen to feed your business. And I'm not a phone warrior, I'm a relationship person. So, sometimes I was adding things because I thought that's what you had to do to be successful. And it really never was a good fit for me.

Tim Chermak:
So, you've never been the person to get a fresh list of expired listings and just hit the phones, calling expired listings?

Christine Sparks:
No, I bought them and then never dialed, but-

Tim Chermak:
I bought it for the tax write off and then never called any of them.

Christine Sparks:
Yeah. I wanted to be that person, and I think now that's one thing that Platform's really helped me do is understand that I did have a value ad, and I do have a legitimate business and it doesn't have to look like what everybody says it has to look like.

Tim Chermak:
Then fast forward to 2020 and you and I met at the Real Estate Distilled Conference. It was at the Hilton hotel, I believe in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. And again, your business was already at 16 million. You had just slowly and steadily built your business up to that point, with referrals over a period of like 15 years. And we met, and I don't know if you remember this, but you came up and talked to me. It was after I gave a keynote talk at this conference, just kind of talking about marketing for realtors and you came up to me afterwards. And apparently there was someone talking to me, who was also interested in signing up for Platform.

Tim Chermak:
And they were from the Knoxville area too. And anyone listening to the Platform podcast probably already knows that we only work with one agent per market. So, if someone signs up in Knoxville, it means that Knoxville is now taken. So, even if another agent hands me their credit card and is like, "I want to sign up." I just tell them, "No, sorry, your area's taken." And they were kind of casually talking to me and they were thinking about it but they weren't ready to commit and make a decision. And then you just basically came up to me and you're like, "I want Knoxville, I will take it."

Christine Sparks:
Yes. I was trying not to physically Heisman him, but yeah. I was like, "Nope, not having it." Yep.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah. That's basically how that happened, I didn't even think you and I had a conversation. It was more like you were overhearing me talking to this other person, and then before they could think about it for a day or an hour or whatever, you're just like, "Actually, I'm going to do this. It's mine. How do I sign up?" And I was like, "Okay."

Christine Sparks:
I appreciated a few things. You were never going in for the hard sell, which would've completely turned me off. Something about your attitude of, "I know I have a good product, take it or leave it," appealed to me because I knew there was a strength there in what you were offering. And what Platform does, filled so many holes, a lot of real estate programs, each thing does one thing well. It does one thing well, but really Platform allows it to be an umbrella that services so many things that I was struggling with that I knew I didn't want to miss out on that.

Tim Chermak:
Well, it's just all the things that successful agents don't have time to do. So, I was just on a sales call right before I hopped on this podcast with a successful realtor. And I had to cut that call short to make sure I made it on time to this podcast. But this is an agent who's already doing $25 million. And I won't name them because technically they haven't signed up for Platform yet, but they're already doing 25 million. So, they're very successful and they're just looking to invest in something like Platform to solidify their brand in the area to make sure that they keep getting all those referrals and make sure that their business grows, but they're already doing quite well. And at the very end of the call, I basically had to be like, "You know what? I'm so sorry." And they were about to sign up and officially get going.

Tim Chermak:
I was like, "I have to hop on a podcast with someone. I will call you back later." And they're like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, no problem. No problem whatsoever." And when you have conversations like that, where there's no sense of rush of like, "Hey, you've got to sign up now. We've got to do this now." I think both parties understand that this person's legit. This person's professional, because it's amateurs that try to rush things and use sales scripts and they handle objections and all that. And that's why I've never really been a huge fan of... not to point any fingers, but I've never been a huge fan of the Tom Ferry sales coaching, objection, handling world of call a hundred FSBOs a day or call a hundred expired listings a day, and here's the script to use, even though I acknowledge that it works. So, I want to be really clear. I acknowledge that what they teach works.

Tim Chermak:
If you follow it, you will grow your business. It's like, I don't want to live my life that way, of basically just pressuring people into doing things that they may or may not want to do. But I'm just so pressuring them, that they kind of just go along with it. I would way rather have casual conversations. And even now, what a typical sales call looks like for Platform is, I just explain what we do. And then I'll say, "Hey, so I'll explain everything and then if you want to give it a try, we can talk about what that looks like. And if not, that's totally cool too. Sound good?" And then they're like, "Cool." And then sometimes they sign up and sometimes they don't and I never call them back if they don't, because I don't want people to feel like I'm chasing them. I want them to feel like they made the decision to sign up for Platform. Not that I sold them.

Tim Chermak:
And that works as you're saying, even on a listing appointment. When you're talking with your clients, if they can sense that you don't need their business, but you would love to have it, but you don't need it. That actually makes them way more... it makes them want to work with you. And that's just how you should build your business. So, even in the ads that we set up in the overall marketing strategy at Platform, we're trying to leverage that dynamic and use that mentality with the ads that we run that like, "Hey, we're not going to generate a bunch of leads, and then have you just cold call a bunch of people that don't want to hear from you. We're going to set things up so that they kind of feel inspired when the time is right to reach out to you." So you signed up in March 2020. We had that very abbreviated conversation there and you're like, "All right, I'm in." And you signed up and then I think it was like a week after that-

Christine Sparks:
A week, trying to get out of it.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah. I actually remember you-

Christine Sparks:
I was like, "I want my money back."

Tim Chermak:
Yeah. You would talk to Andrew, and Andrew's the GM of Platform. And I remember Andrew called me that week. He's like, "Hey man, I thought you said that this Christine person in Tennessee was really excited to go. She just told me that she wants to quit." And I was like, "What?" "Yeah, she's worried about COVID lockdowns and all that." And it's like, everyone was at the time, because if you go back to March 2020, which is when all this was happening, it's when you signed up for Platform, March 2020, we didn't know if 50 million Americans were going to die or if it was going to be 5,000. People genuinely didn't know what was going to happen.

Tim Chermak:
And so, we convinced you like, "Hey, stick this out. You don't want to miss out on this basically, because if you don't sign up, someone else will probably take your market." And then you, I think said something to the effect of like, "Okay, well I'll give it a couple more months and we'll see what happens." And then two years later, you've basically doubled or more, your business from 16 to 30 plus million. What do you think happened in the last two years with your marketing that allowed you to have such rapid growth where the previous 15 years of your business was slow and steady growth every year. And then all of a sudden it blew up from 16 to 30 plus, if you could narrow it down to something, what would you say happened with your marketing that set you up to have such rapid growth in those two years?

Christine Sparks:
I think there's two things. I'm an over preparer. And so, I was perpetually researching. I'd stumbled across Platform three years earlier, I think. Didn't sign up, looked at it. It's probably in a notebook somewhere that I meant to go back to it. And it was just always this idea that I was trying to prepare... planning to plan, is what I was always doing. And with Platform, you just say, "Do these things, send it over. Repost it." I could just quickly start shooting content out and then not have to think about it again. I would open up my Facebook and there it was, and it just started working for me. So, I didn't have to always worry about creating time to get some of these things done, because time is a luxury I don't have right now.

Christine Sparks:
The other part of it, is the video. I think without paying for something that I knew I was paying for, that required video, part of me signing up for a Platform was, "You've been saying you wanted to do video forever. You haven't done video. You understand that video's important. If you write your name on this and say that you're signing up for Platform, then you're going to do video." And video in particular is something I've been blown away by the reach it has, how impressed people are by it. I guess, just even the fact that you do it because everybody has such a fear base around video. I don't enjoy it. I feel like I'm going to vomit every time I do it. I talk too fast-

Tim Chermak:
And you're two years into this and you still hate doing videos. So, for anyone listening to this, who's maybe new to Platform and they hate doing videos. It's not like anyone else likes doing videos. No one likes going out and seeing themselves on camera filming. But once you see how effective it is and how it changes your business, you'll keep doing it. Because you'll realize like, "Wow, it's expensive not to do this."

Christine Sparks:
Yeah. Or you've committed to a seller where you're like, "This is part of my marketing plan. This is what I offer." And you're like, "I'm going to make this happen no matter what, because it's what I told them I do." I've even... Jordan will give me props, finally started being silly, which is not in my nature. Sarcasm is, but silly is not. And so, jumped in a pool the other day. My daughter, as she was videoing was like, "I can't believe you're jumping in the pool." I don't jump in pools, but I appreciate that it's encouraging me to stretch each time, get outside the box a little bit and not take myself so seriously. And each time, I'm glad I did it and I enjoy it. And the feedback I get, is just more than I expected.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah. And you're definitely an action taker. Both from when you first signed up for Platform, you just walked up to me and you basically budged in front of this other person who was thinking about Knoxville and you're like, "Nope, I want it. It's mine." And even now, when I swung by and we had coffee a couple weeks ago, just kind of a spur the moment thing, like spontaneously. I was like, "Hey, I have an ad idea. Can you take this quick picture with me?" And I reached into my wallet and I think I had like $10, or I think I had $12 in my wallet. I had a 10 and two ones. And then you had a five on you. So, we put this 10, this five and two ones, down on the coffee table where we were having coffee at this coffee shop.

Tim Chermak:
And we took a picture of you with this money on the table, in front of you. And we kind of used that as a metaphor for how you help your seller clients avoid leaving money on the table. So, it kind of just visually was reinforcing that. And then we wrote an essay about things you do as a listing agent to again, help your clients avoid leaving money on the table. And then we also took a picture of you holding two pennies and you were just holding the two pennies up to the camera. So, when this starts popping up in people's news feeds on Instagram and on Facebook, they're like, "What? Wait, why is this person holding two pennies?" Because in 2022, it's been a long time since you could buy anything with two cents. It's been a very long time since anything cost a penny.

Tim Chermak:
And so, when this pops up in your newsfeed, you're kind of like, "What, why is she holding two cents?" And then it's this essay, if you click and read it, it's this essay about, "Here's my two cents on what's happening in the real estate market." And we talk about not just that we're in a low inventory seller's market, because everyone already knows that. But we start talking about why, and we get into the economics of what's going on with new construction and why there's such limited inventory and everything. And so, it's this really informative post. And both of those ended up getting a ton of engagement and we ran them as retargeting ads. And yet you didn't question me, you weren't like, "Wait. What are we doing?" I was like, "Hey Christine, just take this picture, holding two pennies." And you're like, "Okay." And then I was like, "Hey, take this picture with this money on the table, in front of you."

Tim Chermak:
And you're like, "Okay." And we did it, and those ads both kicked butt. And now actually, because they worked so well, now other Platform agents across the country are running those same ads in their markets because we saw them work so well. So, I think one thing that maybe doesn't get enough credit throughout this process is just that you have the mentality of being an action taker where it's like, when someone gives you an idea, you're like, "Well, yeah. Let's try it out. Let's do it." You didn't want to jump into a pool, but that's something we tell a lot of our clients to do, if they have a listing that has a pool, is surprise people and wearing your clothes.

Tim Chermak:
It's not a bathing suit or something. Just jump into the pool, do a cannonball, whatever, because people won't expect it when they're watching the video. And it's something noteworthy that they'll tell people, "You know what? This crazy realtor I saw in this video, jumped in a pool on their listing." People talk about it. And it just injects a little bit of fun into your marketing, where you're giving people something to talk about. So, obviously what you're doing has been working. You scaled from 16 million to 30 plus, what have been some of your favorite ads? If you were to narrow it down to... I don't know, two or three of your favorite Platform marketing campaigns that you've run, whether they were photos or videos, which ones have been your favorites?

Christine Sparks:
I loved the one about the house or the husband, because that's very much something I would say. And everybody... when you write some of those ads, people don't realize I didn't write it, because it just seems like something... and I like-

Tim Chermak:
Oh, yeah.

Christine Sparks:
The snarky humor being a little bit of a contrarian, very much suits me. So, I like being able to inject a little bit of that. The one that-

Tim Chermak:
And sarcasm is my love language. So I love sarcasm. And that ad that Christine's talking about for people who are like, "What are you talking about?" We had this ad where it's kind of just a picture of you shrugging your shoulders, basically you have a facial expression as if to say it is what it is. And you said, "Hey, in this market, it might be easier to find a new spouse than a new house. You may have some decisions to make." And so, obviously you run that ad and it's sarcastic obviously. We're not encouraging people to go out and get divorced or something like that. But tons of people, commented and engaged on it, because they get that it's a joke. And that as a retargeting around, gets a ton of engagement for sure.

Christine Sparks:
That, and the one where you held this sign up as if you were homeless, but you're looking for houses. That one went crazy. And then some of the ones where I get to share my family or moments with my kids, because that is 1000% where I want to spend my time and why I do work so hard, so that I can go to field trips and be at class parties and take vacations. So that very much speaks or when I share the nonprofit that my oldest and I volunteer at. When I can share things that I love that have nothing to do with real estate, those are probably my favorite. And I like the house tours.

Christine Sparks:
I like that I'm going above and beyond for my seller, more than just sticking a sign in the yard and letting the market do the work. I don't have to do any marketing to sell a house right now, but I do it because I care about getting my client the best money. And I'm also branding myself as a listing agent. So, I went ahead and took your suggestion earlier this year to add a specific marketing budget behind each listing. And that's completely changed. It's allowed me to be pretty much a listing agent at this point. Kathy's the buyer's agent and really we need another person or two, there's enough volume we're drowning, but it's allowed me to really differentiate myself in a market that is only just going to continue to get tougher on that front.

Tim Chermak:
Would you say that the percentage or the ratio of sellers to buyers that you're working with has changed since you signed up for Platform? Are you getting to work with more listings now?

Christine Sparks:
Yeah. I think by the time I signed up for Platform, I probably was close to 60/40, 40% listings, 60% buyers. The vast majority of the early years, it was mostly buyers. And then last year, I was probably 50/50. And then right now this year, I'm 80, 90% listings myself.

Tim Chermak:
Really? That's awesome. So frankly, even if your business wasn't growing at all, but you shifted to being 80, 90% listings, that's a huge increase in your standard of living and your work life balance. Because if you can make the same amount of money, but rather than being 50/50 buyer sellers, you're more like 80 to 90% sellers, that completely changes the structure of everything.

Christine Sparks:
And I think really, if we're all honest with ourselves, our personalities lend themselves naturally to either working with buyers or sellers. I don't think they're the same. I am data oriented. I love all things marketing and I can have very difficult conversations with people very easily. And I think that is a natural fit for a listing agent. So, I feel better suited for this role as well, which makes it exciting again.

Tim Chermak:
And one thing you mentioned is that you had the courage this year to say, "Hey, every time I get a listing, on top of my normal ads budget..." which you're spending, I think around a thousand dollars a month on your normal Platform advertising budget, with the Facebook ads and everything. You're like, "On top of that, every time I get a listing, I'm going to invest $500 into that specific listing video campaign to blast out that video and make sure that every time I get a listing, it kind of goes viral in the community." So, a lot of your listing videos have been getting 30, 40, 50,000 video views because you've been doing it every time. And that has a snowball effect because if you do it once, it's like, cool. You'll probably get some people talking about it, but it's not going to radically change your business doing that once.

Tim Chermak:
But if you do it two times and then three times, then four times, eventually all the people on your retargeting list and your sphere, start to see this pattern that like, "Holy smokes. Every time this Christine lady gets a listing, I'm seeing it get 40,000 views or 50,000 views. If I ever sell my house, I'm going to work with her. Or if I know anyone thinking about selling their house, now I almost feel a sense of moral obligation that I need to refer them to Christine, because clearly she's getting her sellers homes way more exposure than the average agent." And so, that's probably why this year, you've had so many more listings than you have buyers, is that now you have more of a listing pipeline and more people contacting you to list their house because they see what an amazing job you're doing with the listings you have.

Tim Chermak:
And I want to emphasize too, for people listening to this, because maybe someone's listening to this podcast episode five years from now and maybe five years from now, we're in more of a balanced market or even a buyer's market. Like, "What's that?" We are in a crazy seller's market right now. So, if there were ever a time where frankly, as the listing agent, you don't even need to spend a dollar promoting your listings it's this year, as long as it's priced right, and it's cleaned up, the house is going to sell. So, you could totally get away with not spending a bunch of money, not filming videos of your listings because it's going to sell regardless. So even though that's probably true, you're still investing $500 into a social media campaign for every listing you get, because I think you're investing in your future. Like your brand as an agent, not necessarily to sell the house.

Christine Sparks:
I'm looking for a market share and I'm looking for me to nudge out the competition. If I can use each listing to show other people, I'm a listing agent, that's infinitely more exposure than me sending out postcards. And it's organic. It's got legs forever. Those videos will just keep posting.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah, you want to give people an actual reason, an actual specific concrete reason to list their house with you versus just saying, "Oh, I have all these years of experience." Or, "I have sold this many houses in the last year," or whatever. Give them a specific thing that you do, that other agents don't because if I ask that on a listing appointment, like honestly 99% of agents, if I just ask the question, "What are you going to do to promote my listing, that other agents aren't going to do?" 99% of agents do not have an answer to that question, because they all more or less do the same thing. They're going to take professional photography. They're obviously going to upload it to the MLS and it'll be on all these websites.

Tim Chermak:
They may or may not do an open house, but most agents don't actually have a creative answer to that question of, "What are you going to do to promote my house that other agents won't do?" And so, you have an incredible answer to that question of like, "Well, I'm going to film a video tour of your house and that video will be uploaded to social media and I will spend my own money promoting that video, not so just it gets 50 views or 100 views and a couple people randomly find it on YouTube, but I will spend money promoting this video to people, looking for houses in the area. And I can pretty much guarantee it's going to be seen somewhere between 30, 40, 50,000, 60,000 people will see this video that are in the market looking for a house." And so, that's kind of a mic drop moment in a listing appointment when you can say that.

Tim Chermak:
Because you know that no other agent can make any claims like that. So again, that's probably why you're getting so many listings in the last year, even in the midst of this crazy low inventory seller's market. Your listing business is increasing as most people's listing business is plummeting. So, let me ask you a question about building that brand. What does that actually look like on a practical day to day basis? So, have you ever had it where someone recognizes you out in public or someone walks up to you and says, "Oh, hey Christine, I saw the video. Or, "I saw such and such ad you did. I love that." Has that happened where people have actually told you in real life that they've been seeing your social media posts?

Christine Sparks:
Yeah. It's funny because over the two years, it's happened off and on ran randomly. But within the last couple of months it's happening consistently. And I lead a low profile life outside. I keep my world quiet and small. I work, I go home to my family. We're social people. We have friends, but I'm not a blast things out. So, it's caught me off guard. Yesterday, I got a text message. One of my realtor friends in Florida that I haven't talked to in a while and he's like, "Look what just popped up in my feed." And I don't know why. It's just starting get so many legs and it's just reaching so many people. One of my neighbors, for some reason, her mother started seeing my videos and reached out to me. So, it's such a snowball effect at this point. It's been fun.

Tim Chermak:
Yep. What would your advice be Christine, to an agent whose maybe just signed up for Platform or someone who's thinking about signing up for Platform, but they haven't pulled the trigger yet? What would you say in your 18 year experience as a real estate agent and only two of those 18 years have been spent with Platform. What advice would you give them of how to use Platform to grow your business? What would your advice be to yourself, maybe, if you were to go back two years, what would you tell yourself two years in the past?

Christine Sparks:
I wish I did it sooner. I really am impressed by a lot of the people who have signed up, who don't already have a solid business. And they take that leap because I try to run pretty lean. And so even for me, that felt like a big spend monthly, but the return on investment is just ridiculous. Truly, I can't quantify it because it's just grown every bit of my business and my confidence all the way around. I loved what you said and I don't remember when you said it. It might have been that same podcast where you were talking about adding the budget behind the listing tours, but how, "We don't think of ourselves as running a business and we don't invest in our business." And I think that's the biggest mindset shift because now, I'm not thinking transactionally based or getting the next client. I'm really thinking about running it as a full system that feeds itself. If I'm with a client, I'm not working on ads because I'm with a client.

Christine Sparks:
So, if I'm only client focused and I'm not focused on letting some marketing happen, then people are more apt to have those highs and those lows where now, my business is just building on itself. And I think we all just need the courage to be able to step out and believe we have something to offer people and then just get as much of the content and videos out as you can. You're already paying for it, use it. Use it everywhere. Everything I do, I'm calling Jordan and saying, "How can we spin this into an ad?" I did a client event. I did a cornhole tournament last Friday. And so, we're going to put together an ad just saying how, "It's not just about the sale." You're going to hear from me seven times a year with things that we do for clients. The nonprofit that my son and I volunteer with, I want to share all of those things and Platform allows me to do all of that and tell people I'm a good agent and it's just invaluable at this point.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah. It just keeps you top of mind constantly, so that people never feel tempted to cheat on you and work with another agent. Because if they're seeing you pop up in their newsfeed every day with different photos, different videos, you're just staying so top of mind, that even if they're not in the market to buy or sell a home that year, or maybe for several years, you're going to get more referrals, because they're going to start referring their friends to you. And so, essentially Platform multiplies your sphere. That's what's really going on from a big picture perspective, is that Platform multiplies your sphere.

Tim Chermak:
Because that's also really the only way if you think about it, that even makes any mathematical sense whatsoever, that you could just all of a sudden, you slowly and steadily took 15 years to build up your business to 16 million. And now all of a sudden you're at like 30 to 40 in two years. That's not linear growth. A certain point it became exponential, and it's because your sphere and all these people following you grew so rapidly in that time. So that's amazing. Congratulations to you. It's super incredible seeing growth like that. Because again, it's not like you added one or two or 3 million. You've added basically 16 plus million to a business that was already doing 16 million, that's incredible. Those numbers almost are bordering on too good to be true. That's cool.

Christine Sparks:
I didn't even know it until you came to Knoxville. And I was like, "He's probably going to ask." And I was like, "Whew."

Tim Chermak:
That's awesome. So Christine, if anyone wants to give you a quick call and ask you about your strategy or just text you, would you mind sharing your cell phone?

Christine Sparks:
Yeah, of course. So it's 865-382-3392.

Tim Chermak:
Cool. Well guys, I think this has been an awesome episode of The Platform Marketing Show. Christine, thank you for your time. And again, what a cool story of more than doubling your business, even when that business was already very impressive. So, thanks again. And we'll see you on the next episode of The Platform Marketing Show.

Christine Sparks:
Thanks.