Getting Referrals with A Client Appreciation Party

Summary

One strategy that can add tens of thousands of dollars to your income in the next 60 days is called the Client Appreciation Party. How do you organize it?

Who to invite:

• Everyone in your Personal Circle (PC). Aim for 100 people to come to the event. This will create a buzz about you being a leader in the industry.
• Civic leaders (Mayor, City Council Members, Chief of Police, Fire Chief, Representatives, School Board members, etc). Invite community leaders from civic organizations, the Chamber of Commerce, celebrities, etc. Even if they don’t know you, they’ll go because of the Press Relations opportunity. This gives you instant credibility.
• Vendors. Make them event sponsors. They will give you more credibility because their presence is automatically an endorsement for you.

How to invite them:

• Email, social media.
• Use https://www.evite.com/, http://whoozin.com/, or https://www.facebook.com/events/. Create the event, track RSVPs, and communicate important information to your invitees and those planning to attend

Preparing for the party:

• Food & Beverage. Preferably have a catered meal. Bar is optional. Use a locally owned restaurant/catering company where you can work directly with the owner. This is cross-promotion: you support their business, they will support yours
• Have your lender pay for this or at least split the cost with you.
• Have your vendors pitch in for door prizes. You can let them have their names on the invitations and on a banner at the party for providing door prizes (such as $50 gift cards).
• Optionally, have additional entertainment such as a live band.
  If it’s a family-friendly party, it’s nice to have activities, games or entertainment for children such as a bounce house, magician, face-painting, clown, etc.
• Hire a DJ to be the emcee so you can focus on mingling.
• Get event liability insurance which is fairly inexpensive.

At the party:

• As people arrive, have them check in and fill out a form for the Door Prize drawings. Get their name, cell phone, email, and address.
• You don’t need to ask for business at the party. Because of the Law of Reciprocity, they’ll feel a sense of obligation to give you business.
• Have a Door-Prize Giveaway every 15 to 20 minutes.
• The DJ keeps the party rocking, so you can spend all of your time meeting and greeting your guests.

Within the next 48 hours after the party, send a quick personal video to each person, thanking them for coming to the party.

Here’s a breakdown of your ROI: If 100 people come, the total cost is $4000 ($40/person). If you get 5 deals from them in the next 2 months and your average commission check is $10,000 x 5 deals = $50k. Entire cost = 4000. That’s a 12x ROI.

This is just one of the many Vortex strategies we train on in the Real Estate Vortex Online course.

Let me know your experience with your own Client Appreciation Party in the comments below.

Full transcript

Nobody gets annoyed when you invite them to a party. That’s just the way it works.

Happy holidays. Welcome to the holiday season of 2019, and getting ready to go into the crazy year of 2020. I hope you’re planning it to be an amazing and awesome year. When I say crazy, I mean it’s going to be crazy awesome, if you are prepared for it and do the right stuff.

Today on this video,  I want to share with you a strategy that I have taught for several years in my Real Estate Vortex training that can literally add tens of thousands of dollars to your income, to your bank account in the next 60 days. We’ve seen it happen over and over again with my coaching members that have taken this strategy from the Real Estate Vortex Training Camp- or from Real Estate Vortex Online Course- and have implemented it and the results are amazing. It is called A Client Appreciation Party. Now what’s crazy about it is how powerful it is and yet for years, I would never do it.

I never used it because I was taught it was a waste of time and it just was not a good strategy. And yet I look back to my very first year in real estate. I started in June and that Christmas season, Linda Peterson, who was the number one agent at our company, Century 21 Mike Bowman, which was the number one century 21 office in the world. She was our number one agent, and she had, every year, a client appreciation party.

And, if I remember correctly, she always had it during the holidays. Well, when I was a rookie- because she had been one of my mentors a little bit and I guess she liked me- she invited me to come to her client appreciation party that she put on for all of her past clients, her people in her Personal Circle. She always had great business and had tons of listings, had builders, the high end, all that. She just had it all. She was so good at it.

I look back, I guess I probably should have been a little insulted that she invited me because I guess it really indicated that she didn’t consider me a threat to her business at all. But I went to it, and I was so impressed that she had it in the lobby of an apartment complex. It was just a brand new luxury apartment complex and she knew- I guess the manager or whatever- and she had it there. It was just … They had a great open area, and she had a caterer, and there were lots of people, and there was music, and it was all kinds of cool stuff. I don’t even remember the details of it that much, I just remember it was impressive. But I never really thought about it again until years later, I heard people talking about doing a client appreciation party and one of my coaching members actually did it and made a lot of money with it.

And I’m like, “Okay, tell me more about.” So we started training on this and it has been amazing the amount of business that my coaching members are getting specifically from this strategy. I’m going to share with you the exact steps of this strategy in this video today.

And then I’m also, because we are in … this is the weekend Black Friday, Cyber Monday. We’re having our Cyber Monday special, and our Black Friday specials. The online course, Real Estate Vortex Online, you can get for over 50% off. It is the best deal we give on the Real Estate Vortex Online training ever, and you can get that right now through the end of Cyber Monday. This is just one of over a dozen specific strategies that we teach plus an entire bunch of training about how to use an online vortex to attract business to you. It’s a great opportunity if you want that.

However, in this video, this is not a sales pitch. This is just, “Here is a way you can add tens of thousand dollars to your bank account in the next 60 days.

And it is called a client appreciation party.” I’m just going to literally walk you through the strategy as we teach it to our coaching members and to our attendees at our Real Estate Vortex Training Camp in the past.

So number one, invite everybody that you know, invite all of your Personal Circle. Now, you can invite any group or any level of those. You can just invite the ones that are your core group, or whatever. I recommend that you invite at least a hundred people. You want to have 50 or more people show up at this party because the bigger it is, the more buzz that is created, the more sense of awe that people have at like, “Wow, this agent is somebody.” And you get a better return on the investment. So my recommendation is that you invite … if you have less than 500 people in your database, in your Personal Circle, then you invite all of them. Okay, now you go, “How much is it going to cost?”

Well, it’s going to cost a little bit of money, and I’m going to explain how we pay for that and how that is done in a minute.

So number one, invite everybody that you know or at least invite the best people that you know. And again, you want to have at least 50 people at this party because then you start getting the power of pure pressure, the power of buzz, of you being a leader, of people looking at you going like, “Wow, this is must be a successful agent.”

Invite them. You can invite them with a phone call, you can invite them with a text, you can invite them with email. You can send them … you can do it on social media. Invite them multiple ways with an RSVP and ask them to respond. Nobody gets annoyed when you invite them to a party. Just the way it works. Nobody’s going to get annoyed by that. And then request an RSVP. Now, you can use things like evite.com, whoozin.com, or you can use Facebook Events. Any of those, you can do it and people can RSVP on that.

Now, that’s the first group of people you invite. If you want to go big and really create buzz and really get a lot of traction from this, and your plan is to dominate your market, then I recommend that you invite all the people that you know and you start inviting civic leaders. Your community leaders, your mayor, your chief of police, your fire chief. Any politicians in your market that are there, your congressmen, congresswomen, whoever it is that the more people you can invite. You can invite city council members, school board members, anybody that are community and civic leaders. And they, even if they don’t know you, they will come because it’s a PR opportunity for them. All right? And when the other people are there and they see the mayor of the town show up, or they see the police chief, or they see a state assemblyman, or whoever show up … or a woman, an assemblyman or assemblywoman, however that goes, they’re going like, “Wow, this agent is somebody.” And what it does, it gives you massive amounts of credibility. All right.

So invite community leaders, civic organization, Chamber of Commerce, invite celebrities if you’re in a celebrity area. Anybody that you know to get to come.

Invite all of your vendors and have them all pitch in a $50 gift card and you tell them what to do, or you can just have them … for them to be a sponsor, they give you $50 and you buy a bunch of $50 gift cards, which become door prizes and you give a drawing every 20 minutes.

There’s a drawing at the party so that people are there and it gets things going. And I recommend, the next thing is you have a DJ. You have a DJ there, and the DJ is the one who plays. They have the music going and they keep it lively, they’re the ones that do the drawings and all that so that you can spend your time mingling and mixing with people.

Allow your select vendors to sponsor the party. Now, this whole thing, if you spend 30-$50 per person, you could have it catered, you can have alcohol drinks if you want it.

You can make it an all adult thing or you can make it a family thing. Coaching members do it in different ways, but however you do it. You can have your vendors, your people that you do business with like your mortgage officer, your mortgage company. You can have your home warranty rep, your termite company. They all have marketing budgets and they will pay money to be listed as sponsors on this event.

Okay, so literally they can pay for it. And then you can buy all of your sponsors for a smaller thing where they put up 50 or a hundred bucks, and you use those to get gift cards and you do gift drawings every 20 minutes throughout the evening at the party.

With food and beverage, preferably a catered meal. And again, a bar is optional and so forth. But your lender, they’ll pay for the cost or they’ll split the cost with you because if you’re a player and they know that you do business, they know they’re going to get business from that. I recommend you use a local business, a local catering company or restaurant to cater it.

They will also … you’re working directly with that owner. We train other strategies in the Real Estate Vortex Training on how you can get that restaurant owner to become one of your best sources of business because you’ve used them and you build that relationship with them.

Hire a live DJ to emcee the entire event so that your whole time what you’re doing is you’re mingling, you’re meeting people. Now, there’s other things you can do. You can take people that you’re inviting and tell them they can bring a guest. So you may be having one of your past clients bring a guest, so you’re also meeting the guests. You also can invite people, everybody that’s ever come to one of your open house events or something like that. Yeah, you can invite them. So you’re going to have people that are going to show up and go like, “We don’t even know why we were invited.” And say, “You had to have come to an open house or something.” They go like, “Yeah, I think we came to one of your open houses.”, “Awesome. Well, I’m so excited you’re here.”

Now they’ve all of a sudden they meet you and now you’re their agent, right? You take somebody who you’ve only met one time who’d probably forgotten about you, and when you invite them to a party, they come. You’ve got a whole lot of really cool things happen, as we’re going to continue to get into here. I’m trying to give you a ton of stuff.

I train on this in the Real Estate Vortex Online Course. You get about … I don’t know, 45 minutes of training on specifically how to do this client appreciation party. You can optionally, additionally, you can have a live band, or you can have kinds of live entertainment. If it’s a family-type thing, you can have a clown that does magic tricks, or balloons, or all kinds of cool stuff that you can do.

I will say it is advisable that you get event liability insurance for if you’re doing this, you have more than 50 people. I recommend that it’s for real. It’s really, really inexpensive and yet it’s a good thing to do.

Now, here’s the key thing. You invite the people, you get the RSVP, you send reminders to them. You can do it by text, you can do it any way you want to do it. And then once they come, you’re there. You’re greeting them, make them feel special. At the party, you do not need to ask for business. They know because of the whole set up here that you’re their real estate agent. All right? They’re going to come up to you and they’re going to say, “Thank you so much for having me. We’re actually thinking about selling in January.”, “Hey, my neighbor is doing this.”, “Hey, I’ve got somebody for you. My sister’s getting ready to move. They’re doing this.” And you’re going to be amazed at how many referrals you get for immediate business and for future business. You’re going to take people who really didn’t really think about you that much, had never really given you business, had never been that … and just because you brought them to the party, they’re going to be going like, “Wow, thank you. I’m so honored.”

And they’re so honored now they feel a sense of connection and a sense of obligation to give you business, and that is the law of reciprocity. It just kicks in.

Now, let’s just play this out and I want to give you a couple of examples of what’s happening. I’m just giving you one of my most recent examples. Jared Bowler in St. George, Utah back in September had his fall client appreciation party. And a lot of our coaching members do this once a year, twice a year, three or four times a year.

So he was having a client appreciation party. He invited … I don’t know how many people invite him, but he had nearly a hundred people show up at his client appreciation party. At the party, he walked away with four deals. Four deals including a $2.5 million listing. Now, that doesn’t mean they signed the listing agreement at the party. But I’m saying he got the leads at the party, and within 30 days he had four transactions as a result of people that had come to his client appreciation party.

And my friend, we see that happening over and over and over again. I just want to play this out. Here’s a typical scenario of how a client appreciation party would work for you.

Let’s say you take your entire Personal Circle and there’s 400 people in it, and you invite all of them. They can be A teamers, B teamers, or C teamers. It doesn’t matter. A teamers are people that are really close to you, your past clients, people that are always looking for business, or looking at buying or selling in the next year or so. B teamers and C teamers are not so much. C teamers are typically people that you don’t really ever talk to. Maybe you just have an email, maybe they’d been to an open house one time. But you invite them. If you invite 400 people, you’re going to typically have a hundred people show up. If you invite just your core group, you may have 50% of the people you invite show up. All right, so it depends on your relationships. It depends on how bigger your Personal Circle is. It depends on how long you’ve had it.

Some of you may have had online lead generation things where you have thousands and thousands of people in your database that you’ve never met or never talked to, so you’ve got to make some decisions of who you’re going to invite. Here’s the cool thing. When you have a hundred people show up at a party, it’s a big party. And when you have a hundred people in a room, everybody’s looking around and going like, “This is huge.” And when it’s that big, they can’t count. People can’t really count.

And you can find there’s all kinds of venues in your community that you … there’s community rooms, there are civic organization rooms. You can use places that have large meeting rooms or banquet rooms that you can host, that you can use, that you can have a caterer. If you do it at a hotel, they’re pretty expensive. So I don’t really recommend using a hotel menu and especially not their food and beverage services because it is extremely expensive when you try to do it in a hotel, especially a nice hotel.

But you can find plenty of places, meeting rooms and so forth to do something like this. But when you have a hundred people in a room, it is a crowd and all the people that are there are in awe of you as a real estate agent because all of a sudden you just became a big deal. All right? It’s crazy.

What it gives you is more credibility. You’re friendly, and you want to be dressed to the hilt, and you’re … I mean, you’re looking sharp. And all you’re doing is greeting and saying hi to people. You do not need to be running the party. You need to have the DJ or the MC running the party so you’re free to … You don’t need to be doing food or taking care of trying to … You don’t cater it yourself, you have a caterer taking care of all of that for you. So you invite a hundred people to attend, or you invite 400 people and a hundred people show up. Now, let’s just say that your total cost for this is $4,000, that’s about $40 per person.

And that’s pretty nice … you can do great catering, probably having a bar. Actually, have a bar if you want to and so forth. That includes a DJ and everything.

Let’s say your total cost is $4,000. Now, total costs out of your pocket may be zero because you can have your sponsors, you can have your mortgage guy pitch in 2, or, or $4,000. Termite guy will pitch in $1,000. Your home warranty rep will pitch in $1,000. You get people that will pitch in some money. Okay? And then you have others that all they do is they bring $50 gift card, or bring $50 that you’ll use to get gift cards that you’ll use for the draw prices.

Alright. So that’s $40 per person. All right? That is the actual cost of this scenario, and that’s a pretty typical cost. Now, if only one out of 20, if only 5% of the people there give you a deal in the next two months … So let’s just say it, you invite a hundred people and you have four people that give you deals while you’re there.

That’s what happened to Jared Bowler, four people that within 30 days he had deals in the pipelines within 30 days from inviting a hundred people. And then after that, let’s say in the next couple of months you get one more. That’s five deals that will come out of that. And that is one out of 20 people that come are going to give you a referral in the next month or two, and that is very realistic. We see it over and over again. It’s very conservative.

Now, here’s what’s going to happen. You’d have 100 people and you get five deals from it. If your average commission check is $10,000, which is pretty much the average commission check for a full-service agent in the United States now, 10,000 times five deals is $50,000. 50,000. And what was your cost? What was your entire cost for this? $4,000. And your sponsors, your vendors probably picked up some of that. So if you invest … and let’s just say it was all out of your own pocket, you invested $4,000, you get five referrals that turn into five deals. That is $50,000 return on a $4,000 invested.

That is a 12X ROI. That is a 1,200% return on your investment. Now there are not many marketing strategies out there that will give you that high of a return on investment that fast. Now if you have …

And let me add one more thing here that I almost forgot. And that is that you must as soon as it is over, after the party’s over, within the next 48 hours, you want to send a personal video to everybody that came thanking them for coming. You just send a quick video. You just literally use your smartphone and then you do it one-on-one to every single person that comes. “Hey Kevin, Kevin Ward here. Hey, I just wanted to thank you for coming to my party the other night. It was just great to see you, and meet you, and get to meet your wife.” Or whatever it was. “And again, if there’s anybody that you know that I can help with or if you guys are looking into making a move, please reach out to me. I’m here to help you. And I hope you have a great week.”

Or if it’s a holiday client appreciation party, “I hope you have a Merry Christmas.” Or whatever it is, and you’re just doing that. It takes 15-20 seconds and then you’re going to text it to them. So the follow up is also very, very critical. Now, I invested $4,000, I got $50,000 in return. If you only got three deals, that’s $30,000 on a $4,000 investment. Only two deals, you still make 20,000 on a $4,000 investment. That’s a 5X return on investment.

Now, you want to make it big enough that you have enough people that you’re going to get referrals. If you only invite 40 people and only 12 show up, number one, that’s a pretty small party. So there’s no buzz, there’s no like … People are not going like, “Wow, this agent must be great.” They don’t think that. Now, they’re honored to be there and they’re happy to be there, but there’s also not enough people there to really create a lot of chances of getting a lot of referrals.

So if you invite 12 people and it costs 50 bucks each, you spent 600 bucks and you may not get a single deal and you’re just out 600 bucks. You’d still be great and you may still get a deal from a down the road, but the chances of getting immediate business from it increase dramatically as it gets bigger. So it’s an investment. And again, if you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel and your bank account right now, you can get your vendors to actually do it. If you’re showing up like a pro and they know you’re doing business, this my friend will absolutely crush it for you.

Now, this is just one of many of the vortex strategies that we teach in the Real Estate Vortex Online Course. Right now with our Black Friday Cyber Monday special, you can get lifetime access to over 60 modules in the Real Estate Vortex Online Training, plus our online seller of vortex training which is called Vortex Mastery, which is how to create a website that actually makes you money. Where most websites just cost you money, this one actually makes you money.

It is unbelievable how powerful it is. And right now for well over 50% off, you can get the best price we ever give for the Real Estate Vortex Online. You will not see this price again probably for at least a year, and so take advantage of that. You can click on the link below. We’ve got multiple courses that are on for our Black Friday, Cyber Monday special, so click on those. Hope those are helpful for you. Hope this strategy has been helpful for you. If it has and you’re going to use it, push your comments down below. Give me a thumbs up. Let me hear your experiences, and subscribe to the channel if you’ve not done that. And I’ll look forward to seeing you on the next video. Happy holidays.