This episode is a little different because it was recorded via Facebook Live and was co-hosted by Jordan Muela from The Profitable Property Management Show. We asked six keynote speakers to give us a sneak peek of their talks for the PM Grow Summit, which will open its doors in January of 2018. In this podcast, our speakers shared topics they plan to cover, talked about the relevance of those topics, and mentioned key takeaways that make us want to learn more.

Don’t have a ticket to the PM Grow Summit yet?

Take advantage of this special discount code. Type in PODCASTVIP and you’ll get $300 off the price. But don’t think about it for too long – there are only have 10 tickets at this price for listeners, so scoop yours up.

Who should attend the PM Grow Summit?

If you’re not sure you should attend, remember this: it’s the only opportunity to be around the best and the brightest thinkers and leaders in the property management field and beyond. This is for the property manager who is truly committed to growth. If you want to be more entrepreneurial, and if you want to get out of a rut in your day-to-day operations, this is the conference for you.

It’s about leveling up. It’s about being around the right people and not being satisfied with a baseline education. If you hunger for a strategy to grow your business, and you want to meet your challenges head-on, this summit has the people who can show you how to do it.  

Let’s meet the heavy hitters.

Marcus Sheridan – The Sales Lion

Marcus Sheridan’s book, They Ask You Answer provides a path for changing the way you market your services to potential customers. He’s going to talk about the digital consumer, who is smarter than consumers have ever been. He’ll explain how content marketing will help you reach that consumer, demonstrating how the buyer has changed, and what you need to do about it.

Marcus will focus his talk at the PM Grow Summit on the visual experience. By 2019, you can expect 80 percent of online content to be video-based. If you don’t have video content, you’ll be left behind by this marketplace. So, you’ll learn from Marcus how to integrate video into your sales process. You’ll get tips, tricks, and hacks on how to put a video culture to work for you without blowing your budget.

If you decide to spend the time doing what Marcus suggests, you’ll earn huge results. You’ll learn how to get over your imperfections when it comes to video. The people who are making progress are not perfectionists. Things are changing rapidly in the digital space, and wasting time trying to get it perfect will hold you back.

In addition to his talk, you’ll get some pretty intense workshop help from Marcus at the PM Grow Summit. He’s going to talk about best practices behind the camera and in front of the camera. You’ll learn about the substance that makes you trustworthy and believable.

Here’s a simple tip you can start using right now: Smile three seconds before you start filming.

Not only does this smile impact your body, it lights up your cheekbones and gives your eye a twinkle. Start talking when you’re coming off that smile. You’ll look alive, excited, and you’ll instantly connect with your viewer.

Jason Goldberg – Prison Break

Jason Goldberg is a TED speaker and a coach. He wrote Prison Break, and his topic at the PM Grow Summit will be: Why What You’ve Learned Today Won’t Work for You.

That sounds provocative, and it is. Jason will share his experience of going to amazing conferences and seeing a tremendous wealth of information being shared by industry leaders. Inevitably, people are motivated. They have action plans and intention. But then, they go back to work and give up on all the great stuff they learned at the conference. There’s no doing. Even worse – there’s no being.

Jason’s talk will help you move past the barriers that make implementing what you learn so problematic. Your mind is either a liability or an asset.  Your job is to be passionate about profound and impactful service. You could do this to make money, but you’ll only get so far. If your wealth creation is a byproduct of your profound service in the world, you stand to earn a lot more business and a lot more money.

The takeaway tip from Jason’s preview is this: get rid of your ego. It’s not about you. When you’re in your head, wishing for things or worrying that your sales pitch isn’t going to sound right, you’re making your own barriers. You don’t have to be impressive or the best. The people you serve simply need you to be effective. Get rid of customer service and create client astonishment. It’s not about you. It’s about delivering value to people.

Jason believes that apathy is the antithesis of mastery. Stop thinking about outcomes first. Instead, be present and care about what you’re doing and what kind of service you’re delivering. If you can internalize that need to astonish your clients, everything else will fall into place.

According to Jason, you can show up to the PM Grow Summit as one of three people.

  • The Observer. You’ll sit and watch and shake your head yes or no and feel smart.
  • The Participant. You’re a little higher up the ladder of self leadership, but not at the level you can be.
  • The Seeker. This is who you want to be. You won’t leave the summit until you get everything you came for and more. You’re taking radical personal responsibility, and you’re committed to applying what you learn to your business.

Victor Antonio – Finding the Why in How People Buy

As a sales trainer, speaker, and author, Victor Antonio is the best person to tackle the subject of buyer resistance. In his talk, he’ll explain the way to close more deals by understanding the mindset of buyers. Aggressive sales pitches result in pushback. But, if you know how to match the way you sell to the way that people buy, you can be more successful.

If you don’t like to pressure people or do a hard sell, you’re going to love Victor’s PM Grow Summit talk.

Victor’s going to remind you that you’re in the marketing business first. Everything else is second. If no one knows who you are, they’ll miss your message. He’s going to help you understand sales and how it’s more than pushing a product or a service. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found in 2012 that 1 in 9 people worked in sales. But those other eight people, who are not in sales, spend 40 percent of their time influencing and persuading other people. What does that sound like? Sales.

Sales is about helping people make decisions. When you’re selling in a B2B environment, as many property managers are, you’re encountering people who want three things, which make up a value trinity. These three things are:

  • Increase in revenue
  • Decrease in costs
  • Market expansion

If you can show buyers how to do these things with your product or service, they’re going to listen to you. Buyers today are confused by the number of options they have. They want someone they trust to guide them towards the right decision and to meet those three parts of the value trinity.   

Victor’s takeaway tip ahead of the summit is to cut the fluff out of your video and stop with the stories and the big setups. All you have to do is set up the problem, provide a solution, and explain how to implement that solution. It’s all buyers want. They don’t need a video that’s more than two minutes.   

One thing you’ll love about Victor’s talk is his segment on objection blocking. Let’s say a prospect tells you your price is too high. That’s never the real objection. If you don’t close that deal, it has nothing to do with price. You simply didn’t know how to position your value. Get past that, and close more deals.   

Andrew Propst – Growing by a Door a Day

Prepare yourself for this one. Andrew, who has been a property management leader for years, will talk about how you can grow your business quickly through new development. With the construction of new multi-family and single family communities, you can grow your business and cultivate a new revenue channel.

Since 2011, Andrew has grown his management company in Boise by 3,200 new units. He has expanded into Kansas City, Memphis, and parts of Arkansas. He’ll talk to the PM Grow Summit about the challenge of dwindling inventory. Many of the properties you once managed are now going onto the sales market, which has regained some strength. If you can’t find new doors to manage – you can build them yourself.   

Relationships are necessary to facilitate this process. You’ll need to work with builders and developers and lenders and investors. Andrew will tell you how to get traction. He’ll talk about how to find the land, how to find a builder, and how to put together a package that’s easy for lenders and investors to understand. This is a complete lease-up strategy for new development.

If you’re interested in putting 5,000 new units into the ground (units that will be managed by you), you’ll want to pay attention to Andrew’s talk at the PM Grow Summit. He’ll source the whole process for you, from digging the dirt to stabilizing the property. The next boom in the property management industry is new development.

The takeaway tip for this: it’s not as unapproachable as it sounds. Property management is a relationship business, and if you can develop those relationships and put good information in front of the people you’re working with, you’ll be successful. Anything is possible.  

John Jantsch – Duct Tape Marketing

John Jantsch has built an empire helping small business distill marketing into real techniques that foster growth. He’s going to talk about the 7 must-have elements in every website today. He’s been marketing for over 25 years – before there were websites. A company’s site has moved from just being a place where people can find your business to being the place that guides a buyer’s journey.

People visit your website because they have a problem. They’re looking for you to solve it, and your website has to do that. You’ll learn how you can offer unique solutions, and you’ll get a helpful checklist that ensures your website is performing the way potential clients need it to.   

John’s takeaway tip is to focus on problems. No one really cares about what you sell. They want their problems solved. If you start from that framework and identify the problems, you can focus everything you do on solving that problem. Your entire marketing strategy has to embrace the solution to your client’s problem. If your messaging can connect at that level, prospects will listen to you.

Referral marketing has been a specialty of John’s. His one piece of advice if you want to take your referral marketing to the next level is this:

Be more referable.

No one will refer you if they’re not having a great experience. Solve their problems.

Additionally, don’t wait until you’ve solved the problem to ask for a referral. Ask during the sales process. If you are so confident that what you do will work for your prospective client, you have set an expectation of service. Give them an opportunity to refer you and help other people. With that kind of expectation before someone even becomes a client, it will be difficult for them not to take a chance on you.

Brad Larsen – Rebranding Your Business

Brad will talk about a lot of things, and if you don’t already listen to his Property Management MasterMind podcast, you should. He’s uniquely qualified to talk about rebranding at next year’s PM Grow Summit. Why? Because he managed to rebrand his company with a very short turnaround time. AND – it didn’t really affect his Google ranking at all.

Brad rebranded from Larsen Properties to RentWerx. He wanted to build something that was more than just his name. He wanted a brand that wasn’t about him. With his name off the door, Brad has found a new freedom. He’s still the owner of the company, but not everything points in his direction. Picking a neutral name means he gets to build a company that’s bigger than him.

If you’re nervous about the time and expense that can come with a rebranding strategy, Brad will tell you how to flip the switch. He used a two-page plan written on a notepad, and turned everything around in a matter of days. The website was updated, the business cards were printed, and the videos were all rebranded.  It felt seamless because it was seamless. There was minimal disruption to his business operations and NO disruption to his clients.

He even stayed highly ranked. So, at the PM Grow Summit, Brad will share his story and tell you how to do it while retaining your Google ranking throughout the process. You don’t have to worry about people not finding you, and you don’t have to spend a ton of money on ads. Planning is critical. If your content is already good and Google has already paid attention, you can do this and do it well.  

You’ll love the level of optimism that Brad has about his brand going forward.

These are the six speakers you don’t want to miss at the PM Grow Summit — a two-day event designed to grow your property management business through world-class sales, marketing and technology tactics and strategy.

Get your ticket by going to pmgrowsummit.com, and remember you can save $300 by using the PODCASTVIP code.

See you in San Diego, and thanks for joining us on The Property Management Show.