We Are Selling with Lee Woodward

Lead Generation That Actually Works with Christian Bartley

• Lee Woodward • Season 1 • Episode 200

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We unpack a lead generation system that replaces random activity with scheduled, owned, and tracked inputs, turning appraisals into predictable outcomes and lifting market share to dominant levels. Christian Bartley shares how coding the area, segmenting communication, and replacing the lister created freedom and durable growth.

• focusing on conversations as the primary input to income
• coding the area and cleaning data for precision
• brand, market, and target communication pillars
• measuring the chain from inputs to profit
• training and replacing the main lister to scale
• using templates with hooks and clear calls to action
• turning marketing from cost to asset with predictability
• why systems outlast superstars and owners

Call Christian 0410-695-325 
christian@realmentor.com.au
The Complete Leader Conference: 29–30 October, Sydney, Brighton Le Sands




Hosted by Lee Woodward Training Systems

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SPEAKER_01:

Hello and welcome back to the podcast We Are Selling. My name is Lee Woodward, your coach and host, and the author of the Complete Salesperson Course. Today I have an end-of-year incredible topic for you, as we're going to be discussing lead generation on a team-based level, a company level, and even as a solo agent, the things you need to know to fix this one part of your business. Get this one right, everything else works by itself. And get this one right, you'll be paid the fees you deserve due to the relationships that you build. Now, for many of you listening to this particular podcast, you've been to or you're about to go to the complete salesperson course. When we're at the complete salesperson course and I'm doing find, list, communicate, and sell, during the prospecting side of it, a big highlight of the day is I explain one of the greatest case studies ever in this country of taking up to 70 and 80% market share of one area. And during that part of the conference, I show this slide called Coding Your Area. And it features the work of Christian Bartley. And Christian Bartley's had an incredible career from superstar salesperson, starting his own business. And then just recently, he's actually sold Bellerine property and retired out of the business ownership to come into the wonderful world of real estate coaching and mentoring. And today is his first audio as a mentor. And we're going to be speaking all things lead generation. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mr. Christian Bartley. Hello, everyone, and thank you, Leaf. Christian, last week was your first official gig. You and I went down to Melbourne. We had 38 business owners who wanted to study the topic of building your own company prospecting program. And during that time, you did an incredible job of sharing your story of what you've learned about lead generation. And I'd like you to give us a helicopter over that study in the way of when you started as a salesperson, then when you built the team prospecting program and then to the company prospecting program, what did you learn?

SPEAKER_00:

I'm a systemized person, organized and structured. And most salespeople, if they're not, they'll have someone there in the capacity of the opposite who is who will keep them in line. And everyone has their own way of doing it. And I'm not saying that my way is the way at all. It worked for me. I know it's worked for the company that uh I started and built and it's running today. And it worked for the agents inside the company. I know it will work for every single human if they have the passion to want to implement it. It's quite easy, it's quite complex, but it's more the consistency and the repetition in applying it. And it really does start with the most amount of conversations. Whereas a lot of agencies will or uh agents will count their gross commission income, know what they want to actually make, but it's well before that. And that's the outcome of conversations, it's that's the outcome of leads being generated, and then that's the outcome of converting all those leads into appraisals and then converting them into listings. So when you strip back a lead generation program, and a lot of agents know what lead generation is, but very few of them run a lead generation program. If your lead gen isn't scheduled, owned, and tracked, then it's not real. Random activity inside a day-to-day business, you can't run chaos. Sales don't fix businesses, appraisals do. And so, how do you generate an abundance of appraisals so you have a pipeline and a bunch of leads coming into your business? From the very beginning, when I began my career 23 years, 24 years ago in 2002, I had to strip it back. And it took me a couple of years to really learn it and get it polished to how the whole process works. And um, understanding my own sales structures and attending the complete salesperson course with you, Lee, led me down that complete structured line and knowing the most amount of appraisals that I can generate, and then creating as many lead generation techniques as possible will basically feed me a pipeline every single year, year in, year out. And then just being consistent in that application, which a lot of people just run on random bursts of energy and it's motivational dependent, and it there's that that just leads to unpredictable results. I wanted to have a consistent, repeatable, measurable outcome that was sustainable from throughout my whole entire career. So I completely focused on all those inputs and marketing activities that are going to then lead to leads, then to convert to appraisals. It really began for me when I started my own company. And as natural as any human is or competitive and they want to have the company that's got more signboards anywhere, you obviously got to get invited into many more doors and uh you're starting a brand that you want to have known. How's that brand going to get known? Or are you going either going to sit on your chair in the office, wait for the phone to ring, or are you going to approach it in a way that you're going to get them to ring you? Or you're going to go out and chase that information, that content, and find the people and then multiply it from every single lead. And that's what I chose to do.

SPEAKER_01:

Christian, I mentioned this in the intro, but you got market share up to what level? It was like 70 or 80%.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, one stage we had it at 80% market share. And just even as recently as I've exited the business, um, the team are only just below that, around about 75% market share.

SPEAKER_01:

That is absolutely incredible. And this is why I loved coding your area. And when I was down in your office, because we recorded we recorded together the team-based business, which is the effective business unit, team of four. And today we're not here to talk about that, but this is the lead generation system that did that. What were the main marketing activities or actions you took that allowed this all to come together?

SPEAKER_00:

At one stage, there was a year that I employed someone to come in and work at the start, it was two or three days a week. It was just building data in our CRM system. Because I had the approach that we obviously had a database and we had a number of owners or people who had purchased homes we'd done appraisals for, or they were landlords, or they were just people that we we knew and they're in the database. But if you approach it and you've you've got, let's call it 5,000 to 10,000 houses in an area where you work in a market area. If you could click your fingers and have every single person who owns a property in your market area in your database, but not just in your database with name, mobile, and email and address, but if you could actually categorize each of those, so they'll unit owners, townhouse owners, vacant landowners, houses, and then also segment and code each area of the market so it's relative to each individual property. So for example, let's say we've got a waterfront area where we are. The people who are two kilometers from that waterfront, it's not relevant to them. But if there's any listings and sales that occur directly on the waterfront, all the other waterfront people would want to know that, know about it. And so I ended up breaking up our immediate area where our office is located many, many years ago and coded the area and then also coded to the individual residential type of dwelling that it was. Because what I wanted to do was have every human, every house in the database, then be able to communicate directly with a unit owner, a townhouse owner, a landowner, a property that's on an extra scale of large or on the waterfront, or just in a particular area about every activity that occurred within the area that they were living. So if you're going to communicate and it's got to, it's got to be relevant and it's just got to be consistent to the homeowners in that area. So what I did do going back, uh employed someone to work two to three days a week and purely just focus on cleaning up our data and importing data that we were allowed to import. So people that were on the okay to call register and got them into our CRM database so we could build it. And then there's many other ways that you can also build the database from basically an agency just being out in the field through open for inspections, buyer inquiry online and every other avenue that there is as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Now, Christian, you weren't expecting to TikTok your way to the top. You had real marketing activities that you were doing. And I uh there was a slide you had last week that I just loved, which was inputs, your marketing activities, the leads, inquiries generated, appraisals, property assessments, listings, properties secured, and then sales, deals completed, profit into the company, and then really your freedom came from that because it wasn't about Christian Bartley. The the listing system generates the opportunities, not your name.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, spot on. So um social media didn't exist. I think Instagram Facebook did, um, but it wasn't it wasn't an avenue that a lot of people seen, and still we didn't really even rely on it. Even to this day, it has not been a strong path for us, even though we've got uh, you know, there was near 4,000 followers on ours, and we were the leading social media agents in the area, but it was not a strong lead. You cannot put a post out there and think that's my prospecting done, that's my lead generation done. It is it is purely down to hard work and uh it's been repetitious. So I you can't get an appraisal unless your name and your brand awareness is in front of a homeowner. And they've got to discover that through a multiple number of different contacts and connections from your name and your company, either through text message, via email, via letters, via pamphlets, via billboards, signboards, whatever generation it is, there's communication that you can uh share with your marketplace via brand communication. So it's like the McDonald's advertising. It's on the radio, it's on TV. Um, you've got community charity signboards, or you're maybe emceeing an event, or you have car signage of your logo on the car. Then you've got market communication, which is establishing yourself as the authorized and expert expert in the area. So you're showing your audience that you don't just work in the market, that you actually understand it better. And this is done by the just listed, just sold flies or um market wrap reports to the market area and uh content information going out to them that's how to be sold in 30 days and providing them some advice, inviting them to the VIP open homes that you've got. And then you've got target communication where you are including, you're specifically being personalized with each of the homeowners about relevant information that's meaningful to them. It could be handwritten cards, it could be a specific I have a buyer letter, SMS letter, price drive letters, or direct phone calls that have effective dialogue on them. So through the different three different pillars of lead generation, which is what I focused on, basically the social media was not utilized other than just the odd promotion of a campaign. And that's all it was. So for me, leads are insurance uh for a business and appraisals are freedom. Your data, your database isn't a list of names, it's a future income waiting to be activated. The more people you have in there through the data and the more uh documentation and communication streams that is relevant to the owner is gonna lead to more appraisals coming in.

SPEAKER_01:

Christian, take us into the numbers that prove it.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. Great question. Um, so a while ago, I had to establish myself as whilst I was an active agent in the business and people were listing, uh wanting to list with myself or calling for my name, I needed to uh have a system in place before I could actually step away. And if the system wasn't going to work, then it wasn't going to allow me to step away. So I needed to have a clear understanding on being able to generate a lot of leads so that they are coming in looking for someone in the company, not necessarily me. And over a study, what I did in our particular business, and this can be done in any business where they've got at least, say, five years of tracking uh statistics. So the amount of appraisals that were coming in over a month for us in the last nine years were just over 80 appraisals a month. And that's counting every single appraisal, whether it listed or didn't list at all. So we let's just say 83 appraisals a month, and then the listings per month was average of 27, which is 33%. And then the amount of properties that were being sold was 22 a month, so which is roughly 81% of the listings were getting sold. Then over the last five years, I also did a study of the last three years, and then even as much as this year, uh, the numbers didn't really differ too much. So the conversion rates from the most amount of appraisals was running up to 104 appraisals a month. Now, prior to me stepping out and operating a lead system, we were not at that level. We were at a level of roughly around about 50 to 60 a month. And what it allowed me to do was begin working on the business and focusing on the business communication system that went to our marketplace, that then led to more leads. And when you take yourself out as a business owner who's also an active agent in the industry, you don't get the mind space to actually concentrate on all these facets of the business. So when I stepped out of being a salesperson, I was able to really study it and uh come and implement ideas because I had the time to do it.

SPEAKER_01:

Christian, just to bring some clarity on that for our international listener, you actually located, trained a brand new lister to take over all your listing presentations that the that were coming from all these appraisals. So you were generating these appraisals and a different lister, not you, was going out to convert them. And that was Levi, who ended up being one of the owners of the business. But that's exactly what happened. You replaced yourself as a lister.

SPEAKER_00:

That that's right. And uh look, Levi um is unique, uh, and he was a very, very quick learner. And uh, I mean, I look he he learned from me and he implemented everything that he had learned. Um, and that was a very thing he's coachable, trainable, uh, had the right attitude. And what was he doing before real estate? He was in hospitality um a manager of a local restaurant. Uh I had tried to get Levi for about five years before I got him into the business. I just knew that he'd be the right fit. As I said, very tradable, coachable, and he implemented everything that I was doing from uh a listing presentation. But it was imperative for me that I did have someone, and anyone in the same position is gonna need someone as well to replace them because you can't step back when uh you are the main lister. Otherwise, the income of the business is just gonna go down, your profit level is gonna go down. So you you know all this in your mind and you know it in your gut, but you've just got to you've just got to move forward and actually do it. And until Levi was able to convert the appraisals into listings and do it well enough, consistently enough, and maintain the market share of our presence. So if you've got that statistic that's your measurable, maintaining the market share and that not dropping, that allows the ability of yourself being a uh a business owner who is a sales agent to then step out and begin working on the business and begin looking at everything. So from knowing those statistics of how many appraisals coming in and the and the percentage of listings and sales of what I'd had over the number of years, it just became so obvious that if the more appraisals that we've got coming in, if we've got an average of say 39% uh in a 12-month period that we would convert from appraisals. So 50 appraisals came in and you only converted, you converted 39%, that's 19 listings. But if you had 200 appraisals come in and you converted 39%, that's 78 listings. And then if you can do the same percentage numbers of what you've studied over your historical data of your sales team's performance over the last three, five, or nine years or 10 years, it can work out to be one to two million dollars of GCI. So, therefore, the more appraisals you are generating, the more marketing outputs that you are sending out to your market place is that gonna is just gonna lead to more appraisals and therefore lead to more listings and sales. So, what it became is it became completely measurable and predictable. And that was the whole idea of my system. Then, as we got stronger, more listings we got, then we've got more power and we've got more leverage to continue marketing, continue to communicate, and to have more branding everywhere across our marketplace. What it then came down to was making sure that we were converting the appraisals to listings and making sure that we were delivering outstanding service to the people who were employing us to sell and then converting those sales into a brilliant follow-up service. So then we get the repeat business. When you break it right down, it sounds very easy for me to say that, but it is very, very complex internally. You know, most agents are run around and it's chaos, they just don't know what's going left. But if you've got a business owner that's structured, organized with a system in place, then it removes fear. And when appraisals are coming, you make better decisions. It gives owners back their time because their business stocks are relying on them and it turns marketing from a cost into an asset. The wonder of a real system is it works on good days and bad days. I realized something really early. Income follows conversations, not contracts. So instead of chasing listings, I build a system that creates conversations every day. Appraisals become predictable and listings follow. And the system's now what I teach.

SPEAKER_01:

Christian, you will be speaking at the Complete Leader Conference this year. And during that time, you'll be showcasing the actual model, but also all the templates that you built. Now it was about, I think, two months ago, I said to you, look, why you've just popped out of the business there and you're still fresh and excited. Uh why don't you just park your brain, lay everything out that you've ever done, and package this back up so that you can help others do it, which is what Real Mentor is all about. You're going in to help others in the industry. What was in the templates? What did you learn about all these incredible call to action templates that you built from email, letter, brochure, targeted marketing, video marketing? What was the big learn there?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, the big learn was I have said to you, Lee, I'm glad that you gave me a fair bit of notice to prepare for last week's presentation because it made Me realize how detailed what I'd probably um created many years ago was how simple it actually is when I break it down. And um like the it I just I I tried to simplify it as much as possible, but what I also realize is that every piece of communication's got to have a hook and it's got to have a a way to get a vendor to connect with the agent or the agency. I I just learned how basically complex it is, and I think if I had to explain the presentation, what I delivered last week just verbally without these slides, it will just go over everyone's head. But I think from the belief of what I presented last week, if every real estate business owner who's not already implementing and running a lead generation program, if they just try to go, I'm gonna take that and do that, I know guaranteed it will work. But it makes me concerned about how many business owners are out there that are not running a lead generation program. And if your business is relying on one or two gun agents at the moment, you don't own a business, you actually own a risk. Because if a lead or a gun agent in your office leaves, that's a trouble. But if your system is working, your system never retires. It will continue to work. And so building and a system life that I've already had in my head over all the years was quite interesting just to break down into a you know a story of 50 plus slides. Does that answer the question, Lee?

SPEAKER_01:

Mate, perfectly. I can't wait for you to speak at Leader This Year. You're our big opening keynote. And the company prospecting program, the team-based business prospecting program is our theme. All the speakers at Leader this year are interlocking as they do into the management of that, the visuals, the marketing. But for those people attending Complete Leader, they don't have to wait till then. If anyone wants to get hold of you, Christian, and implement a team-based business prospecting program, company-based prospecting program, how do they get hold of you?

SPEAKER_00:

0410-695-325 is my mobile. Just say that again. Or my email address is Christian at RealMentor.com.au.

SPEAKER_01:

And today is the official launch of Real Mentor. I'm just like to be excited to announce to the world the first taxi voices coming to me uh for the wonderful job you did last week speaking for me. But how does it feel to step into this part of the world?

SPEAKER_00:

No, it's I'm I I look, you just get a passion for helping people that want to have help. Anyone who's going to ask advice, I I love it and appreciate it. And and you know, Malie, uh, once you get me going, you don't I don't stop. But um, but I also are just passionate about wanting to see people succeed. I know the processor system that I've designed and built. It's unique, but it's unique for it's being successful and it's easy to run. It's just about implementation and getting it there. And I love helping anyone out that's prepared to have it, and um, they'll see the fruits of it and um see the profit increase and see the market domination take over like my business did. The team are highly successful, they've got the leads flowing into them. It's over to them to convert it, service all the buyers, service all the vendors, and um anyone else who's got the same approach and the same attitude, then we will get along very, very well.

SPEAKER_01:

And one of my favorite sayings is nothing real can be threatened. Your team was at the complete salesperson course in Melbourne this year, all happy, smiley, ticking away. Actually, you were holding the fort at that moment. You were back at base holding holding it all together, making sure that lead generation system comes in. But to see the the business continue on and succeed, and it was interesting. I think a lot of the competitors were like, Oh, thank God he's gone, but they didn't realise you went a long time ago. Explain that.

SPEAKER_00:

Almost a decade ago, I I stepped out from being the active salesperson. Uh a great moment for me and a pivotable moment in my career that I uh stopped working on Saturdays and I was not the main listing person, but as I said before briefly, I I began working on the business and began um helping and training, mentoring, and coaching my own individual team to get to the level where they are so we could increase and uh grow the business, which it did. Um, you know, on 1st of August 2025, I'm sure a lot of my competitors were clapping their hands and celebrated that I had announced my retirement from Bellarem property and um left the business. But what they didn't realize is that the system doesn't retire and the system is not leaving the business. So that's a beautiful thing about what I've been able to create there, that it will continue to flow. Uh, and that's from a systematic perspective of lead generation and also working through the conversions and uh working through different appraisal techniques and closing the deals. Every agent inside that business is professional, is highly experienced in what Bellarine property became and is. So me leaving the business won't make any change of effect. In fact, it will probably, I don't know, what's up? Yeah, there's always that little bit of extra blood and you know, antigenetic and enthusiasm with the new owners where they're running the business without Christian there and they rise to their level. So I think that will come, and um any of the competitors probably need to be a little bit more concerned.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, the 29th of October and the 30th of October, the complete leader conference in Sydney, Brighton Lasands, Christian Bartley, Keynote One, big opening professional talk coming through. And Christian, I look forward to everyone experiencing this research, this work that you've done. And thank you for joining us on We Are Selling.