Value Performance Actions That Turn Data Into Trust, with Christian Bartley

We show how destination selling lifts conversion by focusing on where clients are going, not just what they own. We share the exact questions, value actions, and simple tools that turn data into trust and relationships into listings.

• redefining VPA as value performance actions
• destination selling with suburb stats and timelines
• winning on relationships over fees
• using advocacy and local partners to reduce risk
• asking the motivation trigger question at appraisal
• matching follow‑up cadence to time frame
• using short face‑video messages for relevance
• building pre‑listing value with stylists and trades
• anniversary calls that spark referral moments
• attract, engage, commit through useful insights

Hosted by Lee Woodward Training Systems

Brought to you by The Complete Salesperson Course & Super Coaching Program

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Discover more:

• Next Events
• Lee's New Book – Claiming Doors
• Explore Lee Woodward Short Courses
• The Top 100 Business Stories & Life Lessons Of Charles Tarbey

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And The VPA Mindset
• 0:28 From Advertising To Actions
• 1:15 Destination Selling Explained
• 2:30 Serve One Client Like It’s 200
• 4:15 Data That Eases Moving Decisions
• 6:10 Win On Relationships Not Fees
• 8:40 Unique Service Over Generic Promises
• 11:30 Triggers, Timelines And Motivation
• 13:40 Be Helpful Before You’re Hired
• 16:00 Face Video Beats Voicemail
• 17:35 Anniversary Calls That Spark Referrals
• 19:05 Attract, Engage, Commit With Value
• 20:20 Excite The Next-Home Vision
• 22:00 Buyer Advocacy As A Listing Tool

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Hello and welcome back to the podcast We Are Selling. My name's Lee Woodward, your coach and host. Today I've invited another coach onto the program who also had an incredible real estate career. No stranger to our airwaves. Please welcome back to We Are Selling, Mr. Christian Bartley. Christian, welcome aboard. Thanks, Lee. Good to be back again. Today we're going to talk about the internal VPA of an agent. Now everyone thinks VPA stood for vendor paid advertising. We changed that to value performance advertising. But in agent land, it's value performance actions. And what I want to get into today is we've got the data, but what do you do with it? And how do you make phone calls to it? And what's that timeline that you do it? Previously on the program, we had a great session where we discussed the nurturing process. Adding value is a different thing to just making phone call after phone call after phone call. You and I were just chatting off here about the power of destination selling. When you're helping someone with where they're going, it makes such a difference. And our goal on this podcast, Christian, is to lift that conversion rate of, yeah, I'm making all these calls, but I got no conversion for it. How do we increase those statistics? Take us into it. What have you got?

SPEAKER_01: 1:15

One simple approach for a lot of new agents in the area or in the country to think back to when you first started in real estate and you had your first client and you only had one. And when you only had that one client who was a homeowner who was going to consider selling, all you did was think about them and you would have thought about where are they moving to, what are they doing, what's their motivation, why are they selling. Imagine if you had only one client. How much dedication would you put into that one client? And if you multiply that by your 200 potential sellers and your database of potential sellers, but nowadays, because you're so busy and you've been in the industry for five or 10 or 15 years, you skip over a lot. A lot of agents can get caught up in just making that regular call that's once a month or once every three to six months and make a connection. As we know, our job is to build relationships. And one of my key attributes that enabled me to win a lot of listings was as what you just said was the destination selling. Somebody's selling a property because they're moving somewhere. But the people who are moving there, who are the homeowners, don't have the ability, like we do, have access to the data of where they're moving to, the sales statistics, the sold prices, how many days properties sit on the market for. What I used to do was collect that data and find out where they're moving to and when, what their intention was and what their motivation is, and then return with content and information and data and statistics about the suburb where they're going to and help them with what's been sold recently, how many days it was on the market for sale, what the average price is in the area. Just guide them with where they're going to and then obviously offer to be an advocate to where they're moving to. Either represent them in the purchase of the property, that is adding value to a client. So expectations are is to not just go in and treat a contact. You need to add value for them to want to use you and convert into putting their own property on the market and utilizing your services. This should just come because you'll want to help people and you want to help people move. The end result is that you're going to accelerate the time frame that they're not just a contact on a document or in a computer database in your office. You are genuinely helping everyone. And as I said, going back to the beginning. When you start your career, you have one client and then it goes to two clients and three clients. And you know intimately everything about that client at the beginning. Now, when you're in a career, you've got hundreds or if not thousands of potential sellers. You've now got to start to focus on what are the triggers that you're going to be doing to help each one of those clients and to accelerate and convert them to come on board with you.

SPEAKER_00: 4:05

Christian, this is so powerful and so simple at the same time. So destination selling for the coachable moment is focus on where the on where they're going, not what they have. If you do a great job on the destination, they'll release their asset for you to sell it. However, why everybody else is fighting and killing each other on fees and marketing, you can play in your own lane here. And you know yourself when some someone out of real estate has done something for you. Actually, I had an example this week. Bax Audiovisual just did our Brisbane event and drove the big truck up there with all the gear, and they've been with me all my career. Another company emailed me saying, Oh, look, send us their quote without the prices and we'll beat it. It's not about the price, it's about the relationship. And they've been with me so long and added so much value in times that I ring up, I get advice that I don't go anywhere else. If you can be that person who they ring and say, Hey, Christian, I need some advice. I want to move to Perth. And as you just brilliantly articulated, well, let me let me put a whole report together for you. And anyone listening to this who does the price update, you can do the price update on a property anywhere in the country. So you say to your potential sellers, when you get to Perth, just text me the address, I'll do a price update straight away for you, and I'll send it back to you. That way you've got knowledge on the ground. You can go and look at the other properties that were purchased. Now, if you did that, which is exactly what you've just said in that strategy, when they come back, they're not going to go, okay, but the other guy's 1.5% or whatever percent people are today. They're going to say, no, no, no, Lee's just been too good. And he put so much effort into this that we have to go with him because he he's helped us in a different way. Anyone can list it and sell it, but did you help them move? Did you focus on the destination becomes the ultimate part of real estate? But as you know, Christian, if you help enough other people get what they want, your name gets mentioned in the famous words of Charles Tarby, that method of introduction, my number one lead source was buyers that didn't buy from me. Yet they'd buy another door in my area, and sure enough, two or three of their friends would reach out and wing you all because you were helpful. So you might be pounding phone calls out, but are you helpful in this value performance action that is required to be selected?

SPEAKER_01: 6:19

So what is your point of difference if you're an agent that's just trying to win on commission? That means that you probably have got way too many clients, you're too busy, and you don't have the time to dedicate to each of those clients. Everyone needs to take a step back. If they want to accelerate their career based on value, not just based on commission, any agent can go out there and win a listing at 1% and just turn over on volume and volume and volume and be so busy. But at the end of the day, do you want to leave a legacy in your community or in your marketplace where you were just seeing that you went above and beyond and rose the bar in terms of what your service offering is compared to just a generic agent? So don't take the generic approach, take the unique difference approach. Now, a lot of people talk about five-star service, but they don't deliver it. They're just words that come out of their mouth. So it's about going above and beyond and helping people from the beginning. And it may be in terms of bringing in a stylist to the property and saying, let's get a quote on what it's going to cost to get it styled. Let's bring our photographer and videographer through the property and get some ideas flowing. This is not going to cost you anything. I'm really enthusiastic about getting a plan in place, whether it's in three months, three weeks, or in three years. Let's start moving forward. So you've got a vision of what I'm visualizing now, and you've got an intention. If you're if you wake up one day and say, we're going to pull the trigger and put this on the market, then you know that we're ready to go, you're ready to go, and bingo.

SPEAKER_00: 7:56

Christian, in real estate, there's so many people that truly passionately believe it was the fees that I I lost the business, it was this, it was that. I always say to agents, how's that serving you? Like you're so passionately believing that. Yeah, if I grabbed 100 potential sellers of you, let's go back a couple of years now, you listen and sell in real estate, and I grabbed your top 100 and I went over to your competitor and said, Right, I'm gonna prove a point to you. There is Christian Bartley's top 100 potential sellers. You've just saved yourself five years of trying to find them. There they are, you've got the list. I guarantee if you ring through offering your cheap rates, you won't get it over the relationship that he's built and the reports and the 38 steps for putting your property on the market, the web book examples of all the just sold you've done and the incredible results. So you've got the data, you didn't have to find it, but you won't beat the relationship connection that has happened over a period of time.

SPEAKER_01: 8:53

It's what gets communicated to those people from when you first met them to that particular point, and anyone that is in that top 100 list. It's not so much of a templated generic approach. It's just that you've asked the right questions when you've gone in the door. And one of my most famous questions that I always said when I did an appraisal, I was either walking in there and they weren't going to be selling, and they weren't going to be selling for 12 months, or they were going to be selling for a couple of years, or they could be selling in three weeks. But I still asked this same question and I let them finish the answer because I did the uh good old or and pause. And so I I did, I walked in, I would take control as soon as we'd go in the front door, and I'd want to walk into their 80% area, which is their living generically, it's their living kitchen area and that area of space. A lot of owners like to open the door and take you straight into the first room on the left or the right. I would take control, go down there into the main living area, and then I would turn around and say, Look, on Friday last week, did you just wake up in the morning and think, We're gonna ring Christian Bartley and get him in here to do an appraisal? Or what was it that triggered you to ring Friday morning? Did you just wake up during the morning and state that and think that? And they would end up concluding and finishing the sentence with the entire intention and motivation of why they called me. And they answered what I was wanting to know. And it was the simplest question, and I'll repeat it again now. Did you just wake up yesterday morning and think, let's find out what our house is worth? At the end of the day, they would all answer the question and give me the reason as to why I was there in the house. That answer was what I utilized as my reason to follow up on how hard I pushed, how fast I pushed, and what I communicated with them and how I helped them moving forward. Because they would answer and say, you know, the ranges of answers are it's either, you know, either financial, we're divorced, we're separated, the kids have growing up, we're downsizing, we're upsizing, we need to do this, we're moving jobs, we're moving interstate. No, we're going to Queensland. Whatever it is, it didn't worry me. But it gave me an understanding of a time frame. And it also gave me a very clear understanding of how fast I needed to convert them to become a seller. Even just calling them and saying, you know, two weeks later, saying that stock levels in your price range are down 20% and properties in your price bracket are now moving in within 45 days. So they start to feel a bit of a sense of it could be a good time to put on the market if you wanted to try it. But I'm not here to make you the decision's yours when you're the time is right. Just having that motivation answered from the very beginning opened up a lot of doors and also pulled down a lot of walls, I suppose, in the relationship moving forward, because they were being upfront and honest with myself, and I respected that and kept that close to myself. And uh that was the trigger for so much strategic movement in bringing them to the market.

SPEAKER_00: 12:00

So, Christian Bartley, an interesting coaching moment today about VPA, and that's that value performance action that we take as an agent just to use a spin on that style of thinking. But the destination selling is about being helpful, taking the stylists through, providing a list of tradespeople who could come out and do the quotes, getting a building report done. But you can actually begin before you're hired, and that's what this style of work is. And I know myself, I I was forever bidding at an auction for someone or sending a tradesperson round to fix something. Because people would think of real estate and they think, oh, Leo knows someone. It was amazing how many calls I used to get for commercial real estate. And I had no idea back then the connection of the wonderful world of commercial, which I love today, hence claiming roller doors may be a book one day. But people would ring up, and I remember saying to my principal one day, I'd go, I get two, three phone calls a week about office space, factory, industrial. Why is that? And my principal said, Luke, it's it's not the type of real estate. They just think real estate, they think Lee will know, or he'll know someone. And sure enough, you pass them on to a Bill Ryder or whoever was around at that moment, they'd say thank you, you sort it out for us. But everybody wants to work with someone in safe hands, and that referral style way of working is amazing. And then just on what you said before about the put the report together, I'd just ring an agent in Perth and say, you know, I have a client, they go, Oh, Lee, we're moving to Perth. Well, before you do anything, let me make some calls. Make sure you're going in the right areas here because you you don't know what's going on in certain areas, and you know certain areas of Sydney that you would say to someone, don't go there. It's very easy to make that same mistake in a in a land where you're not used to being. But let me hit the phones. I'd ring a Peter Clements and say, Pete, got a client coming in. The thing that, oh, don't go there, whatever you do. Make sure you you bring them over here. Now, can you put a report together for me and some stats, as you would for all your potential sellers over there, so I can pass it on to them. Ring them up. Look, I've just sent you a report. The person I'm referring to you is Peter Clements. He's going to look after you. So you've got someone on the ground, someone to call. Just that alone would win you the business.

SPEAKER_01: 14:09

That's right. Exactly right. I've got another idea, can be well utilized, and I don't think it's been utilized enough that a lot of people are obviously phoning people, calling people, and uh don't get a connect. They either leave a voicemail or it's send a text message, and voicemails, as we know, uh become in a limited amount of use. A lot of agents probably should just record a face video. You can do an audio video or just a face video talking to the potential seller for 30 seconds about a sales result that just occurred around the corner or nearby, or a concept or an idea about a strategy moving forward with a marketing idea on the sale of their place. Or they've just heard a place come up on the market that is on the destination of where they're moving to and thought that they should know about it. This agent who's calling is not the one who's actually listening and selling it. They're obviously of just genuine value trying to assist them and find a place for them to move. So just little video concepts. So it's showing their face, their scripts and dialogues are coming out. It's just real, down to worth. It's like they're actually actually having a conversation with them, but it's a video message that's going to the owner. And I think any message or concept or idea, it's just it's the reality of talking like you and Lee, you and I are today, Lee, just now. This is real, and there's no no crap behind it. It's just this is real life conversations about what happens in in our industry. The communication that goes to owners is sometimes can feel a lot very scripted. Just FaceTime video or a visual video, sending that message accelerates things as well and puts you in the light of a vendor in a in a different realm, whereas you're you just are showing your genuineness of trying to help them.

SPEAKER_00: 15:57

Absolutely brilliant. And on a final note, Christian, I was in a workshop yesterday with 25 wonderful agents. And I was talking about the established client campaign, how the phone call of that anniversary is so important. And someone did ask a question. It was a good question. They said, Lee, you know, if they only bought it a year ago or two years ago, is it as relevant? I said, right. Let me explain something. The reason we make anniversary calls is not because that person may sell. It's to refresh your name with everybody else they're speaking to who mentions real estate. And it just dawned on me that people don't understand the trigger of a phone call. So I can speak to you today, Christian Bartley, and then you'll be speaking to somebody else tomorrow. And you go, I was speaking to Lee Woodward the other day. And that connection comes in where people go, Oh, right. So if I ring my anniversaries and say, Hi, Christian, Lee here from Bartley Realty, eight years ago this month that you moved into that house, can you believe it?

SPEAKER_01: 16:54

The the anniversary phone calls, do you call them anniversaries or do you call them birthdays? Either way, either all, and I suppose it sits down to the to the weights. Uh when I used to make uh a few of the phone calls, call them anniversaries or move-in phone calls. Obviously, I had a strategic move about 30 days after they'd move in, I would call them to make sure that everything else was going okay. Let them know that we had a trades list database that if anything was wrong in the house, please let us know. And we'll get a tradesperson there. We've got them accessible. And they're usually new to the area, so they don't have them. During the first 12 months to two years, generally in our community, we would see people around anyway, rather than having to make the phone calls and we'd bump into them either at the primary school or the at a restaurant or just walking down the street. Some communities and marketplaces don't have that ability because they're bigger than what ours was. But I think it's just a connection. And I don't think you should be having that 12-month phone call. There should be a number of other little communication pieces along the way that makes that 12-month phone call a lot easier. The generic phone calls to make sure that how is everything going inside the home and that it's all running well and it is what you expected to be, and then informing them of other new listings that are nearby, what sales results are, not necessarily for for their benefit, but just to make sure that they're across the marketplace. Keep offering if there's anything else that you need. Like people used to wake right up our front door of our office, elderly people and say ask what time the bus stop was or the buses were coming past the bus stop. We are expected to know every single thing about what's going on in the marketplace.

SPEAKER_00: 18:29

Well, Christian Bartley, plenty of coaching tips today. And later on this year, you are our big opening keynote speaker at the Complete Leader Conference as you take everyone through the company prospecting program, which is actually connected to what we're talking about today. Well, real estate's just nothing more than attract, engage, commit. So we've done the marketing and we've attracted some wonderful people coming through to us. We've got them engaged because they let us get them on a price update and allow us to pop over and see their home. But the commitment side is when we're making these value calls and building that relationship to the data so that we do get the opportunity to do it. So it connects nicely to what you're going to be teaching the leaders. But then at street level, our agents need to be making calls that build value.

SPEAKER_01: 19:14

And just thinking about what they are calling before they pick up the phone, uh, don't just ring instead of saying, uh, look, just touch your base to see if you're thinking of selling. You know, get rid of that dialogue. Since we last spoke, buy demand in your price range has increased by 25%. Two homes like yours just saw one had three bidders. If you're considering a move, time is now working in your favor. Look, we've got buyers who missed out nearby and are still active. If the right offer came in, would you consider it? And you're not asking if they're ready. Your creative relevance and speed increases when urgency becomes logical.

SPEAKER_00: 19:47

And that's why I love that question. So, Christian, tell me about your next property. And next isn't about time, month, whatever. Like we all live in a house, or hopefully we do. You're then thinking, but my next place would be. So I know myself, I I see what I would like next. Not that I'm I I love where I am, but I had this next thing. And if you can get people speaking about the next property enough, it's amazing how it amplifies. And then suddenly they're looking it up on realestate.com and now they've asked for an alert, and three weeks later they're like, get back here. We decided to do it. I think great salespeople can excite people to move.

SPEAKER_01: 20:24

Just imagine if you are a potential seller and uh someone brings along a house that is exactly what you would want. And you picture yourself in that moment that has the pool we want, that has the shape, the style, the foundations, the the colour palette, everything, the landscape, the size of the land, the corner side, whatever it is. Someone drops out in front of you, that triggers you to go, that's what we're looking for. Are the agents in that area going to be doing that? Yes, they will be helping that client out. But even if I can get addicted to that as well, that's just the that's that's just the nature of helping people and uh trying to find something, or even you know, looking through sold data and going, that one sold four years ago. I wonder if that owner would sell. And then you contact the agent in that area and say, Do you reckon that owner would sell that property again? Because I've got a buyer would probably buy it. And these are all the strategies. The worst thing that can happen is the answer is no, and they aren't looking at selling. But the more questions you ask, the more answers that come back, and it eventually occurs.

SPEAKER_00: 21:29

So just fall in love with your job. And what's powerful about that, Christian, is this is how buyers advocates are now charging fifteen and twenty thousand dollars to help people. Now, agents thought that wouldn't take off because who would pay that? People are using it all the time, and they're doing it local, but you could do it as an agent, as a service, to win the listing. And here people are looking at three or four thousand dollars difference between agents, yet they'll pay fifteen thousand dollars to to to have assistance. In buying it. So to provide that service isn't that hard. Do the reports, everything we've discussed today, but it's become a profession now and a huge profession that people don't think twice about. Yeah, I'm going to pay someone to find me a property and make sure I'm not making any mistakes. And what does a buyer's advocate do? Provide value and some protection so that the purchaser can actually achieve that reason for purchasing.

SPEAKER_01: 22:25

Yes, but on every time I offered that to someone, they always said, Oh, what's the cost? And I just said, No, it's not the cost. It's just my my intention to help you and help you move. Every person that you're talking about generally, unless they're a landlord or investor, they are moving somewhere. It's the door that is open that a lot of people miss. They focus on the primary property that they've been invited to talk to the owners in, and they focus on that rather than where they're moving to.

SPEAKER_00: 22:56

Well, Christian Bartley, great episode today. And you and I are recording Wednesday. This comes out tomorrow. That just shows you how close the show is to the marketplace. And we look forward to having you at the Complete Letter Conference. And thank you for joining us.