Look Ma, I'm on TV!

This episode goes far beyond lead gen. Trevor Mauch walks through how inbound marketing has evolved, how AI is reshaping online search, and why consistency beats speed every time. But where he really shines is in breaking down how to scale a business intentionally — from your first deal to seven figures. He shares his Entrepreneur Freedom Formula, the “pain lines” every business hits, and the identity shifts required to break through each revenue ceiling.

About Trevor Mauch

Trevor is the CEO of Carrot.com (5x Inc Magazine fastest-growing company), where they help over 6,000 real estate investors and agents stand out and generate highly-motivated seller leads through their websites, tools & training. Trevor lives in Roseburg, Oregon, with his wife and 3 kids and is passionate about using business to fuel your passion and to amplify the impact you want to make in the world. The impact he’s passionate about making is helping entrepreneurs unleash that entrepreneurial dream of finally unlocking the FREEDOM & IMPACT most dream of but haven’t yet been able to achieve. You can find Trevor on his podcasts, The Entrepreneur Freedom Formula & Evergreen Marketing. You can follow Trevor on Instagram at @trevor.mauch or his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheTrevorMauch.

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How AI + Authentic Content Are Reshaping Real Estate Leads According to Trevor Mauch

I can tell you one thing. Technology is the single most important aspect of every business that has successfully scaled. It’s time for That Real Estate Tech Guy. It’s your weekly chance to explore how technology can help your real estate business explode. Each week, you’ll hear from real estate investors who have been there and done that and find out their favorite technology tips.

Listen in as Jordan speaks with tech companies and learns about new technologies and new ideas that will help you scale your business. And now, join your host, Jordan Samuel Fleming, CEO of SmrtPhone, for this week’s episode.

Hey, and welcome to this week’s episode of That Real Estate Tech Guy. I’m your host, Jordan Samuel Fleming, and I’m delighted to say this episode is packed with Trevor Mauch from Carrot. Now, if you don’t know Trevor, you’ll know Carrot if you’re in real estate. It’s one of the biggest lead generation platforms in the country for real estate investors.

And of course, in the last couple of years, they purchased InvestorFuse and launched Carrot CRM as well. This is a great conversation with Trevor. Trevor is an amazing guy who’s built an amazing business, and he has an incredible brain for business. Not only do we touch on a lot of the core lead generation concepts, we also talk about the importance of moving from lead generation into your CRM.

But Trevor really dives deep into what it means to scale a business, particularly as a real estate investor. And you’re not going to want to miss this episode on YouTube. If you’re listening to this on your podcast, whatever platform you’re listening to, head over to YouTube and check it out there, because he shares his screen and talks us through some of the growth levers and the growth stages he’s seen over the years.

He’s clearly thought a lot about this. This is an opportunity to hear from someone who has built an amazing business, and who thinks deeply about business. I can’t tell you enough good things about Trevor, Carrot, and our partnership with Carrot and Carrot CRM at SmrtPhone. This is an episode you’re not going to want to miss on YouTube.

So head over there now, give it a like, and leave a question, and we’ll get it over to Trevor. For now, let’s go to the show.

And we’re live. I’m here with Trevor from Carrot. Most of you probably know who he is, but in case you don’t, Trevor, just give a little summary of who you are and what your company is all about.

Jordan, dude, first of all, I appreciate the opportunity, man, and good to see you. Yeah, I own a company called Carrot, and we serve thousands and thousands of the top real estate investors, flippers, wholesalers, and a lot of agents. And now we’re going into home services too, like HVAC and roofing contractors.

At the root, what we do is we help you get in front of your most motivated prospects online with our websites, our high-performing websites, our marketing data, and now with our CRM. We help you convert those leads into deals faster with our AI automation too.

So basically, we want to be the inbound marketing stack for high-ticket service businesses in the market, including real estate investors.

Absolutely. And inbound is such an important thing. If we just think about the real estate market right now and where people are, inbound is absolutely critical. Most people, inbound is where you get your most qualified leads. Without question, it’s where you’re able to focus, follow up, and get your most success.

But I think a lot of people just assume. I think a lot of people default to high-volume outbound to begin with. Have you seen any changes to success rates or the levers people need to pull for inbound over the last year?

Because it’s been a weird year. It’s been a weird year. The real estate market, in many spots, we have some clients, like in the Ohio markets, going, “Oh man, best years I’ve ever had,” and it seems like they’re all doing good up in some of those markets.

And then you have guys in other markets where it’s like, “Oh man, one month we’re up here, and then one month we’re down here.” So there is inconsistency across the board.

But then there’s the AI dynamic. How AI search has changed the way that people find solutions online. That’s something we’ve been heavy into this past year. We can talk about that at a high level.

The way I think about marketing in real estate, and I believe it applies well across the home services markets too, is inbound is the foundation. It creates consistency in your business.

And by inbound, Jordan, some people will say direct mail and things like that are inbound. For me, that’s actually outbound because I’m taking a message and sending it out to people to get them to grab it. Then, yes, they can come inbound, but technically that’s outbound marketing.

Inbound for me is we’re putting something out there in the current flow of where people are already going to find a solution, and then we’re getting in front of them. That’s Google search now, that’s ChatGPT. It’s networking too. Local networking is inbound marketing, technically.

But inbound is the foundation because it creates consistency. It’s a little harder to get going at the start. That’s the drawback. It’s more work to get momentum going. But once it has momentum, you’re getting the best leads, the most motivated leads. They close the quickest, they have the highest profit per deal, and they’re the most consistent.

Where outbound comes in for me is it’s fast. If you’re going into a market, you’ll probably go outbound first to test the market and scale. It’s speed and scale.

The people who are doing the most deals, we have a client, Rapid Fire Home Buyers. They do five to six hundred wholesales a year, and they crush it with Carrot. Carrot is their number one profit lead source, but by volume it’s direct mail, cold calling, and all the other ones. So they have to mix all of them to get their 500 deals a year.

And that mix is really important as you start to scale up as an investor. When you get started, chances are you’re watching your pennies carefully because you don’t have any pennies yet. So you make decisions around what is cheapest, what is quickest, and that’s totally fair.

But when you start to scale up, the scale up involves solidifying your marketing channels and solidifying your process internally. Those two have to go hand in hand. I’d imagine one of the reasons you guys brought out Carrot CRM is being tired of generating leads that people don’t follow up properly.

Yeah, that’s a big part of it. But I’ll tell you the major part of it, speaking as a software owner and marketer to marketer.

When you have thousands and thousands of clients that come in and say, “Hey, can you help me get leads?” and then they’re getting leads, but you can’t help them manage those leads and turn them into deals, you’re not serving them well.

And from the business perspective, one way to grow is you ask, “What can I help people with that they need right before or right after my current product?” It was logical. They need that right after they get leads.

But the biggest strategic reason, and what I’m most excited about heading into the future, is when AI really became mainstream, where people are going to win with AI is not just using AI. It’s the companies that have unique data that layers over the top of AI.

And we’ve got a really unique data set. We have more online leads coming through our platform for motivated sellers than any other platform in the world by a good margin, because our clients crush it in Google. They’re crushing it in ChatGPT now. They do really well on Google PPC and Facebook.

We had all this data, but we were missing the data once the lead came in. To make marketing powerful, you need to know what happened with that lead. Did it turn into a deal? Was it highly profitable? What marketing channels turned into deals?

We didn’t have any of that because you couldn’t unify the whole stack. Now we have that data with some of the biggest wholesalers and flippers in the country. We know what marketing channels turn into deals, how many touches you need, and what types of touches make the most sense.

Then we can take that data into future products we’re developing with AI, learn from it, feed it back into the front end of the funnel, and say, “What types of contacts are likely to lead into the best deals?” Feed those back into the marketing machine, back into Google, back into Facebook, back into the content on your website.

So that’s where we’re going. And that was the real reason behind the CRM side of it. We can help make the marketing better.

Yeah, and that’s such a smart thing to do. Over the years, as I’ve worked with real estate investors, I’ve taught them on the phone side. One of the things I always tell them to track is: you’re going to have lots of channels. I want to know which channels are bringing leads in. That’s easy.

But I also want to know which channels bring leads that convert to contracts and closings, and by each channel how many touch points you need. Because you may find trends that show where you should be putting your money for the best profits and easiest conversions.

And that’s only possible if you’re looking at that data as a combined data set, which is what you’re doing.

And with bigger teams, inside the product, one thing the InvestorFuse team built before we acquired it was the ability for an owner to say: based on lead channel or lead type, like PPC leads that are high quality and need fast follow up, you can route those to your best closer.

You don’t assign those to the new acquisitions manager. You route the highest quality leads to your best person, and the leads that take more touches and training go to your developing team. But you can’t do that without the data.

I heard a quote years ago: 50% of your marketing doesn’t work. Most people just don’t know which 50%. We have to figure out what’s working and what’s not so we can stop what’s not working and scale what is, and assign your best leads to your best people.

And that’s also where AI is going to have a massive impact.