097: Real Estate Coach Scales from $0 to $51M in 5 Years with Krista Mashore

Today, I’m joined by real estate coach, author, and digital marketing expert Krista Mashore to talk about how her coaching programs have made more than $1M/month for 31 consecutive months.

As a real estate agent, Krista sold more than 2,300 homes. Ready to share her expertise, she left real estate and launched her coaching business in 2017. In just five years, Krista’s business went from $0 to $51M+.

Today, you’ll hear how Krista designs and tests her funnels and high-ticket offers, how to earn trust and turn prospects into buyers, and how to make effective investments in yourself and your business.

Inspiring Quotes

• “Going through a course on your own is very difficult and most people aren’t successful. But when you have help and support and guidance and accountability and you have other people that you can talk to and be around on a regular basis, it makes it a lot easier.” – Krista Mashore

• “You have to be willing to adjust and modify and look at what you did and be willing to change what you did in order to make things work.” – Krista Mashore

• “If your stuff that’s free isn’t good enough and making a big enough impact, nobody’s going to want to take the next step.” – Krista Mashore

• “It’s getting harder and harder to earn someone’s trust. You need to give as much value as possible and elevate your authority and build that relationship with somebody.” – Krista Mashore

• “Whether you’re doing an event, a VSL, a webinar, anything at all … The hardest issue is to get the people on the other side to believe that they can actually do it.” – Krista Mashore

• “We test everything, even things that are working. Because even things that are working eventually can get stale or fatigued.” – Krista Mashore

• “You will not fail if you just keep going. But the problem is most people just stop.” – Krista Mashore

• “It’s really important to make sure that the person you’re learning from has actually done the thing they’re teaching you to do.” – Krista Mashore

• Making 7 figures as a real estate agent
• How Krista went from real estate to coaching
• Creating high-ticket offers
• Optimizing funnels
• How to gain trust by giving away value
• Should your marketing content be evergreen?
• The 3 things you need to do to convert prospects
• Krista’s $900K mistake
• Trusting your gut as an entrepreneur
• Adapting in a bad real estate market
• What should you look for in a coach?

Brad Weimert: Krista MaShore, I appreciate you carving out some time.

Krista MaShore: Thanks for having me, Brad. I appreciate it.

Brad Weimert: For sure. So, I want to dive into things right away with you. You are kind of directly in our ideal client profile for Easy Pay Direct. We work with a ton of people that crush it in the info product space and you are one of them. So, backdrop here, you have a large real estate background and now a real estate education background. Can you give me a little context for like size and shape of your business right now for background?

Krista MaShore: Yeah. So, I’ve been in the coaching industry for about six years. Prior to that, I was in the real estate business, a top 1% agent, and now we have about a thousand students and we bring on around a thousand leads into our pipeline every single month that either go to a webinar or to a virtual event. And we do anywhere from a million plus a month for the past 31 months in a row for the overall business model for coaching. So, it’s been really, really great. Now, we actually also are coaching entrepreneurs, teaching them the model that we’ve been using over the past 31-plus months to hit million-dollar months.

Brad Weimert: Awesome. So, I want to get into the business model itself. But before we do that, tell me about the path of becoming a real estate agent and then the transition into coaching and information.

Krista MaShore: Yeah. And there might be a little bit of a lag, everyone. So, sorry about that if you notice that. Me and Brad are trying to figure that out. But yeah, so prior to becoming a real estate agent, I was a teacher. I taught third grade for six years, loved it, and then kind of got sort of forced into becoming a real estate agent because of some really exciting life events that now looking back were great, but at the time didn’t seem so much that way. Got into real estate for 17 years, did really, really well, and then eventually realized that my passion was really helping other people and I had realized that I was an expert in real estate and I knew that I could probably help other people kind of find the success that I had in real estate because I did it very non-conventionally. And so, I took the leap and left my nice, safe real estate career, one of which was very exhausting and tiring and working like a psychopath, quite frankly. You know, I average about 135 homes a year at the time when I was in real estate and I was just tired. So, I knew that I can take my skills and knowledge, and expertise that I had in real estate and help other people. So, I just took the plunge and left real estate full-time just at the six-year mark. And it’s been great. It’s been hard and challenging and fun all at the same time.

Brad Weimert: Wild. So, now you dropped a couple of stats, which are the info product business, the coaching business, has been doing a million a month for 31 months consecutively but you also said that you were top 1% realtor. When you were doing real estate, what was unconventional about the approach? And where were you? I mean, 135 homes a year is a lot. So, where were you relative to revenue? And like, what was the business model then that was allowing you to do 135 homes a year?

Krista MaShore: Yeah. So, I kind of went out with a bang. My first year in real estate, I sold 69 homes as a solo agent, and desperation, quite frankly. I had two little girls at home, a brand new mortgage, and empty bank accounts. So, I kind of had to do it. And I just did really well. And as a real estate agent, when I left being a realtor, I was thinking about $1.8 million in GCI a year, bringing home about 1.5 million, I’d say, after expenses. And I did it utilizing social media and video and digital marketing. So, I basically had more of an attraction-based marketing model in real estate. I became a marketer, which then led me to be a top producer really early on in the business. And then once Facebook ads came out 12 plus years ago or so and video, I just sort of continued to dominate the market and made it to where I was constantly showing up in people’s newsfeeds, their social media feeds, which is educational content about real estate, about the community. And I didn’t have to do open houses or door knock or cold call or do any of the normal things that agents do. I basically just learned how to be a top marketer in real estate through education and then therefore I attracted the business. So, that’s the same model that I teach real estate agents to do is like how to become basically a top marketer or to become a top producer.

Brad Weimert: I love that. Yeah. That seems like a pretty logical path, though, I will say that most people, when they make a transition, don’t just quit what they’re doing and shift altogether into coaching. So, how did you decide like, “I am not selling homes anymore and I’m moving 100% into coaching?” Is that what it was? Was there any overlap and what was the thought process there?

Krista MaShore: There is a little bit of overlap, so I knew I wanted to make a change. So, I brought my brother into the real estate business about a year prior and just kind of like showed him the ropes. It wasn’t because I was planning on leaving. It was because he was in a job he didn’t like, and it was horrible on his body and he had a great personality. And I said, “Hey, you’ll be great at real estate so let me just go ahead and teach you the ropes.” So, I taught my brother how to pretty much be me. He went on 150-plus appointments with me, and I showed him how to take listings. And then one day I just got to a point where I was so tired of real estate and I didn’t realize how much I was working quite frankly and I was working a lot to sell. My best year, I did 169 transactions as a solo agent and with a new assistant and a transaction coordinator. So, it is a lot of work. I didn’t realize just how much I was working, how burnt out I was, and one day I just got to the point where I was like, I went to a training and realized, “I can be a coach. I know I can do this.” And I just called my brother and said, “Hey, I’m leaving the business. You’re taking over.” And he’s like, “Okay, in a couple of months.” I’m like, “No. Tomorrow. Like, get over here,” and like I’m done.

So, that’s what I did. And pretty much it was nice because I was still getting income from that business, which I definitely needed. I mean, nobody tells you to start a new business, I think I hit the million-dollar mark in about 11 months in coaching but no one tells you it takes like $1,200,000 to make a million, right? When you first change jobs in a heartbeat and you need, it’s a lot. So, looking back at that, I’m not even sure how I did that, quite frankly. But yeah, I guess I left and I utilized the money from my real estate business to support my coaching business, and I did pretty good. Wasn’t quite as profitable as I had hoped as early on. But then when COVID hit, we were at about a six-week burn rate in my coaching business, and I realized I had to completely change the way I was doing things so I started doing virtual events. And so, from the time COVID hit on, we’ve just done one virtual event after another with this whole proven model process that I have. And we every month just tweak and define and optimize one aspect of the event. And some optimizations have been amazing. Some have been really bad just depending on what we’re doing but luckily we’re learning and now we’re teaching other people this model so they don’t have to make the same mistakes that I did.

And we’re just basically giving them a blueprint of like, “Okay. Here’s exactly how you do what we’re doing.” And we’ve had people that have great success, and ones that hit the million-dollar-a-month model market. We’ve had people do 500,000. We’ve had people do 600,000 in a day, which is pretty cool, which is really great actually considering they don’t have this huge team like I do. And so, it’s been nice.

Brad Weimert: Awesome. Yeah. It’s huge. It’s also atypical in the info product space tremendously. And you mentioned that it took time to get there. I have a couple of questions around that but the first is you said that you went to a seminar and saw, I think, probably the info or the coaching model and you’re like, “Oh, I can do this. Let me run with it.” Whose seminar was it? What caught your attention?

Krista MaShore: I actually just watched a webinar from Russell Brunson on Expert Secrets. So, I watched the webinar, 90-minute webinar, picked up the phone, paid $15,000, flew to Boise, did an event, and then I joined his Inner Circle. It was a $25,000 investment, then a $50,000 investment, then a $150,000 investment, and I stayed with him for quite a few years. And just being around those people and like learning the possibilities, it wasn’t like they didn’t give you a blueprint of like, “Here’s your funnels. Here’s your…” Like they said, “This is what you need to do.” So, there’s a lot of trial and error and figuring out on our own. But being around the group and the ideas and the collaboration and seeing the success of others and being around that mastermind, it just completely elevated my belief and my drive. And Napoleon Hill says there’s nothing like being around other people and having somebody that’s kind of been there and done that you could sort of replicate and was a game changer for me. So, I’ve invested over $1 million of my own personal coaching and growth over the past six years from just about everyone. I’ve hired so many people, some good, some bad, and just kind of learn through trial and error.

And I wouldn’t say it’s an info product. It’s like it truly is a coaching company that we have. I mean, we literally handhold people, give them a business blueprint, the funnels, the worksheets, everything they need like to kind of start their own business, whether it be in real estate or for the proven model. So, it’s more than just like, “Hey, do this,” but more of a, “Here are the things. Now, tweak them and make them your own,” kind of a deal. So, yeah, it’s been… And we put a lot into the coaching program. It’s not just like, “Hey, take this course.” I mean, we have hands-on training every single day and office hours and accountability coaching and everything you can to help somebody be successful because I think just going through a course on your own is very difficult and most people aren’t successful. But when you have help and support and guidance and accountability and you have other people that you can talk to and be around on a regular basis, it really makes it a lot easier, you know?

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think there’s no question about that. And I clump those things together because almost all information product companies that we work with, there’s an escalation path. So, it starts with some front-end offer that is, it might be a lead magnet, it might be a membership site online. Almost all of them escalate to a live event or a coaching package in the back end, and that is the escalation path of the model. And it’s an interesting point because you delineate those two things really clearly, certainly in your head. But I’ve heard you speak before about high ticket, and correct me if I’m, well, and you can just tell me. I’m not even going to make an assumption here but what are the price points of what you sell and how does the model work? So, if it’s mostly coaching, what does that look like? Because I think that plays into the success in some capacity but I’d love to learn more about that.

Krista MaShore: Yeah. Okay. So, originally, when I first started coaching, my highest converting high ticket offer and high-ticket now is anywhere from 25,000 to we’ve received upwards of $200,000 in revenue from our coaching clients. Our average like is around a $25,000 offer for either 90 days or 12 months, depending on if you’re an entrepreneur or a real estate agent. But originally, it started off with just a book, right? We did a book funnel. And the book funnel people would read the book and they’d get onto a phone call with the setter, and then a closer into high ticket. And we were doing anywhere from $500 to $700, $1,000 a month with that model but it was very difficult to be profitable because we had setters and closers. And a lot of salespeople are very difficult because you don’t know about that, the three deal. They can be kind of hard to deal with sometimes. And so, when we changed the model to a lead magnet to a webinar to a three-day virtual event, we got rid of the closers and we just would send everybody straight to book a call. And that is what’s really transformed our businesses, is creating high ticket offers. We don’t have any low-ticket offers.

We’re actually in the process now other than a book. We’re in the process now of changing that because the market has kind of changed. And we’re sort of going to do the whole membership model where people sign into a software, and then they get a free trial. And from there, they get invited to either a webinar or to an event, and then we sell them high ticket. So, our high ticket offer is $25,000. We’ve also done a high ticket offer, $60,000, again, for a virtual event and sold on that as well. But we feel that we will scale more if we bring the price down to 25K and do it for a 90-day offer instead of 50K, 60K at a six-month offer, which is now what we’re going to be launching in January. And honestly, Brad, it’s a lot of like trial and error, right? It’s like seeing who your audience is, what works for them. And not every launch works. I mean, we just did a launch and, I mean, we did a couple hundred thousand dollars on it but we pretty much sort of broke even from the expense and the cost to put the offer on. But the cool thing is that we’re learning our audience. We’re also learning that we need to kind of change who are our avatar is, our ideal client because the market is wanting something different than what we’re actually offering, so because of that.

And that’s really important for everyone to hear is that every offer that you make is not going to be hit out of the park and you have to be willing to adjust and modify and look at what you did and be willing to change what you did in order to make things work. And I think a lot of people, they give up because they don’t see it working at the expense of it, obviously. And I’ve seen my own students doing that. Like, they’ll do great and then they’ll lose a few students or they’ll have a hard month. And instead of them just keep going on and trying to figure out a way to move funds around or to even make an investment in the business, they just give up. And so, instead of struggling for a little while, they struggle forever. You know what I mean?

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I do very much. And that was a lot you’ve got. So, I want to break that apart a little bit because the elements of how to know when your market doesn’t want what you’re selling anymore so when it’s time to pivot like that’s an interesting topic in of itself. And the other is I want to clarify the model. So, basically, it’s the book funnel, which is some lead magnet. You’re selling a low-dollar thing. And that, I’m assuming, is anything from $7 to $30. And the purpose of that is to help cover the cost of the leads that come in. And then from there, is the virtual event a free event, or is that what the paid event is? Are you pushing people the free event and then selling them on the high ticket from there?

Krista MaShore: Yeah. So, basically, we do. So, we basically market for the event ten days prior because anything past ten days we’ve got no-shows increase and all that great stuff, right? So, we only market for an event ten days prior. So, if during the month we have one virtual event and we have one or two 90-minute webinars or trainings, right? So, if the 90-minute training is next, I will drive traffic to that training. And then from that training, that’s a free training, the offer is going to the three-day event. If the three-day event is next up on the calendar, then I will drive traffic to that and that’s supported anywhere from a $47 to $100 offer for a three-day virtual event. We’ve tested like all different price points and we found that $47 gets us the lowest cost per acquisition, which is still pretty darn high, right? It’s around $240-ish, anywhere from 180 to 350, quite frankly, to get people to get to the virtual event. The cost for getting people to the free webinar is around $25 to $40, depending on the month, the season, the climate of what’s happening. And yeah, so it’s a free event webinar driving traffic to the three-day event or it’s a paid ticket to the three-day event, $47 to $97, which from that three-day virtual event we offer a high ticket program ranging in the past anywhere from $18,000 to $60,000. Our sweet spot we’re finding is around $25,000 and that $25,000 mark is right around what we’ve done anywhere from $1 million to $2 million in a month from high ticket offer to our virtual event.

Brad Weimert: Awesome. And so, there are a couple of interesting parts of that. And the first one is that you’re shifting between a free webinar and a three-day event and you’ll go straight to the three-day event if it’s closer. So, why the gap? Does it not still make sense to push people into the free webinar, or did you just find that it wasn’t necessary?

Krista MaShore: Yeah. So, basically, we used to even do a five-day challenge, right? So, this kind of shows you all the things we tested. So, we did a five-day challenge for about 18 months and then we realized that challenges kind of got a little bit – they were a little saturated in the market. People weren’t taking them as seriously, getting someone to show up for five days, even though it was only an hour a day like conversions went down by the third, fourth day, like less than half the people would even show up even though that content was great and people loved it. But we found that the cost per acquisition and the conversion was actually higher on a 90-minute webinar. And again, that can change, right? We just base it upon our data. So, that just shows you how important it is for you to test and tweak things and not to get so comfortable with what you’re doing without testing. And we try our hardest and we’re not always good at this. There’s plenty of times we’re playing catch up but we try to sort of get ahead of things that might happen. For example, fatigue, right? Like, our challenge started getting fatigued and it wasn’t converting as much so the webinar was doing better.

But we found that whether or not somebody goes to a webinar or just goes to the event, there’s like less than half a percent in conversion to high ticket meaning they don’t have to go to the webinar and then to the event to convert at the same rate. If they just go to the three-day event, the conversions are almost exactly the same but the difference is, is that the cost to drive traffic to a free webinar is substantially less, right? It’s between $25 and $40 instead of between $180 and $350 for the high-ticket three-day event. But the bad thing about the free challenge is that about 10% of people only show up no matter what we do, even though now we’re incorporating AI and we have all these follow-up sequences and these conversion sequences and start doing everything we can to get more people to show up. It used to be closer to 24%, but it’s gone down for whatever reason. So, now we’re working on getting more people to show up. So, there’s just all these different factors, so they’re both equally important. I can still build my list while I’m doing the free webinar. The cost per acquisition cost really is much cheaper, right? But the no-show rate is much, much higher. But I still own the leads. I then can nurture those leads. I can build my list. I continue to offer them the three-day event later on just straight from that list.

But we still want to make sure that we’re like we know if we can, I mean, the biggest problem I have, honestly, Brad, is getting more people to the event. We’ve tried Google Ads. We tried like TikTok ads, everything you can imagine. Our best source of getting people to the event is Facebook Ads and it’s still difficult. And you know how Facebook is, right? It’s very volatile. So, both work. There’s pros and cons of both. And the reason why we have the webinar is because I don’t want to offer – if I have an event in 30 days, I don’t want to drive traffic to that event 30 days later because if anything from ten days or sooner, then there’s a lot more no shows. So, we don’t want to start marketing directly to the three-day event prior to ten days before because we’ll have a lot of falloff even though they paid for it.

Brad Weimert: Love it. Yeah. So, keeping engagement up. So, we’re super, super granular on the marketing front, which I love. And I want to stay there because I think it’s super important to the people that geek out on marketing. But I also want to clarify a little bit of language and then back out to some of like the systemic things that you’re doing to help people think about the general approach. So, first and foremost, when you talk about the free webinars being more cost-effective to get people to, for those that aren’t driving a ton of traffic, it’s because the offer is free. So, you just get more people clicking through to take the free offer than the paid, right? So, from there, one of my questions is when you look at the aggregate funnel, the first several steps here ultimately are all in the name of paying for advertising to sell the high ticket. So, how do you think about what information you’re delivering and what value you’re providing from the book to the free webinar to the three-day virtual event that all tees up into coaching, right? What is it that’s getting people in there that they’re excited about? And what are you delivering that keeps them engaged throughout that process? That’s not in the coaching or how it works with the coaching, right?

Krista MaShore: Yeah. Well, we give away a lot like you would probably think almost too much, quite honestly like even on both programs. If people are going to read my books, Sell 100 Homes A Year, and they could take that book, and if they actually did it, they would be awesome. I just wrote a book, A Million Dollar Month Model. In fact, if you’d like, I can give you a chapter of it. It’s called Seven Levers for Seven Figures. It literally breaks down everything from A to Z on how we drive traffic, we acquire our customer, how we convert them. I can give you that chapter of the book, but if somebody even read the book, it’d be like they can take that book and go, “Man, I can do this on my own,” but there’s 8 million nuance steps in between even though we give away so much and even at the event, like we’re literally teaching so much that my sales team is like, “I think you give away too much.” And I’ve had people basically tell me that they can just do it on their own after watching it and thanks to you, like they literally have made hundreds of thousands of dollars just for free watching your $47 event. Maybe we should cut back a little bit.

But I think that the more you give, it’s like Alex Hormozi always talks about this, right? It’s like value, value, value. And I’ve been talking about that serve not sell, value, value, value for six years. If your stuff that’s free isn’t good enough and making a big enough impact, nobody’s going to want to take the next step and you’re knocking at their attention to want to sit down for a 90-minute webinar or a three-day event. But if your stuff is good enough, they’re going to want to. And most smart people realize that you can google anything and you can read any book but to really, I mean, I have literally given people our funnels, our workbooks, our slides, our email sequences, like our SOPs, our sales training, like I’ve given them my entire business model, right, that we’ve spent over $28 million like building. And there are these awesome entrepreneurs that are smart and well-equipped, they have teams, and they still have tons of questions and need a ton of help. So, there’s just so many things in between. So, I don’t think you can ever give away too much. So, we give away high, high value at the webinar, high, high value through the event, high, high value with every lead magnet that we make, enough that it gets people excited about wanting to show up for the next step and trusting me and seeing me as the authority.

And as you know, Brad, like right now, I believe it’s harder than ever to gain authority because there are so many fakes out there. Like, what’s that saying, for those that can’t do then teach, right? There are so many people that are saying they’ve done something that they’ve never even done or they’re quite frankly, just lying about it or they’re taking the success of somebody else, which we’ve all seen. So, it’s getting harder and harder to earn someone’s trust. So, therefore, you need to really, really give as much value as possible and elevate your authority and build that relationship with somebody. So, I believe before you can sell somebody, you need to earn the right. It’s kind of like most people just I feel like they kind of dive in for the kill. They want to jump in the sack before they ever date. I highly believe in dating people, flirting with them, holding their hand, taking them to lunch and dinner before I ask for a kiss, you know? And I think a lot of marketers miss that step. And so, we do that and we do it really, really well. We earn their trust. And then once they get into our world, we then completely over-deliver even more so than we did on the beginning. Because as you know, you have to constantly be selling people like you need to sell them. Once they say yes, you need to sell them to write the check. You need to sell them throughout the entire training because there are so many roadblocks to success. So, you constantly got to be like positively influencing them to want to keep going for themselves.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I totally agree with you. And I think that the…

Krista MaShore: [Indiscernible 26:24]

Brad Weimert: No. You’ve got me. Totally agree with you. The other part of that is and you’ve alluded to it several times, but there’s this never-ending change in the landscape of specifically paid ads but our marketing world in general right now, let alone what you’ve got going in the real estate space as of October of 2023. But just from a marketing consideration, everything’s ever-changing. So, the other question for me is a lot of people historically in the direct response marketing space, evergreen things were super popular. And so, there was a, “Hey, how can I create a webinar or a three-day training and repurpose the content as often as possible?” or all the events live for you? Or do you repurpose stuff or keep it static for some period of time before you redo it? How do you think about that portion of it, both in terms of your funnel and products that you deliver?

Krista MaShore: That’s awesome. So, we don’t do a whole lot that is evergreen. We try to do the challenge evergreen. We do like some of the recordings, we’ll let people watch on demand because entrepreneurs are busy, especially with our entrepreneurs. But with our three-day event, I did it 18 months in a row every single month live. And the reason I did that was because I wanted to be able to learn. Like, we would go back and look at the comments, we’d look at the questions, we’d look at what people liked, what they didn’t or what they felt like was missing. And we constantly would tweak and massage and change the order. We looked at show up rate, we looked at return rate, we looked at fall-off rate. We looked at everything you can imagine. We track everything during these events. And so, we would continue to do it over based upon the feedback we were getting and all the questions and everything else and move things around until it got to even things like somebody would say, “Oh, there’s too many testimonials,” we would change the event next month and say, “Hey, the reason you’re seeing these success stories is because we want you to see yourself in as one of these success stories.” It’s not a testimonial so you seeing that you can do this.

So, anytime you see a success story, I want you to say, “That’s me. I can do it. I’m next.” Right? So, we would take everything from the comments and the feedback that was happening and change and massage the event to help it convert more. So, that’s why we did it 18 months in a row. It was exhausting. Then we took the event and for six months it was an evergreen live version. So, I wasn’t there. It was recordings of me but my team was there. There was a live emcee. It ran live and so it looked like it was live. We told people there were recordings. Part was recording. Part was live. We didn’t lie about it, but it was done so well that they forgot that it wasn’t live and then it would get a little stale. The market changed, as you said, August of 2023, that whole market crash with the recession and interest rates doubling. So, then we had to redo the event based upon the market shift and our languaging matching the messaging in the market. That ran for a couple of months then we did it again. So, now it’s at a point where the real estate one is running. It’s been like five or six months that it’s been the same one, right? And again, it’s a live virtual encore type of thing where I’m not there. It’s recordings of me but my team is. And we’re going to be redoing it brand new in January because we’re revamping it, changing the name and all that good stuff, as well as doing the same thing for the entrepreneurial ones.

So, we’ll run the entrepreneurial one probably four or five, six months in a row before we let that one run evergreen for a few months. And we do that for a couple of reasons. Number one is I get exhausted. I can only handle so much. It’s like three days. Coaching is kind of a lot. And also we’re even testing with entrepreneurs, is three days too much? Maybe we need to shorten it, maybe we need to, because a lot of people say, “Hey, three days is a lot. It’s a long time,” even though it’s great content. But we do notice that the people that are the most – the ones that are there and stay and sit, that are excited about it, keep showing up, they’re the ones that buy. So, it’s hard to tell sometimes.

Brad Weimert: For sure. Well, I want to highlight something you said because you were talking about taking feedback, reading the comments, paying attention to your market, and taking feedback. And the way that you discussed implementing the feedback is important for people to understand, which is when the feedback was there are too many testimonials, you didn’t take the testimonials out. You looked at it and said, “Let me engage the audience and help them understand why this is in here and participate more with it.” And I think that that’s a really interesting way to take a lesson from the comments as opposed to what I think most people would do, which is just shut it down and say, “Okay. Well, people don’t like this. Let me kill it.” So, I love that.

Krista MaShore: I know how important testimonials are because, I mean, so the biggest problem that so there’s a few – I’ve been studying sales and persuasion tactics for like, honestly, six years. I go to all these different events, whether it’s virtual or in-person, just to watch the whole sales process, right, to watch everything that they do. And I think that’s what we’ve gotten so good at them because I’ve been kind of obsessed with watching everybody from Russell Brunson, Peng Joon, like people you’ve never heard of in the industry and kind of seeing how they do things and taking bits and pieces and not taking bits and pieces, quite frankly. But the biggest problem that you have, whether you’re doing event, VSL, a webinar, an event, anything at all, a book that you’re writing, the hardest issue is to get the people on the other side to believe that they can actually do it, to believe that it’ll work for them. The average person, their brain says, “Well, Krista can do it because she has pretty fake blond hair because…” whatever story they want to say. They look for reasons why it will not work for them and their brain talks them out of wanting to do it. So, your job, which is your hardest job out of the whole any to prevent, in my opinion, no matter what you’re doing is to get people to believe that it will actually work for them.

Well, how do you get them to believe that it’ll work for them? Number one, you showcase studies from all different types of people, from all shapes, colors, sizes, levels of experience, you know, you name it. You show case studies, you show that you’re not a unicorn, that you’re a normal regular person, that if you can do it, they can do it. How do you do that? By not being perfect, by showing your flaws, by being vulnerable, by being real, by talking about your mistakes, not making it all seem perfect. You do it by getting them to adopt a new identity, right? A new identity of like, “I’m next like I can do that,” and getting them to sort of see themselves differently. All of this is a part of ethical sales and persuasion skills to get people to take action in a way that’s for their best interests at heart. Right? Because we have to ethically and integrally help people that I think a lot of people sometimes might not do for the right reasons, whereas everything we do is to get people to convert because I know that if they don’t say yes to themselves and allow me to help them, the chances of doing on their own are pretty much zero. Like, I know the average person which is most, just won’t do it, right? So, I know it’s my ethical obligation to get them to ethically, not convince, nobody wants to be convinced, but to persuade them to say yes themselves, which is again, the hardest thing to do.

The second thing you got to get people to do is to believe in your vehicle, to believe in what you’re teaching, and to get them to believe like, “That’s the thing that I need to get me the result. Like, that’s the thing. That’s the one thing,” and all of their internal beliefs and external beliefs as to why it would or wouldn’t work like you are dealing with during your training. And then lastly, to get them to know that they need your help. Those are the three things that you have to do in conjunction with seeding what you’re selling the entire time. You’ve got to seed belief in self, belief in vehicle, believe in you the entire time. You have to seed your entire offer the entire time, why they need it, how they’re going to use it, how it’s going to save the money, how it’s going to make them money, and exactly how they’re going to apply it to their business life from the second you take stage. And what I noticed with most sales trainers is especially with like the seeding they offer, right, like they talk about all these things that no one even knows that they are when they make the offer or they’ll bring up something one time and they never refer back to it. You’ve got to constantly refer back to what it is that people are going to use and how they’re going to use it because they need to be reminded like 15 times.

So, that by the time you make the offer, people are like, “Oh my gosh, I can do that. Oh my gosh, I have to do that. Oh my gosh, I am doing that. No matter what, I’m doing that. And then I know exactly what it is that I’m getting, why I need it, and how I’m going to use it. There’s no doubt in my mind.” Like, that’s the whole goal around doing an event. And the reason why it’s three days is because the analytical buyer needs three days, whereas the emotional buyer will buy emotionally on day one or two but the logical analytical buyer needs a little bit more time. So, there’s a rhyme to everything, if that makes sense.

Brad Weimert: Super, super, super insightful. You’ve mentioned testing a million things. What is one of the worst mistakes that you’ve made?

Krista MaShore: Oh, that’s a great question. So, I made a $900,000 mistake in a month. We were on track to do about 3 million, and I had gotten advice from a mentor to any time I make my offer, it’s always book a call. So, anytime I’ve ever veered from book a call with the salesperson or any time I’ve ever had more than one call to action on an offer, I’ve lost a substantial amount of money. So, one of my mentors said, “Hey, just do it this way. Drive traffic to the link. You know, you’ll crush it. We do every time.” And I did. And we had about $367,000 book like immediately pay but we lost about $900,000 because of that. So, we realized that we could never, ever send our clients to a link to pay for a $25,000 program. They want to speak to somebody. They need to. Even though we answer all the questions as much as we can based on real questions we got in the past, we add them to the pitch, add them to the what I call the irresistible life-changing offer. Even though we’ve done that, people still want to talk to somebody. I mean, spending $25,000 for a lot of people is like what they pay for a down payment to a house or to a car or whatever else so they want to talk to somebody. So, the biggest mistake we made is sending people directly to a link to purchase without the ability to speak to somebody and having more than one call to action. Those two things have been the biggest, costly mistakes. And the third one is not listening to my gut regarding getting rid of employees that just don’t cut it. Those three things.

Brad Weimert: That’s great. The other thing that I think is great is that it’s not that it didn’t work. It’s that you could have done so much better. And that’s a scary proposition for a lot of entrepreneurs because they’ll try something and it works. So, they’re afraid to let go of it when it works, even though if they let go of it and did something different, it could work so much better.

Krista MaShore: That’s so true. And I’m not kidding you. I remember my team. They were like, “I can’t believe…” I was actually writing my book and my editor, I was telling her the story about how I lost the money and I was like, “Oh, man, that sucks.” I was upset for about an hour and then I was like, “Ah, we learned when not to do it.” The cool thing is, is number one, that same month we did it, it was virtual without me being there. So, I learned I could actually do an event without having to be there and save my voice. I learned that I lost $900 because I sent traffic directly to a link, but I learned never to do it again, which, by the way, I did do it one more time and lost a significant amount of money again. We just tested a couple of months later to see maybe it was an anomaly. But no, I mean, we’re not afraid to… We test everything, even things that are working because even things that are working eventually can get stale or can get fatigued and can do better. So, we always test something. The goal is to try to only and we’ve done more than one thing. We really try to only test one thing, at the max two, every single event, which we always at least test one thing. Oops. I’m not sure if he’s gone or not. But we try our best to just make sure that we only will test one thing at a time so we know what does work or doesn’t work. And then we just optimize, optimize, optimize.

Brad Weimert: Oh, you know what I wanted? What I want to talk about is I want to get some clarity on, you know, one of the themes that we keep talking about is testing and figuring out what’s going to work, what’s not working. You also mentioned keeping employees too long, being the third huge mistake. And there’s a parallel here, which is that a lot of the time entrepreneurs are both afraid to let go of something and also just don’t know what the threshold is to cut it loose. And I think that’s both true when you’re testing ads and when you’ve got an employee. And it’s like, okay, well, how much bad behavior is too much bad behavior? Or at what point do we pull the plug on an ad? Do you have and you can talk about either, but do you have kind of a dedicated rule that you follow around how big the sample set has to be before you change something or how you know when it’s time to adjust?

Krista MaShore: Well, I have a full-time in-house ads guy who I love, and I would recommend if anybody can do that. We’ve tried some of the biggest ad agencies out there. We spent 30 plus thousand dollars a month paying for ads people. We average about $120,000 to $200,000 a month. Recently, it’s gone up a lot on our ads and it’s the best to find an in-house ads person that works full-time solely on your stuff that’s really, really good. Like, it’s worth its weight in gold because when you work for these agencies, they’re not giving you all the time, right? Like, they’re working with ten different people. Their eyes cannot be as good as somebody in-house that’s really, really good. So, I’ll give that advice. But he tests like just a ton of stuff. He’s constantly always testing and tweaking and he’ll know. I’ll say, “Hey, is this ad for me? I don’t like this picture.” He’s like, “Well, it’s one of our best-performing ads.” Like, so he knows everything. So, I can say that too. As far as employees go, what I’ve learned is, is that and the hard way, because I don’t like firing, I hate controversy, and I don’t like drama or any of that kind of stuff. But I have figured out that if I have a feeling about somebody and when you have top A talent because we have a lot of top A talent, like one of the compliments I get from my company all the time is, “My gosh, I love your team.” Like, I hear it literally daily.

So, now when you have somebody that’s not cutting it or it’s just a B player, it’s very easy to spot. And when you have the feeling or the inkling, you need to listen to it because it’s always right. And like recently, I’ve tried to, let me just try to make this work for this person and it just doesn’t. And every single time, I mean, every time I’ve ever had the thought, I probably shouldn’t keep this person, we end up getting rid of them anyways and then replacing them to somebody who’s better and then realizing like they weren’t doing nearly as much as we thought or as good as we thought. And somebody else can come in and take over and it’s not like you thought. You know what I mean? So, if you think it, you’re probably right. I think most entrepreneurs, especially when you’re the one paying the bill, can sort of take your instincts and run with them and trust them because in most cases, those instincts are probably correct. That’s what we’ve found more often than not. So, we’re trying to listen to ourselves more.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Let me challenge you on that one because I don’t disagree with you but I also think that with your background, your history, you had six years as a super high-producing agent, which was learning, marketing, dialing in marketing, being a marketing beast, just to sell houses, right? That was just the product that you were facilitating, but it was a marketing company and now you’ve got another six years of doing the same thing. And I think it’s a reasonable assumption to think that the data set that you’ve ingested is going to produce a certain gut-level feeling. So, my question for you is, do you think that a new entrepreneur should listen to their gut or do you think that’s more relevant advice for an experienced one?

Krista MaShore: I think so, because even back when like I remember, I had an employee in the very beginning who kind of started with me, right? And it was like I needed her and I relied on her. Can you just give me one second? My daughter is calling me and she took her real estate license. I just want to know if she passed. Hold on.

Brad Weimert: Sure. Put her on speaker.

Krista MaShore: Say it again.

Female: I got a 58% so I just need 12 more percent to pass. So, it’s nothing. That’s 12 questions.

Krista MaShore: That’s good. You need 70%, baby girl. That’s good.

Female: I know. That’s what I just said.

Krista MaShore: Oh, good. Yes, you’re right. Exactly. Okay. Good attitude. So, now you learn that you just need to study a little bit more next time. Plus, you said you didn’t study, so now, like, next time, you just got to get on the bandwagon and do it.

Female: Yeah. I knew a lot more than I thought I did, so yeah.

Krista MaShore: Good. Well, I’m proud of you for taking. I thought that was a good lesson. And then go home and schedule it so that you get back on top of it right away.

Female: Okay. I’m going to actually for sure do that when I get home. 30 bucks.

Krista MaShore: I love you, baby. Good job.

Female: Love you. Thank you. Bye.

Krista MaShore: Love you, baby. Bye. It’s her birthday today. So, she said, “I’m not going to pass, mom. I didn’t study.” And I said, “Quit saying that. At least, like fake your brain until your brain to look for the answers.” So, she didn’t think she was going to but I was hoping that maybe she defied the odds. I’m like, I had to memorize that thing because it was hard for me. She’s like naturally smart.

Brad Weimert: Lots of hilarious things about what just happened there. Okay. Well, I know we’ve got a hard stop coming up on my end here, but I want to ask you a couple of things, specifically. We keep talking about changes in the business model, shifting the business model, tweaking new things, testing new things. You also got slammed with just the real estate market transitioning and you were teaching the core offering. So, you’ve got an offering to entrepreneurs now, but the core offering is to real estate agents. And I mean, I don’t have to tell you this. Selling real estate in a market where it’s a never-ending upward curve for real estate values going up and interest rates are basically nothing in transitioning to interest rates double or more than double, and sales just dry up. How did that impact the market that you were selling to and how did you think about what was necessary in terms of a product to deliver them?

Krista MaShore: So, I love your asking that because it’s been tough. I mean, real estate agents for the first eight months when the market shifted, it was like, “Oh, I’ve heard there’s going to be a recession. I’ve heard there’s going to be…” Now, they’re straight up like, “I haven’t sold a house in six months. I haven’t sold a house in eight months.” 70,000 agents have already left the industry this year and already in real estate, 87% of agents fail within the first five years or so. And the average agent only sells less than two homes a year. So, I mean, they say it’s 12. It’s actually under two. If you look at how many realtors and unlicensed realtors are based upon how many homes that are selling. And that was like two years old so it’s probably even less than two homes a year now. So, definitely, we adjusted our prices around $4,000 at a summer sale. Now, we’re like I said, we’ve never had a low ticket offer. Now, we are going to be doing a lower ticket offer. We’re also focusing more. I have a software company through GoHighLevel where we literally teach people, give them everything they need, funnel, CRM, workflows, transaction management, you name it. So, now we’re starting that. We’re going to have that be kind of the entry point in as a lower ticket-free lead magnet and then ascend them up into the three-day event and then sell them into the high-ticket coaching.

So, again, it’s just modifying and adjusting. I also kind of feel sort of blessed because I sort of was looking ahead a bit and realized, “Okay. I don’t want to be so heavily dependent on one brand.” We’ve built this brand for five years now. We’ve done really well. We’re very profitable. I have all the SMPs in place. The business is at a place where it could literally sustain itself without me having to be so involved to where a year ago we transitioned to coaching entrepreneurs and again, way harder than I thought. Like, I mean, I thought we’re going to do 30 million the first year. I mean, I had this crazy goal. I put it out to the world. I read it shy by 29.5 million. It’s just the worst, the worst launch ever. But again, we realize like we’re learning our market. And so, with that being said, I have such an amazing team and I’ve sent over $1.2 million in the past five years in my own education and growth. And so, for it to be as challenging is hard for me on a business where I already have the team and the infrastructure, I can only imagine what it’s like for entrepreneurs trying to launch which even more so tells you that people 1,000% need help. You know, like I believe that with you. If you can find the right coach that can help you that’s been there and done the things, they can just help you through so much trial and error. I mean, like there’s so many things that we’ve learned that we just tell our students and say, “Don’t do this. Do this. We’ve already done it,” and we’re the ones that are sort of taking the – we’re figuring it out for our people, you know?

So, yeah, it’s not for the faint of heart starting a new business for sure but if you stick to it and you just keep on going and you just adapt and modify and test and just keep on going, like I believe it’s impossible to fail. Like, you will not fail if you just keep going but the problem is most people, they just stop like they don’t see the results. They don’t see the success. They take the failures as failures but it’s really something they’ve learned not to do and they don’t keep going. And if people would just be able to learn past that, I feel like they’d be amazed at what they get accomplished.

Brad Weimert: Well, and you had a couple of things that were highlighted early in that response, which was when the market shifted, you adjusted price point was one and iterated quickly. And then you also looked at what are other markets that are sort of parallel that might be reasonable to extend to. In the entrepreneurial market, logically to you was an extension of what you were already doing, but in a totally different space that wouldn’t be negatively impacted by interest rates, the real estate space, etcetera, etcetera. You also mentioned coaches and the value of coaches, which has been a theme throughout the conversation. What do you look for in a coach?

Krista MaShore: Well, somebody obviously that has the same morals and values that I do. What I mean by that is like you’ll go to some of these conferences and it’s like, “Let’s go to a strip club and get drunk,” which is not really my thing. Might be for some people, but I look for someone that’s actually done the thing. And I would highly recommend talking to people if you can that have coached with them and look at the reviews online and really do some deep research because in my pursuit of spending $1.2 plus million, I found some great coaches and I found some really bad ones. So, I would just say make sure they align with what your values and your morals and you like them and make sure they have a track record and they’ve actually done the thing like they’ve actually done the thing that you’re trying to do in multiple markets for a sustainable amount of time. I think that’s really, really important and I think that’s something that not a lot of people have done. I think a lot of people are experts because they’re going into this new thing, but they haven’t really done it. So, I think it’s really important to make sure that the person that you’re learning from has actually done the thing that they’re teaching you to do.

Brad Weimert: Awesome. Krista, I appreciate you carving out time. It is awesome to talk to you. I think that there is that we got really granular on marketing and I think that, first of all, there’s a huge segment of people that watch or listen to this that are going to geek out on it. And in the specifics of what makes the marketing campaign work or when to adjust and the things that you tweak are that is the sauce, right? That is the thing that you need to look at and play with all the time. And for those that aren’t that granular, thinking about hearing how you approach it is super powerful for people. A lot of people, as you know, without getting under the hood, end up having this idea that, “Oh yeah, they’re just really good at it and it just works for them or they just found something that happens,” right? And so, hearing you navigate it has been super cool. I appreciate carving out the time. Where do you want to point people if they want to find out more about you or about the products or whatever, whatever you’ve got?

Krista MaShore: Yeah. So, if you’re a real estate agent and you want to learn more about that, you go to KristaMaShore.com/Unstoppable. If you’re an entrepreneur and you want to learn just marketing and sales strategies and conversion tactics, you can go to TheProvenModel.com. And also, Brad, I’ll get you a copy of my Seven Levers For Seven Figures. It’s just a chapter of my book that I think will really, really help people kind of like everything we talked about, it kind of goes over in much, much greater detail. It will probably be very helpful for them.

Brad Weimert: Awesome. Yeah. We’ll definitely put it in the show notes and link to it here.

Krista MaShore: I appreciate it very much.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Thanks again. Until next time. Hopefully, I’ll see you at an event here in the near future.

Krista MaShore: Yeah, I’m sure I will.

Brad Weimert: Love it. Thanks, Krista.

Krista MaShore: Thank you. Bye.