Making It into the Top 1% of Real Estate Agents with a Book featuring Krista Mashore

Rob Kosberg:

Hey, everybody. Rob Kosberg here, and I am interviewing a fantastic person today. I think you’re going to love her, and you’re going to learn a ton. Krista Mashore. She’s been in the top 1% of realtors nationwide for over 20 years. She’s personally sold over 2200 homes, which averages more than a hundred homes a year, which is incredible! She’s the author of four bestselling books. How cool is that? Focusing on real estate sales, digital marketing. You may have seen her on Inman, Wall Street Journal, NBC, Fox, and many more. Krista has an incredible real estate coaching business that I absolutely love that we’re going to talk a little bit about as well. Krista, thanks so much for taking the time to do this. Great to be with you.

 

Krista Mashore:

Thanks for having me, Rob. I appreciate it. And also, thank you for helping me get my four books to bestseller status.

 

Rob Kosberg:

Oh, my pleasure, and thank you for sharing that. My pleasure. You are a powerhouse and somebody that doesn’t do anything halfway. We’re going to talk about your magic and the stuff that you do. We also talk about what role the books play in all of what you do. Whether it’s the content and teaching that to others or using your books as lead generators and various other things. And of course, we know each other from Russell Brunson and from his Inner Circle and all that. Maybe we start there, Krista. Tell me about 2200 homes, 20 years in the top 1%. Holy cow! I was in real estate. It is an exhausting business! What’s the magic, and what’s the magic that you teach to others when it comes to maintaining that kind of excellence?

 

Krista Mashore:

You know, first of all, you have to love people. One thing is I really am a people lover. I always say people before things and the things will come, so that’s part of it. And really, always differentiating yourself. I actually had a book, 10 years ago, about short sales, which helped me through the short sale days. It helped me land asset management companies and banks to sell their foreclosures way back when. It kept me alive through the recession when the housing market crashed, and 90% of realtors left the industry.

 

Rob Kosberg:

I know that was 10 years ago, but how did you use your book to land major accounts like asset managers and banks? I’ve never heard that story. How did you do that?

 

Krista Mashore:

I would send it to them along with a dream 100 strategy, or I’d send them my whole marketing plan and let them know that I could actually take on foreclosures and short sales, and I knew how to do them. And once you get one and people refer you, before you know it, I had 13 of them! I sold 169 short foreclosures in my best year ever. It was a nightmare doing that. It was just an assistant and me, and oh my gosh! If you only knew. But it was great, and I think anything you can do, no matter what business you’re in, to really differentiate yourself – you need to do that!

And as you know, a book does that. My books now; they are the second-best thing that I’m doing to generate leads. It used to be that my book was my highest performing into my High Ticket Coaching. So people would read my book, and then they’d pay me anywhere from 10 to $30,000 a year to coach them on exactly how to do what I wrote in the book. And right now, we haven’t been running as many ads for the books, for the free plus shipping. But we’re doing the two-day event. And I utilize a book strategy to be a co-author with me on a real estate book that I wrote. And that right there, they are just like, “Oh my God, I get to be a co-author with you!” I use that as a bonus when I’m selling them the High Ticket Coaching for a year, and it’s just been fabulous.

 

Rob Kosberg:

That is so smart. I love that strategy!

 

Krista Mashore:

That’s actually something that you should teach all of your people.

 

Rob Kosberg:

I do!

 

Krista Mashore:

Do you? Oh, you do, okay, good!

 

Rob Kosberg:

We call it an anthology. We started doing something new. You and I should talk about that at some point. But we started doing Wall Street, Journal, and USA Today launches, and a big anthology with that, which is cool. It’s very costly to do that because of the amount of marketing that needs to be done. But we do teach the anthology lesson, which anybody that’s a thought leader should know about. I mean, people that follow you, they want a connection to you. And if you can actually share some of that authority that you have, which that’s what you’re doing in a book, they will love you for it. So, congratulations. That’s a great offer.

 

Krista Mashore:

Oh, thank you, thank you. We charge our customers $3,000, and it’s just been fabulous. I have sold it for 3,000, but now we’re using it as a bonus. So I talk about why it’s so important to be an author, how being an author has completely changed my business. And then we’re like, “Remember that book? Well, guess what, you can be an author, and it’s your own. We personalize it for you.” And they’re just like, “Oh my God, I have to be an author. It took me a year to write my book, and you’re going to do it in a day.”

 

Rob Kosberg:

I love it. I love it. Tell me, you didn’t go into detail, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind going into detail, you shared that your book was your number one strategy. We’ll talk about what you’re focusing on right now. You’re still using your book, but a little different. But you said your book was your number one strategy regarding a funnel, and you were selling 10,000 to $30,000 packages. So, how did you use the book to attract people? What did all that look like?

 

Krista Mashore:

What I did was I made a free plus shipping offer, so free plus shipping funnel, and we’ve done several million dollars from our free plus shipping offer. And it was just like, basically, hey, here’s a book, you just pay for the shipping, and we’ll ship it off to you. Once they read the book, they go into a High Ticket funnel application straight from reading the book to a High Ticket sales call into the program. And again, it was all from the book. When you write a book, you want to make sure it’s super, super high, high value, and I gave away every single secret that I could give away. I told them exactly what I do, how I do it, when I do it, they’re like, “Man, I need help doing this. I can’t do this on my own.” What’s taken me years to do and learn, they could learn in the matter of two years-ish. So, it’s just been fabulous and me, with my coaching. We just hit our 10X. We just hit our 10X Award.

 

Rob Kosberg:

Which is $10 million in online sales for readers who are not familiar with the 10X Award.

 

Krista Mashore:

Yeah, $10 million in online sales, and we have six 2 Comma Club Awards, so we have six 2 Comma Clubs that have done over a million dollars from online sales. I’ve only been doing this for three and a half years. Now we’re doing literally a million a month. We’ve just hit our third month, we’ve done over a million dollars in sales, and it’s just been three years and, I think, three months that I’ve been in business. And it all started from, a hundred percent, I mean, I can say this beyond, not just because I love you and I am also in the Inner Circle with you, it is from the book. It all started from the book. It’s difficult to get on stage and to be known as an authority, and the book really put me on the map. Because people realize, “Man, she knows what she’s doing!” So, I might be an expert in real estate and even an expert coach, but it doesn’t make a difference if nobody knows about it.

So the book just really helped me to get my name out there. It’s led to speaking events, it’s led to being in Forbes Magazine, and all that kind of stuff.

 

Rob Kosberg:

Wow! That is amazing. I mean, you’re throwing out some numbers. You’re throwing them out like nothing. 

 

Krista Mashore:

No, I don’t mean it like that.

 

Rob Kosberg:

I mean, you said $7 million through your free plus shipping funnel. How many books did you sell?

 

Krista Mashore:

No, no, no, not “seven” million. I said “several” million.

 

Rob Kosberg:

Several million. Okay. Sorry. So several million. How many leads did you generate roughly? How many books did you sell? And, of course, the several million is not from royalties. That’s from your High Ticket coaching stuff that you’re selling. I totally get that. Do you remember roughly how many leads, how many free plus shipping books?

 

Krista Mashore:

We have about 85,000. We didn’t sell 85,000 books. No way. We have about 85,000 people on our email list. Those are emails that we got from the different offers, and one of our leading offers has been our book, just up until recently. We ship them ourselves, and so all this stuff happened with COVID, and so we just kind of changed our model a little bit. 

Back in March, my business kind of just stopped. It was like at a halt, and I was at a six-week burn rate a year ago. I was making money even before that, but I was spending it, so I kept throwing money back in the business to get the business rolling along. I was trying to get it going quicker.

Just this past year, since corona, we have just skyrocketed. We changed our business model. We’re still selling the books, we give all of our students the books, we’re getting ready to redesign our free plus shipping book funnel and launch that in the next 60 days because it did so well for us. But right now, we’re also doing so well with our free challenge to our two-day event. So we’re just trying to laser-focus the business. But my sales team needs more to do, not just during that week. So what happens is I do a two-day event. Then we sell 50 to 60 people on access to my programs. Then for the rest of the month, it’s like they’re not doing as much, so I’ve got to be able to give them some more people on the phone to sell to, so we’re going to start using our book to do that.

 

Rob Kosberg:

We met and kind of come from the Russell Brunson world, and even if you haven’t been in Russell’s Inner Circle, you can look at what he’s doing and replicate it. What does he do? He writes books, uses those books in conjunction with free plus shipping funnels, and he hosts challenges. His promotions never stop!

 

Krista Mashore:

Never.

 

Rob Kosberg:

I mean, Expert Secrets, Dotcom Secrets, they’re all on my shelf. Just like I’m sure they’re on your shelf. And they’re on hundreds of thousands of other people’s shelves. And so, for our readers, even if you’ve never been in Russell’s Inner Circle, buy his books! Because you can simplify what you need to do by looking at what he needs to do to successfully run ClickFunnels. And that’s what you’ve done, Krista. I mean, you’ve done some amazing things. I congratulate you. You’re just doing the exact same thing, and it’s working like gangbusters for you.

 

Krista Mashore:

Three years ago, you were at my very first Inner Circle meeting. I remember meeting you, and I was so intimidated and so nervous.

 

Rob Kosberg:

By me?

 

Krista Mashore:

Not just by you, just by everybody! All of these online marketers that are millionaires. I’m just like, “here I am” I didn’t even know what a funnel was! I just signed up, I saw a webinar, and I was like, “Oh, I like this guy Russell. I think I can do this. I’m an expert in my field. I know I can get it out there.” And so I’m like, “What’s a funnel?” I had no idea! And I saw the awards. “Oh, I want to win one of those things.” It’s amazing what can happen if you just really, really hunker down and do the work!

I hired a coach, I did exactly what my coach said, and I didn’t question it. Even when it was uncomfortable, I just did it even when I didn’t feel like it. And there were plenty of times that I failed. I mean, I’ve made some massive mistakes over the past three years! But because I keep going and I don’t stop, we’ve had some great successes. Now, we’re at a point where we’re just really, really refining what’s working. I’m going back to what worked before. Now that we have the systems in place and the book worked, selling the book worked. But it worked so well that I wrote another one and another one because they work!

 

Rob Kosberg:

Well, congratulations. Let’s take one side step here. Your audience is real estate professionals. We’ve talked a lot about how you’ve used your book to grow your business, your coaching business, so any coach can listen to what you’ve done and start modeling some of those things. But what do you tell the realtors? You mentioned that you offer them to be in a book with you because it helps them grow their authority. How do they then use that book to attract clients? I love what you’re doing there. How does it help your clients?

 

Krista Mashore:

As soon as someone knows that you’re an author, it just gives you legitimacy. I remember being at a meeting, a conference, and when they say, “Oh, there’s a best-selling author,” I’m thinking, “Oh, he’s an author.” You know, like THE guy, so you want to have him sign the book. It sounds kind of cheesy, it’s kind of fangirlish, but I’ve done that! I’ve been that person where I see somebody up there, the audience likes them and wants them to sign their book, and I buy the book so the author will sign it. It just gives you instant authority – having a book. Less than 1% of the population writes a book. You can be brand new in an industry, but if you have a book, perception is reality, and the reality will look as though you have been doing it for a long time! It has to be a well-written book, though. I just can’t say that enough. It’s got to be an excellent, well-written book because then it really does showcase your knowledge. So now my students drop off their books before going on a listing presentation. They’ll drop off the book when somebody requests a market report. I’ve taught them how the more the book’s cover really speaks to the audience, the more likely it will convert. Some of them have done titles like How to Sell your Tacoma County Home. Or How to Sell a Home During Divorce. It’s just like modifying its title and then adding a few minor tweaks within the book. And the next thing you know, you can give it to divorce attorneys or probate attorneys or financial advisors or whatever it might be. And now they all of a sudden have instant authority. We’re teaching them how to create their own funnel with it and run their funnels locally to showcase that they’re the expert and the authority in their field.

And people have told me, “I’ve been trying to go after this person for two years, and now that I gave them my book, now they’re having me list their house!” I’ve had my students say that “Hey, this person interviewed five agents, and they were going to go with someone else, and once they knew I had a book, they hired me because of the book!” So it really does work. We take the book to where it really is their book. They have their own stories in there, and they have their own stats in there. If they don’t have stats that are as good as mine, they leave mine in there because I’m a co-author. I should show you one of them.

 

Rob Kosberg:

Do you have one with you?

 

Krista Mashore:

I can show you on my email, let me look it up, but it just says co-author Krista Mashore. The rest of the book is theirs. I will show you, let me find it. It’s great, and they collapse timeframes because they can get it done in such a short timeframe. So they’re happy, they’re excited about it, and it has just really, really helped me. It’s really, really helped me be able to help them sell more real estate and also me sell more to them.

So here’s an example. This is Rich’s book. The Smart Seller Rich Brecklin Selling your Milwaukee Area Home. How to get the highest price and the best terms for the sale of your home. And then there it is. It’s his picture, it’s him, and just the co-author Krista Mashore. That’s it.

 

Rob Kosberg:

Love it, love it.

 

Krista Mashore:

And then he really has changed this, and it’s his stories in there. 

 

Rob Kosberg:

That’s exactly what we want our clients to be doing. And I love how you’ve just taken your own authority and passed it on to your clients, which I think is just really, really cool. Congratulations on that.

 

Krista Mashore:

Thank you.

 

Rob Kosberg:

Love it. So what else am I forgetting, or what did I not ask you? As far as the stuff that you’re doing that we think could be valuable?

 

Krista Mashore:

What we’re doing now is, once a month, we have a five-day free challenge. So, anybody who bought my book in the past is dying to go to my challenge. So we’re targeting everyone that we’ve sold books to, everyone that has downloaded one of our lead magnets. Still, our books are our highest converters into our challenge. And now, the last event that we did, we did $1,020,000 without any Facebook ads. I lost the Facebook ads person, we just emailed our list, which tells you how important a list is, and you build a list when you’re selling the books. So we were able to do just from our lists from the marketing, but we’re doing a five-day challenge. In that challenge, we talk about a two-day event on the first day. The challenge is built around people overcoming their limiting beliefs, getting them small successes, teaching them how to utilize video and social media in their real estate business.

I just wrote another book called the Ultimate Legion Playbook, and we are going after local professionals. So we teach local professionals how to do this as well now. So we’re going after a bigger market. After the five-day challenge, the offer is made on day four. The offer is to go to a two-day live event with me. It’s two days, it’s a virtual live event, and they get just massive training from me. I think that we’re averaging around 60% that are in the challenge, that see the offer, go to the two-day event. 

 

Rob Kosberg:

And that’s $97?

 

Krista Mashore:

It’s just $97. I don’t care about the money. In fact, it cost me $300 to get somebody, which is terrible, but it cost me $300 to get somebody in, which then really means it was $200 because I sold my customers the ticket for $97. So I’m not trying to make $97. I’m trying to make the sale at the end. So on day two, before lunch, we make the offer for our coaching. So it’s a five-day challenge once a month. Two weeks later, we do a two-day live virtual event, and we sell them into our High Ticket program. It’s essential when you’re making offers to make sure you’re seeding the entire time. For example, they’re offered a co-author. We give them a marketing plan. We teach them all about Facebook ads. All the things that they’re going to get from coaching with me make sure that we’re teaching it over the two days. More importantly, really honing in on why they need that and how it will change their business, how it’s helpful.

So we teach them what to do but not really the how. So you need to have a marketing plan. In the marketing plan, you need to have all these things, blah, blah, blah. We teach them about funnels and how they work. And we show them all the different funnels and how we create leads from them. And then in the offer, it’s like, “Remember that funnel I talked to you about on how to get people to raise their hand and say they want a home evaluation? Well, we give you that funnel. It’s done for you. Remember I talked about how important it was to be an author? Well, guess what, if you purchase today, you’re going to get my $3,000 co-author at no cost. We’re putting it in.”

So when you’re making the offer and making the bonuses, they understand what those are, why they’re essential, and how they’re going to significantly move the needle in their business. And I think that’s what many people make the mistake of because we’ve been taught, like make your offer, value stack, blah, blah, blah, right? But if no one understands what they’re getting and how it’s going to impact them, it doesn’t make a difference that they have this bonus! They need to understand what the bonus is and why it’s essential, so you teach that throughout those two days.

 

Rob Kosberg:

Tell me, if you don’t mind, I mean, you gave some numbers. I mean, you’re doing a million bucks a month through this model. How many people will show up at the two-day training? Do they stay all the way through, and what does that look like? To do a million dollars, is it hundreds of people there?

 

Krista Mashore:

That’s a really good question. We’ve found in the challenge, and these are pretty much industry standards. When you have a free challenge, the average show-up rate is between 10 and 25%. That’s good. We have 25% of our people who sign up for our challenge to make it to the challenge. But what happens is about 30% of people on there, sometimes even 40, will leave. So if you have 200 people on day one, you’re going to lose 40% of them, so you only have 120 people on the last day. So we’re converting about 60% that actually see the challenge into the two-day, and I’m converting at about 21%. So 21% of people that are at the two-day event are purchasing.

In the last two-day event, we had around 300 people there, and that’s pretty much what we’ve averaged. The first time I did it, we did 1.4, but I did two events, two live events in January. Then we just did one in February and one in March. Our sales went down a little bit. We did 1.2 in February and 1,000,020 in March. We don’t know why it went down a little bit.

 

Rob Kosberg:

But you did that all from one two-day event?

 

Krista Mashore:

Yeah.

 

Rob Kosberg:

So you’re making more per two-day event now?

 

Krista Mashore:

We are.

 

Rob Kosberg:

You’re just doing one.

 

Krista Mashore:

Yeah. We’re just doing one. But we still had around the same number of people, so around 300 that we had there. For some reason, this time, my team was like, “Krista, these people don’t have any money this time. They don’t have a lot. It’s a different crowd. We don’t know why.” 

What ended up happening was my offer was $23,000, but like more than half the people took our $10,000 offer. Which means that those people inevitably will move up, so that million will probably turn into a lot more, maybe 1.5. Because most of our students, once they get in, they love what we do, so they’re like, “Oh my God, I have to have the full thing. I need it all.” So they end up upgrading. I mean, a significant amount of our people end up upgrading. And they don’t want to leave the culture of the community because the community and the culture are just so awesome and supportive.

So yeah, it works. I’ve just been studying relentlessly. I’ve been obsessed with, over the past couple of years. I’ll go to a virtual event, or I’ll go to something just to watch the closes and to watch like what do they call them, the closing bites? The whole time, they’re doing these little things to overcome people’s limiting beliefs and help them take action. I’ve really gotten good at believing and knowing that when I’m selling, I’m doing the service. It’s an injustice if I don’t sell to them because I know I can absolutely, totally change their life if they’ll just coach with me and let me help them! I mean, I’m an expert in digital marketing and real estate. We combine those, so it’s like nothing that most agents are doing. I feel good about selling to them, and I feel good about really getting the sale.

Sales are persuasion, and marketing is attraction. And so when you can ethically persuade somebody by selling them, to do something that is in their best interest, it’s a great thing. I look at it that way. I love selling, I feel good about selling, I’ve gotten really good at closing because I believe in it, so it’s easy to do.

 

Rob Kosberg:

You know, I love that. That touches some deep nerves. I mean, if you don’t feel good about what you’re selling or don’t feel good about selling, you probably need to take a good hard look at how good you are at delivering that result. How good you really are at changing someone’s life. The fact that you are so good at that gives you all the confidence in the world to sell hard and sell with authority.

 

Krista Mashore:

Yeah, and I’m very confident when I’m doing it. And when I first started coaching, I gave away my $30,000 program for free to 40 people to make sure I could get them the result. And I coached them for like four months, and I was like, “Okay, I can do this, they can do that.” And so what happens is, though, it’s the four-minute mile. Now, so many people are seeing other people succeed, and they’re like, “Man, I’m the only person to blame.” And over the past three years, I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on coaching. I don’t know if you ever saw that post of my Inner Circle. You’re not in there anywhere, but I was like, “I’ve given away $400,000 to people in the Inner Circle over the past three years”.

We’ve modified and adapted the process. There have been times where I’ve spent 20 grand, I’m like, “This is crap.” So I’m just like, “Oh, I will never do that again.” Or I’ve spent two grand, I’m like, “This is awesome. I need to add this.” For example, I did a program, they had this accountability call every morning, and I was like, “This is gold.” So we added an accountability call into my program. We’ve got 11 times where people can jump in on an accountability call. 

It’s 15 minutes, and it starts their day up successfully. They get the compound effect. They get tiny little commitments that at the end of a week or a month, or two, it’s like they see massive results. That worked for me, so I was like, “We’re adding this into the program.”

And yes, that costs me money. It cost me money to do it. It was more time, more energy, more everything. Still, the results for my students are increasing significantly. Hence, the investment is worth it because now I’m getting paid back tenfold. And I think people are so obsessed with making the most money and blah, blah, blah, that they need to be more obsessed with the results they’re getting for people! And I will say that part of the reason I am so successful is that the results we provide people with are actually there. If you do the work, you’re going to crush it. Period. And I can say that. You will kill it. We’ve helped brand new people who have never even sold one house, who then go on to being voted best realtors in their town. And they outperform top producing agents in their market.

 

Rob Kosberg:

Wow.

 

Krista Mashore:

Yeah, like big time! We’ve helped people go from selling two homes in a year to selling 88 homes in a year or a hundred homes a year to 300 homes a year. We’ve just really been able to give people great results. If you’re reading this right now, make sure that you just over-deliver. Like, be a student always, implement and over-deliver, and continue to revamp and change and just refine, refine, refine what you’re doing.

 

Rob Kosberg:

Man, I love that. You said something that made me think about the foundation you laid. A lot of our clients are similar to you. For 20 years, you’re like nose to the grindstone, top 1% realtor, 2200 homes sold. When the entire market collapses, you use a book to get, what’d you say, 13 different major corporations that had hundreds of thousands of homes. I mean, you did everything in every market. And so all you really had to do in the last three years was, and it’s no small feat. The task is to take all of that knowledge and then put it on a platform. So you have the authority. That’s where your books come in. And your media appearances. And now, you have laid the groundwork with your expertise over 20 years. Now all you have to do really is get that in front of the right people, and the rest is magic.

It’s certainly not that easy. There are ups and downs, figuring out the marketing piece, but that’s what you’ve done. I mean, holy cow, I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a conversation a year from now, and you’re doing several million a month! Growing your business into something even bigger and better because you’ve laid the groundwork, and it’s been a beautiful thing to see you do that.

 

Krista Mashore:

Yeah. That’s the goal. Our goal is to do 3 million a month. My goal is, within the next six months, to be doing 3 million a month. Like we thought we were going to do 2 million this month. Like we were like, “Oh, we’re doing 2 million in March.” And I was like, “Oh, I only did a million.”

 

Rob Kosberg:

What a disappointment!

 

Krista Mashore:

I know. Then I feel like a jerk. I’m not, by the way. But, we were just like, “Oh, we figured this out.” But it was a different crowd. It was just weird. So now we’re like trying to just again, refine. And now we have a new Facebook ads person, our ads aren’t working very well, so we’re not filling the challenge as much as we want. So I mean, things are going to happen. Next month I might not do a million because it’s been difficult getting it filled because of just stuff happens, but you just keep on going and tweaking and changing, and it’ll work.

 

Rob Kosberg:

Crank your book up again.

 

Krista Mashore:

I know.

 

Rob Kosberg:

Because those leads, those email addresses, and those clients, they’re gold.

 

Krista Mashore:

You’re totally right. I’m going to do that, and I’m also going to turn on my High Ticket application because we did really well with that too. The High Ticket application came from the book, so my customers bought the book. They then were funneled into the High Ticket application. So that is absolutely something that we will be doing so you’ll be seeing my ad soon.

 

Rob Kosberg:

Beautiful. Krista, it’s just so good to talk to you. Congratulations on all your success. Super honored to work with you on your books. Where can people get some more information about you? Where should we send them if they’re realtors or real estate professionals listening, or just marketers that are like, “Man, I want to know what Krista’s up to!”

 

Krista Mashore:

Yeah, yeah. You can actually go on Amazon and get my books. If you’re a realtor, you want to get the Sell 100 Homes a Year. If you’re any other type of marketer, entrepreneur, any type of business person and coach, consultant, you can go to Amazon and get the Ultimate Lead Gen Playbook. It just teaches you how to utilize video and social media to dominate your profession and your field. So, yeah, that’s that.

 

Rob Kosberg:

Awesome. Well, I can’t wait to hear more about the whole going out, spreading out now from realtors to local professionals. I think that’s going to be huge. So, thank you. Thanks for taking the time. I know how busy you are.

 

Krista Mashore:

Thanks for having me. I appreciate your help. I appreciate you getting us bestsellers. That was great working with you, and I really appreciate that.