90-Day Spring Sprint for Title Agencies | Title Agents Podcast Ep86

In a world where change is the only constant, Mo Shumil stands at the forefront, guiding title professionals to not just grow their businesses, but to master the art of innovation. With every episode, you're handed the keys to unlock unparalleled growth and stay ahead of the curve. Get ready for a transformative journey. Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are focusing on a very specific feeling that tends to creep in right around now if you work in the title industry.

Oh yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Right. It's that January or February lull. You look at the calendar, the closing schedule is looking a bit thin, and you think, okay, things are quiet. I can finally breathe.

Yes. You know, maybe I can coast a bit before the spring market craziness hits. It is the siren song of the winter months. And frankly, based on the research we're unpacking today, it is the most dangerous mindset a title rep or an agency owner can have right now. That seems a bit dramatic, doesn't it?

I mean, everyone needs a break. Sure. Human beings need breaks. So is it really that critical if you just take your foot off the gas for a few weeks while the market is naturally slower? I mean, it feels natural to slow down, right?

Yeah. But the sources we have stacked up today suggest that this whole idea of seasonal downtime is a myth. A myth. Or rather, it's a trap. The material argues that winter is not the slow season.

It is actually separation season. Separation season. That implies there are going to be winners and losers determined right now. That is exactly what it implies. Because here is the core concept that most people in this industry miss revenue is a lagging indicator.

Explain that a bit more. Well, when you look at your revenue in April or May, you are looking at a scoreboard. And that scoreboard reflects the work you did or didn't do back in February. So if I am a rep and I'm sitting there in March waiting for a listing inventory to spike so I can finally start making my calls. You are already dead in the water.

You're weeks behind. Think about the psychology of your clients, the realtors, the lenders. They aren't waiting until they are completely drowning in spring contracts to decide who their operational partners are. Right. Because that would be chaotic for them.

Exactly. They are stress testing their vendors now. They're looking for the partners who can actually handle the load before the load arrives. That makes total sense when you put it that way. They want to know the system works before they put a high stakes stressful deal into it.

Right. If you wait until they have the contract in hand, they're going to go with whoever they trust most at that exact moment. And if you haven't been visible for the last three months, it won't be you. Okay. So the stakes are set for us today.

If we hibernate, we lose. But saying don't hibernate is easy. What does active preparation actually look like for the listener who wants to win the spring? That is a whole mission of this deep dive. We are unpacking a strategic framework from the sources called the 90 Day Spring Sprint.

The 90 Day Spring Sprint. Yeah. It's a roadmap designed to take an agency out of survival mode and push them firmly into positioning mode. And looking at our outline, this is broken down into three specific phases. We have clean and clarify, then plant and position, and finally authority and acceleration.

Yep. That's the arc. And woven through all of this, which I find fascinating, is the use of AI, not just as a buzzword, but as a way to actually execute this stuff without having to go out and hire three more assistants. It is entirely about leverage. Let's jump right into phase one then.

This covers weeks one through three. The theme is clean and clarify, or essentially get your house in order. Now, be honest with me. I'll try. Is this just code for clean up your CRM?

Because that is the one task every salesperson on earth hates and avoids. It is the task everyone avoids, and that is exactly why it's the first step in separation. You cannot scale chaos. That's a great line. And you certainly cannot systemize a messy database.

But the sources highlight a different approach here. It is not just about mindless data entry. It's about segmentation based on potential, not just history. Explain that distinction, because usually we just sort by who gave us the most orders last year. Yeah, but that's looking backward.

The framework suggests categorizing your contacts into conceptual tiers. So you have your A tier, which is your top producers. One's moving volume right now. Exactly. Then you have the B tier, the growth agents.

Maybe they aren't volume giants yet, but they are climbing. They have momentum. And then the C tier, which is dormant contacts or completely new prospects. OK, but functionally, how do I actually do that without spending three days staring at a spreadsheet? If I have 500 or 1000 names in my database, that is a nightmare.

This is where we bring in the AI edge. The sources mention using tools like ChatGPT to do the heavy lifting on this segmentation. How does a language model help me clean a spreadsheet, though? You can actually export your CRM data, anonymized, obviously. Right.

Definitely remove the personally identifiable information. Yes, strip out the PII. But you feed the production numbers and the last contact dates into ChatGPT. You can give it a prompt like, analyze this list of agents based on deal volume and last contact date. And you tell it, segment them into three tiers, VIPs to protect, rising stars to court, and cold leads to warm up.

So the AI essentially does the triage for you. It does the triage, but then it goes a step further, which is the really powerful part. You can ask it to generate specific talking points for each of those segments. Oh, that's smart. Instead of a generic hello, you now have a customized approach strategy for your rising stars that focuses heavily on growth tools.

Versus your VIPs, where you'd probably just focus on retention and service stability. Exactly. It's so much more effective than just starting at the letter A and calling down the list. Now another tool mentioned in this first phase is Perplexity. I usually think of that as just an AI search engine, but the notes say to use it for market intelligence.

Perplexity is an absolute superpower for title reps because it offers real-time sourcing, A massive problem in the title industry is wasting time on agents who look busy on Instagram but aren't actually closing any deals. Ah, yes. The fake it till you make it crowd. Right. The flashy marketing, but no actual escrows.

You can go to Perplexity and ask who are the top listing agents by volume in this specific county for the last 90 days. And it's just not. It can scour public records and recent market reports to give you a consolidated list of who is actually moving dirt. So you stop guessing entirely. You aren't just cold calling.

You are calling with verified intel. You are calling the people who actually have title orders to give out right now. That is pure efficiency. There was one more piece in phase one that I thought was super interesting, specifically for the reps who might be a little rusty after the holiday break. Using AI for roleplay.

Is this literally just chatting with a bot? It is. And it's surprisingly effective. You prompt ChatGPT to take on a specific persona. Give me an example of the prompt.

You type in something like, pretend you are a skeptical realtor who has worked with the same title officer for 10 years. You are busy and you are annoyed that I'm cold calling you. OK. Setting the mood. Yeah.

And then you say, I am going to try to pitch you on a quick coffee meeting, object to everything I say. I can feel the anxiety just hearing that prompt. It is stressful. Yeah. But that is exactly the point of doing it.

You get to practice your objection handling. You get to figure out how you pivot when they hit you with the classic, I'm perfectly happy with my current vendor. Exactly. And you do it in a safe environment. You get to stumble and fail in private.

Yeah. So that when you are on the actual phone with a real top producer, you sound incredibly polished. OK. So that covers weeks one through three. We have cleaned the data, identified the real players using perplexity, and practiced our scripts with our hostile AI bot.

Now we move into phase two, which is plant and position. This is weeks four through eight. This is a major pivot. This is the shift from internal prep to external connection. And the sources draw a very hard line here.

They specifically warn against the check-in trap. Oh, man, I am definitely guilty of this one. The email that just says, hey, just checking in to see if you have anything cooking. It is honestly the worst email you can send. Really?

Why is it so bad? I always thought it shows I'm thinking of them. It's lazy. It provides absolutely zero value to their day. Essentially, you are asking the recipient to do work.

How so? You're asking them to stop what they are doing, figure out if they have a need, and report back to you. It's a taking energy, not a giving energy. OK, that makes sense. So what is the alternative then?

If I want to ping a heavy hitter to stay top of mind, what am I sending if not a check-in? You have to show up with relevance. The goal here is value-first outreach. For existing relationships, that might mean reactivation strategies based on actual market data. And for new prospects?

For new prospects, the core philosophy is visibility over volume. It is far better to send 15 hyper-personalized, insight-driven emails than to spam 50 generic ones. Give me a concrete example of insight-driven. What does that actually look like in a realtor's inbox? This is where the tool stack really comes alive.

We have tools like Apollo and Clay listed here for prospect research. You use them to find out what that specific agent is focusing on, but then you pair it with a tool like Canva AI to actually create a valuable asset. An asset. Like a flyer or something. Think more specific to their business.

Imagine you see a realtor who's trying to break into a specific neighborhood, let's say Oakwood Estates. You use perplexity to pull the turnover rates and the average sales price for Oakwood Estates over the last six months. Then you use Canva to slap that data onto a really clean, professional graphic. But here's the trick. You put the realtor's branding on it, not yours.

Oh, that is clever. So you are sending them content they can actually post on their own social media. Yes. You write the email and say, hey, saw you're doing a lot of work in Oakwood. I pulled some quick stats for the neighborhood and made this graphic for your Instagram and city to pull the turnover rates and the average sales price for Oakwood Estates over the last six months.

Then you use Canva to slap that data onto a really clean, professional graphic. But here's the trick. You put the realtor's branding on it, not yours. Oh, that is clever. So you are sending them content they can actually post on their own social media.

Yes. You write the email and say, hey, so you're doing a lot of work in Oakwood. I pulled some quick stats for the neighborhood and made this graphic for your Instagram in case you want to use it this week. That is the textbook definition of value first. You just gave them marketing material they didn't have to spend time making.

You aren't asking for a coffee. You're just giving them a tool. Precisely. That is how you stop being a vendor who is just selling title insurance and you start being an operational partner who is actually helping them grow their business. The notes also mention using video in this phase, Loom and Descript.

Is this just for the reps who are too lazy to type out an email? Not at all. It's for the people who want to actually cut through the noise. A text email is incredibly easy to ignore or delete. A video thumbnail with their own listing on it is really hard to ignore.

How does that video workflow actually look in practice? It's fast. You use Loom to record a quick 45 second video. You pull up their latest listing on Zillow on your screen. So the very first thing they see is their own work.

Smart visual hook. They just say, hey, saw this new listing on Elm Street. It looks amazing. I noticed it's a historic home. Just want to mention we have those old plat maps on file if you ever need them to show the buyer.

That's huge. It's specific. It's helpful. And it proves you actually looked at what they are doing. Then you take that video and drop it into Descript.

It automatically removes any ums and ahs, generates nice captions and gives you a polished link to send off. It takes maybe three minutes total, but it feels incredibly high touch to the recipient. It seems like the common thread through all of this is personalization at scale. You aren't manually typing every single word from scratch, but you aren't sending a blind blast either. It's the sweet spot.

You use AI to handle the structure and the polish, using Claude to refine your email tone so it doesn't sound robotic or salesy. But the actual insight, the strategy, that comes from you. All right, moving on to the home stretch of the sprint. This is three, authority and acceleration. This is weeks nine through 12.

This is where we hit what the sources call visibility stacking. We are getting very close to the spring market now. Contracts are about to start flying. You want to be the perceived expert before that happens. The outline mentions microcontent here, but be real with me, realtors are incredibly busy people.

Do they actually sit around watching title company content on social media? They absolutely do if it saves them from getting hit with a lawsuit. OK, fair point. The content strategy here is not, hey, look at our nice new office. It relies on fear and greed.

It's 60 second compliance tips or real time fraud awareness. Think about what actually keeps a realtor awake at night. It's definitely not title fees, right? It's seller impersonation fraud. It's the terrifying idea that they might list a vacant lot for a scammer, wire the funds to the wrong place and lose their license entirely.

That is a massive issue right now in the industry. The vacant land scams are popping up everywhere. Exactly. So, if you just film a quick video saying, here are three red flags we saw on a big deed last week and here's how our team caught it before the earnest money was deposited. You aren't really marketing.

You are protecting them. You essentially become the safety net. You become indispensable. And structurally, this phase is a fantastic time to host what the sources call roundtables. Is roundtable just a fancy corporate word for a seminar?

No. And that distinction is actually super important. A seminar is you standing at the front of the room lecturing at them. A roundtable is you facilitating a conversation among peers. So what does that look like?

Think virtual coffee sessions on Zoom with maybe five to ten local agents. You just ask a prompt like, what are you all seeing with appraisals right now? And then you just let them talk. You are the connector. And again, I assume AI can do the heavy lifting here as well.

Completely. It can script your content so you stay on track. You use chat GPT to outline that 60-second fraud video so you don't ramble. You can use Descript to take the recording of that virtual roundtable and chop it up into short clips for social media. So you get a month of content out of a 30-minute chat.

Yes. The entire idea is that when the listing volume finally hits hard in March or April, you are already top of mind. You have spent the last four weeks consistently educating them. You aren't some stranger cold calling for business. You are the trusted expert they've been listening to all winter.

So we have gone through the three phases of the sprint, but there is this underlying theme throughout all the research today that I really want to dig into before we wrap up. It's about the way we actually use these tools. The sources draw a pretty hard line between simply using AI and building systems. This is the critical differentiator. This is the difference between having a cool party trick and having an actual competitive advantage.

Break that down for the listener. The expert view in the material is that using AI casually, like occasionally asking ChatGPT to write an email when you have writer's block, is not an edge anymore. Because literally everyone can do that now. So what is the edge then? The edge comes from building true workflows, systemization.

It is all about automation. Give me a concrete example, because workflow sounds like something you need an IT degree to figure out. It's much simpler than that. Take a tool like Zapier. A casual user remembers they need to send a follow-up email, maybe they scribble it on a sticky note, and eventually they type it out.

A systemized agency has a Zapier automation set up to handle it seamlessly. Walk us through the steps of that automation. Okay, so imagine you're in your CRM. You finish a call and you tag a prospect as interested-phase 2. Simple enough.

Zapier sees that new tag, and it automatically triggers a sequence in the background. First, it might draft an email in your Outlook specifically referencing that Oakwood market report we talked about earlier. It drafts it but doesn't send it. Right. It waits for your approval.

Second, it creates a specific task in your daily to-do list that says, record loom video for this agent. Third, maybe it automatically adds their email to a specific custom audience in your Facebook marketing software. So it basically takes the remembering part completely out of the equation. You just add one tag and the machine starts moving all the pieces. It automates the mundane tasks so you can focus entirely on the personal connections.

This is what allows a small team to compete with a massive legacy firm. That's powerful. If you have a library of prompts that you know work and automations that guarantee no lead ever falls through the cracks, you are operating at a scale that manual hustle just cannot match. It's almost like having a bionic arm. You're doing the same motions, you're just suddenly much stronger.

That's a great analogy. And it relates perfectly back to the separation season concept we started with. The agencies that spend the winter building these systems, the prompt libraries, the Zapier connections, the Canva templates that are going to hit spring running at full speed. And the ones who didn't. The ones who treated winter like a vacation are going to be sitting there trying to figure out how to log into chat GPT while their competitors are already closing deals.

It really highlights why this specific 90-day period is so crucial. It's not just about doing more manual work while it's cold outside. It's about building the infrastructure that does the work for you later. Yes. And it requires a fundamental mindset shift.

You have to stop looking at the quiet months as a well-deserved break and start seeing them as literally the only time you have to build that infrastructure. Because once the volume hits. Once the volume hits, once the underwriters are completely swamped and the phones are ringing off the hook, you will not have time to learn Zapier. You won't have time to carefully segment your database into tiers. You'll be way too busy putting out daily fires.

And you'll be too busy wondering why your competitor across town is suddenly getting all the new listings. So let's bring it all back home for the listener. We have covered a lot of ground today. We talked about the myth of the slow season, the three specific phases of the sprint, tools like Perplexity and Descript, and the massive importance of automated workflows. If we had to distill the mindset recap down, what are we leaving everyone with?

I think it boils down to this system's outperform hustle. You can grind all you want, but a good system will beat you every single time. And visibility compounds, the careful work you do in weeks one through four naturally stacks on top of the outreach you do in weeks five through eight. And the reality check is that spring is going to expose whether you actually did this work or not. That is the harsh truth of the industry.

Spring exposes operational weakness. Winter conceals it. Right now, if your internal systems are messy, it doesn't hurt that bad because the volume is low. You can hide it. But in April...

In April, that mess will cost you real money. It really is the difference between being totally overwhelmed by the market and actually capitalizing on it. Completely. And I honestly think it's exciting. It means you actually have control over your year.

You aren't just at the mercy of the market. You are preparing for it. I love that. It's empowering. It's not about just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.

It's about actively building the phone network. Well said. Well, we've thoroughly unpacked the 90-day sprint today. We've looked at how to clean up your data without losing your mind, how to position yourself as an operational partner rather than just another vendor, and how to establish authority on scary topics like fraud before the spring rush even hits. And we've seen how AI isn't just a shiny new toy, but the actual engine that makes this level of scale possible for small teams.

It is a clear roadmap. The only question is who is actually going to follow it. Exactly. Which brings us to our final thought. The sources provided a quote that I think sums this entire deep dive.

clean up your data without losing your mind, how to position yourself as an operational partner rather than just another vendor, and how to establish authority on scary topics like fraud before the spring rush even hits. And we've seen how AI isn't just a shiny new toy, but the actual engine that makes this level of scale possible for small teams. It is a clear roadmap. The only question is who is actually going to follow it. Exactly.

Which brings us to our final thought. The sources provided a quote that I think sums this entire deep dive up perfectly. It is something to chew on as you look at your own agency and your plans for the next few weeks. It's a quote that really draws a line in the sand. It is.

The quote is, spring doesn't create winners. It reveals who prepared. Spring doesn't create winners. It reveals who prepared. So ask yourself as you head back to work, are you building right now or are you just waiting?

Thanks for joining us and we'll catch you on the next deep dive. Take care, everyone. And that's a wrap on today's journey with Mo Shamil from the Tidal Agents podcast, reminding you that mastering the art of innovation is key in the tidal industry's fast-paced world. If you're finding it tough to keep up with the changes and challenges, remember, you're not alone. Our calendar is open for you.

Find the link in the show notes and let's connect. Make sure to hit subscribe to not miss out on strategies that elevate and insights that empower. Together, we'll navigate the future of the industry. I look forward to our next meeting in the upcoming episode. Keep pushing, keep innovating, and see you in the next episode.