Somewhere in your community, a future seller might be scrolling Facebook. They hover over a cute cat video, a school fundraiser, and then your latest post: a sold sticker, a selfie, an address, and a price. They keep scrolling.
That’s the problem Samantha McLean set out to fix in Week 4 of the AI Sprint.
The address and the price are already on the portal. The thing only you can add – how you actually handled it – is the part that’s missing.
What “circle sales” actually is
First, a definition. Inside sales is your database and how you work it. Circle sales – sometimes called outside sales, depending on which coach you follow – is everything you broadcast: your farm area, your BDA, your socials, your content.
Circle sales has always been the labour-intensive one. A case study for every sale in your listing kit. Letterbox drops for the neighbours. Letters before an auction. Captions for social. A newsletter to keep updated. Done properly, it’s a lot.
“AI-first circle sales is less labour-intensive,” Samantha said. The mechanic she taught is simple: create one case study from a sale, repurpose it across every social platform, then boost it to your farm area. One piece of work, many places.
This is the methodology Elite Agent uses to create social reach, repurposed for agents. “Regularly on social media we reach about 100,000 people a week,” Samantha said, “and it’s because we’ve put in the research to get it right.”
The one piece of ground you actually own
Before the tactics, a strategic point worth sitting with.
Social content is prospecting. It matters. But you don’t own Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or X. You rent attention there on someone else’s terms.
“Your newsletter is actually the golden strategy,” Samantha said. The job of all that social content is to be useful enough that people click back to something you control – your website, your subscribe button – so you can then talk to your farm area one to one.
It’s the brand defence idea from last week’s session, Be the Answer, applied to marketing. If you’re sending people to a profile on a platform you don’t control, sitting next to five competitors (or a cat video!), that’s weaker brand defence than delivering them home to your own ecosystem.
Three places agents come unstuck
Most of the friction in circle sales, Samantha said, comes down to three habits.
One: only ever posting the result. The sold-sticker selfie tells people the price and the address – exactly what they can already get from the portal. Keep doing them if you like them. But make the rest of your content additive.
Two: outsourcing your judgement to a calendar. A well-known coach’s advice is to ask ChatGPT for a 90-day social calendar. It’ll happily give you one. The trouble is the moment the market shifts, “Thursday’s five styling tips land like they were written from a bunker” – especially now, with capital gains changes in the conversation and clients openly asking when prices might fall.
There’s a deeper version of this mistake. Samantha described an agent in Queensland who could recite her own market’s numbers off the top of her head. Impressive – but the numbers lived only in her head.
“That’s great,” Samantha told her. “But where are they online? Where are they where people can find them?” Because what the public hears is mainstream media generalising, when Australia is really a market of many micro-markets.
“If Google doesn’t know you know it, then you don’t have your EEAT.”
Three: posting AI slop. Samantha put up a LinkedIn post of the kind Ethan Mollick has flagged: a siren emoji, manufactured urgency, a redescription where a comma would do, “what keeps me up at night” – written by an AI that doesn’t sleep – and the obligatory Three. Words. Staccato. Ending.
“You will not be able to unsee this,” she said. Posts from people who can barely string a sentence to you in person, suddenly three pages long and in need of their own table of contents.
“Even though you might think you sound like Justin Welsh,” Samantha says, “you don’t. You sound like an AI.”
Invite best practice “to the party”
The fix runs through Samantha’s AI First Formula – her method for turning any task into an AI-first one. The step she keeps coming back to is “invite best practice to the party”: before you let AI loose on something, ask what the best people in the field already do, and build that into the prompt.
For circle sales, she invited four.
Sharran Srivatsaa – formerly president of one of the US’s fastest-growing brokerages, now CEO of Alex and Leila Hormozi’s business. His rule: show how you handled it, not that you sold it. Let the reader follow a story, not read an ad. Demonstrate competence through specifics, not claims. The question to ask before you post: “Am I showing how I handled it, or just announcing that I sold it?” If you can’t point to a specific decision, conversation, or moment that made the sale different, find one. That’s your post.
Jimmy Mackin – co-author of Exactly What to Say: For Real Estate Agents with Phil M. Jones and Chris Smith. His version: tell the true story. Not “sold for X,” but what actually happened – the situation, the approach, how it unfolded. “Go back and do the marketing you wish you’d done.” How many buyers missed out? That’s the kind of detail the portals never show. After your next settlement, answer three questions in plain language: What was the situation when the vendors first called? What did I do that made the difference? Why was this sale different? No hashtags, no siren emojis – just how it happened.
Together, Samantha calls Srivatsaa and Mackin the hook masters, because every algorithm rewards whatever lands in sentence one. A few of their openers:
- 40-plus buyer groups through one home.
- Two weeks from listing to sold.
- We didn’t sell to the first buyer who came through.
- Off-market, single inspection, matched.
A neat trick: drop a handful of hooks you like into ChatGPT and ask for more in the same style, then apply them to your own sale.
Tom Ferry – in Samantha’s words, arguably “the GOAT”. He teaches the testimonial and the process are the proof, not the price. Social proof doesn’t come from celebrating a number; it comes from demonstrating professionalism. A neighbour reading your post should think that the agent handled that well. Go back and read your last five posts. How many lead with the price or the result? Rewrite one to lead with a decision, a conversation, or a problem you solved. That’s the version that earns trust.
The fourth “coach” is Google
The last guest at the party isn’t a coach. It’s the search engine.
Google is getting better at spotting whether a piece of content adds something new or just repeats what’s already out there. The phrase to remember – carried over from last week – is “information gain”. Google has patented a process for it, and is actively using it to judge whether you’re saying something new. Assume the other AIs are or will do something similar.
Here’s information gain in one line. Same suburb, two posts.
Low gain: “Close to shops, schools and transport, popular with families.”
High gain: “Homes on the south side of the creek are attracting five to seven offers, mostly from upsizers leaving CBD units. On the north side, it’s more investors chasing townhouses under $800K.”
You can feel the difference. The second one is something no portal listing and no slop post will ever tell you.
What the AI can’t see
This is also the line AI can’t cross, and the reason your on-the-ground knowledge is worth more, not less.
Samantha pointed to a widely shared story about US agent Ryan Serhant, in which ChatGPT nearly derailed a large deal. The buyer asked the AI, “Am I overpaying?” and it said yes. The seller asked, “Am I getting enough?” and it said no.
“The AIs can see the data, but they can’t see the deals,” Samantha said. They can read everything up to right now, but they can’t see how many buyers are standing in the open home, what the emotions are, whether someone needs to move quickly – or what happens next. “They can see history, but they can’t see the future, and they can’t see what’s going on in your world now. And that’s what people want to know.”
The words worth retiring
If you’re writing your own posts, Samantha had a short list to drop – part algorithm, part reading the room in a housing crisis.
- Exceeded expectations. Above the guide. Increasingly a red flag to bodies like Fair Trading – and the buyer who just paid reads your post too.
- Smashed it. Crushed it. Record price. Unless that’s genuinely your brand, you risk buyers feeling they overpaid and neighbours feeling a bit icky.
- Humbled. Honoured. Excited to announce. Nobody believes it. Straight to the slop bucket.
- Another one done, another one sold. That’s the biggest asset a person owns. Read as a vendor, it sounds like you were only ever a number to them.
Better: Strong buyer interest drove a competitive result. The campaign attracted the right buyers at the right time – a result that worked for both parties. Smooth process, clear communication, good outcome.
“Process over price every time,” Samantha said, “because a process is repeatable and a price is not.”
And before you write a word, know who you’re actually talking to. Samantha reads a lot of agents’ posts, and often can’t tell whether they’re addressing their farm area or other agents. If it’s the neighbourhood you want, write to the neighbourhood: Curious what’s happening on your street? Noticed more activity lately? Wondering what your options might look like?
The DIY version – with one big caveat
For agents who want to build this themselves rather than have it done for them, Samantha walked through the setup.
Start with who you’re talking to. Run a deep demographic analysis of your location to produce an accurate audience statement. Then feed the model a few samples of your own writing and ask it to analyse your voice and tone. Together, those two documents are your audience and your voice DNA.
Then – and this is the step she paused on – build a dedicated project. ChatGPT calls them Projects, Gemini calls them Gems, Claude calls them Projects too. Crucially, change the settings so the project draws on its own sources only. Left on default, it can pull in your personal memories and custom instructions and muddy the voice. Locked to project-only, it stays fixed on exactly this audience and this voice. Talking to investors as well as upsizers? Build a project for each.
Platform tactics matter too, because every algorithm wants something different:
- LinkedIn doesn’t mind a link in the caption, but wants an engagement question in the last line. Carousels do well – upload them as a PDF and LinkedIn will handle the slides.
- Facebook wants the link in the first comment, never in the post, and rewards a question that invites replies.
- Instagram is link-in-bio only; lead a carousel and aim for “send this to a neighbour” energy.
- X is a good place to follow the AI thinkers, less so to prospect your street.
The caveat is the same one from last week, and it’s real. “The DIY route will only work if you put the sweat equity in to build your voice DNA and brand,” Samantha said. “Otherwise you still end up in the slop bucket.”
How Ailsa does it in one click
All of that best practice – Srivatsaa, Mackin, Ferry, and Google’s information gain – is exactly what Samantha and the team baked into Ailsa. “You focus on the sale,” she said. “We’ll focus on the social proof.”
As shown last week, Ailsa interviews you about a sale and writes it up. What wasn’t obvious then is that she also builds the socials automatically. From one published story – Samantha used a real example, a Point Cook home where 45 buyers registered interest – Ailsa generates the LinkedIn post, the Facebook version, Instagram, X, newsletter copy, and even a letterbox drop, each formatted the way that platform wants it, each carrying the information gain a portal can’t: the irregular block, the 21-step process, the renovation call that created the result.
It’s the same social media formula Elite Agent uses to reach 100,000 people a week, handed over so you don’t have to remember any of it.
The real question
Samantha closed on the honest part. All of this works – but when, realistically, do you have time to write a case study for every sale?
“I’m the worst at creating my own content,” she admitted. “But, I’ll sit there and create other people’s content for days.” So the question worth sitting with isn’t whether you could do it yourself. It’s whether getting it done matters more than doing it yourself.
One more reminder before you automate anything: get your house in order. Do you have the vendor’s consent to use AI on their information? Is your privacy policy current? Do you have an internal AI policy?
“Don’t just throw someone’s information in and hope for the best.”
From there, two doors. Door one: take everything from the last four weeks and run with it on your own. “Some of you will, and no hard feelings – I’ll still be cheering you on from the sidelines.”
Door two: stay in the rhythm and come inside, where the methodology, the prompt library, the Canva templates, and Ailsa are already built.
Elite Agent Insiders is $297 a year and includes four Ailsa story credits, the AI tools, a WhatsApp line to Samantha, onboarding, and the monthly member sessions. That price is going up to $397 next week, so this is the last week to join at $297. As Samantha put it, win one listing off the back of it and it’s more than paid for itself.
Your circle sales checklist
- Turn each sale into a case study, not a sold-sticker selfie – show the process, the hurdles, and how many buyers missed out.
- Lead with a hook in sentence one. Borrow from the hook masters, or feed a few you like into AI and ask for more.
- Add information gain to every post – the street-level detail no portal and no AI already knows.
- Retire the slop words. Choose process over price, every time.
- Write to your farm area, not to other agents – and end with a question that invites a reply.
- Make your newsletter and your website the destination. Own the ground people land on.
- Repurpose one piece of content across every platform, formatted the way each one wants it.
- Sort out AI consent, your privacy policy, and an internal AI policy before you automate anything.
The bigger point is the one that ran through the whole Sprint: the people on the other side of the table have AI too. Your vendors and buyers are already running these prompts. The advantage left is the part the machine can’t reach – the local insight, the lived experience, the last layer of care.
Different is what gets you noticed. So, in Samantha’s favourite line from the whole course: go and be so good they can’t ignore you.
The AI Sprint wraps up this week.