Every agent walks into a vendor appraisal with a marketing schedule. Most of them, as Samantha McLean points out in Episode 8 of The AI Edit, look remarkably similar.

Sam’s argument: the real opportunity isn’t in the marketing schedule itself – it’s in what comes before it. Specifically, buyer personas.

“We want to show our vendor that we really know marketing more than any other agent,” Sam says.

The underlying principle is one Sam has been exploring this week: you don’t have to attract the biggest crowd if you attract the right crowd.

In an industry that has historically defaulted to volume – biggest database, most eyeballs, widest reach – the shift to precision marketing represents a significant change in how agents demonstrate value.

The approach is straightforward. Using AI tools, an agent can feed in the property’s features and the area demographics, which will point you toward a detailed list of customer personas – the types of buyers most likely to purchase the property.

The agent walks into the appraisal having already done the work: not just a schedule of where the property will be advertised, but a clear picture of who it will be marketed to and why.

So, rather than presenting a marketing package, the agent leads with insight: “What we do is we use some sophisticated AI tools and prompts to come up with the personas that are most likely to want to buy this property.”

Then add your own insights and tailor listing copy to the different buyer personas.

“The marketing plan is the new appraisal,” she says. “We don’t start with how. We start with who.”

From there, you can create precision marketing, which can lower your costs, make them feel like they are being spoken to directly and create healthy competition.

Sam also flags that vendors themselves will increasingly have access to AI tools for researching past sales and market data. So you need to demonstrate deeper insights.

The episode’s anchor line: “You need to provide something that is so good they can’t ignore you.”

Key takeaways:

  • You don’t have to attract the biggest crowd if you attract the right crowd. Precision beats volume in the vendor conversation.
  • AI can generate detailed buyer personas from a property’s features — giving agents a marketing conversation that goes beyond the standard schedule.
  • Vendors will increasingly use AI to do their own research. Agents who arrive having already done the work will stand apart.
  • The marketing plan is the new appraisal. Start with who, not how.
  • The goal is to provide something so good they can’t ignore you — a point of difference that’s visible from the first conversation.

The AI Edit is a weekly series of short clips from the AI First Agent Accelerator.

New episodes weekly.

Want the full system? Visit aiagentcourse.com. Want Samantha to present to your team or at your next event? Get in touch.