338 Unlocking the Power of Home Builder Analytics - Derek Bryant Sep 23 2026

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello everybody, and welcome to today's episode of the Builder Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse.

Greg Bray: And we are pleased today to have joining us Derek Bryant. Derek is the CEO at Vantage Analytics Group. Welcome, Derek. We appreciate you being with us today.

Derek Bryant: Well, thanks so much. I'm really excited to be here.

Greg Bray: Well, just to get us started, give us that quick kind of background, a little bit about yourself so people [00:01:00] get to know you a little bit better.

Derek Bryant: Yeah. So, my background is in digital marketing and sales. I've been doing this for 10 plus years, long enough that I've stopped counting. I got started in the builder industry working for Keystone Custom Homes in Pennsylvania and doing their marketing strategy and analytics. And then from there, I've kind of branched out to start doing that for builders across the country.

Kevin Weitzel: All right, before we jump into all that, could you work us into an interesting factoid about yourself that has nothing to do with the home builder industry, family, or work life whatsoever?

Derek Bryant: All right. I would say that I am a mountain person at this point. I was telling Greg I live here in Western Maryland. I'm up in the Appalachians, and that's where I enjoy being.

Kevin Weitzel: You're talking about, like, kettle on a wood-burning stove kind of Appalachians?

Derek Bryant: Yeah, I have a wood-burning stove. Part of my agenda for tomorrow is I have to split wood, and start prepping for winter.

Kevin Weitzel: What? [00:02:00] That's crazy. Actually, one of my favorite skits on Saturday Night Live is called Appalachian Court, and it's where they basically have these exaggerated Louisiana, like, bayou-thick accents that have nothing to do with Appalachia. I don't know, I just think it's hilarious, but anyway.

Derek Bryant: I'll have to check that out.

Greg Bray: But I gotta say, wood-burning stove and the high-quality high-speed internet connection don't seem to quite mesh for me.

Derek Bryant: I, you know. I like being a contradiction, Greg, so.

Greg Bray: Well, Derek, give us a little bit more about your company, the kind of services you offer and who you like to work with.

Derek Bryant: Yeah. So, Vantage Analytics got started because I started working just with home builders, just in that niche. Started doing analytics and analysis for builders to try and see, you know, what's happening in your marketing as it goes through to sales, where are things breaking down and what can we do? And it's kind of expanded from that because, you know, once you start saying, "Hey, I'm noticing these things," the next question [00:03:00] is usually, "Oh, so what do we do about that?"

Which then kind of had to expand my sphere of what I was doing to, all right, well, now let's make sure your CRM is all set up properly and you've got good data architecture so that we can track things properly so we know the reports are accurate. And then it's, all right, well, what can we be doing in tracking our paid ads so that we know exactly what's working and what levers are we pulling?

And, you know, how do we keep our CPL from bloating too high to now it's getting into more of the sales side of the CRM funnel. And all right, so how well is this working for your sales team? Are they doing the sales process that we're supposed to be doing? Are we getting notes? How do we make this easier for sales management to take all that data that's coming in and do something actionable with it?

Greg Bray: Awesome. So, tell me then, Derek, what's different about being in-house at a builder looking at these things and then being kind of that outside consultant partner that [00:04:00] brings something different to the table? Are builders doing okay in-house with looking at it, or do they need somebody to kind of help interpret some of this for them?

Derek Bryant: It depends on the builder, if I'm honest. There's some that they definitely have a grip on it, and there's a few others where there's a lot of room for refinement and tweaking. So, the nice thing, though, from the in-house side is they know their data, they know their business, they know their communities and everything, and so there's often some nuance in the data that can be easily missed by an outside partner.

If every week I'm sitting down with the builders and looking at, all right, what's just happened last week? Are we seeing any red flags that need looked into? And part of that with them is usually to say, "Hey, I'm seeing this flag here. Maybe appointments in this community dropped suddenly this last weekend." And then I have to touch point with them to, "Hey, is that something you guys were expecting? Are you known? Was the salesperson on vacation? Was there something that we need to log in here that I [00:05:00] don't know from the outside?" Okay, great.

And then from my side, I can provide that kind of macro view of here's industry benchmarks, here's what we're seeing overall. You know your data, but here's how it's now stacking up against what everyone else is doing. So, sometimes a builder will find out their kept to close rate is actually really, really good, but that's all they've known, so they don't actually quite know that yet.

Greg Bray: So, if you are brought in kind of brand new, you've been asked to look at a builder for the first time, where are some of the places that you start if you're trying to understand what's working, what's not, you know, what are they tracking, what should they be? What are some of those starting points?

Derek Bryant: Yeah. So, one of the very first places I like to dig into is looking at whatever the reporting is, whatever their CRM, and looking at their lead attribution. I'll start there and just see, are we seeing consistent tagging for leads that makes sense, or are we seeing some weird [00:06:00] buckets?

I rail against this, because I see it all the time is lead source is website. And I go, "Nope, that's not a lead source." Website is a destination. I want to know where they got to before that. Or I'll see lead source is CallRail. Nope. We need to find out where that came from before CallRail. Is it paid ads? Is it organic search? Like, we need to know this, because that sets the tone for almost everything afterwards, is how do we know where stuff is coming from?

Greg Bray: Okay, wait a minute. The website has to get some credit. You can't just say, "No, it's where they were before the website." Come on. Let's give the website people some credit here for the hard work they do.

Derek Bryant: Well, it's not to say there's no credit there, but obviously, like of course they came from the website. They submit know where were they before that so that I can attribute that back. Like, otherwise, I've had this happen where we were looking at the paid ads for a builder and I kept looking through the data and thinking, "This is wrong. We're spending so much money. How are we only getting, you [00:07:00] know, 14, 15 leads a month out of all this spend? It's not right."

Thankfully with HubSpot, they automatically have a field for the GCLID number and I was able to filter through and found that and found a whole slew of leads that were being marked as outside referral but they were actually Google Ad leads and the system was just incorrectly tagging them.

Greg Bray: And that's powerful because if somebody suddenly was gonna say, "Oh, you know what? Paid search isn't working, turn it off."

Derek Bryant: Right.

Greg Bray: It'd be a big mistake if you're not looking at it right? You mentioned the CRM there, Derek, and that kind of tracking. Do you find that it's common that folks are tracking at that level in the CRM or is it just more of a generic kind of saving conversations and kind of a storage as opposed to actually tracking some of those source codes?

Derek Bryant: It depends on the CRM. If it's something like HubSpot or Salesforce, there is inherently going to be some tagging of that nature on [00:08:00] where did it come from, because you have to put the pixel on your website and it starts tracking that stuff right away. But I do see a lot of builders where they get dropped into HubSpot or Salesforce, those platforms are great, but they are major beasts that are meant for any kind of industry. And so, if they haven't had someone sit down and work with them to set it up for them as a builder, it can get really messy.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, on that note, a lot of builders just kind of set it and forget it. They just hope that it's gonna get used. Do you see with the clients that you have, that you're finding builders have their CRM as a footnote or as a parenthesis versus having it be a major component within their team?

Derek Bryant: Sort of. I've noticed they know that it's supposed to be a more integral part of the system, and there's usually just some roadblocks that are in the way that make it really hard. And some of [00:09:00] it is a set and forget mindset. Think about your lead nurturing process is usually, okay, we've got the lead in, great.

Our OSCs do a little bit of outreach to them, try to get a conversion to an appointment set. But usually once their seven, 14-day cadence has run out, then they just kind of go in a cold box and maybe they get the occasional newsletter email. And then the other area I see a lot of struggle is adoption on the sales side, like the sales team using the CRM fully to work the leads and get them through.

Greg Bray: Now, Derek, you may not have heard this before, but Kevin knows how to fix that.

Derek Bryant: Oh.

Greg Bray: Yes, he does.

Kevin Weitzel: You don't use a CRM, you're fired. On the auto side, it was a product called TLP, Traffic Log Pro, and they called me the TLP Nazi. Because if you weren't putting your stuff in, I didn't want you on my team, and if I didn't want you on my team, you didn't have a job. Bye. You're out of there. Because it [00:10:00] makes or breaks the success of a team

Derek Bryant: Right.

Kevin Weitzel: If they're tracking. I'm not talking about just the tasks. I'm not talking about, "You need to make 10 calls a day." I'm not talking about that.

Derek Bryant: Oh, yeah. No.

Kevin Weitzel: I'm talking about just the simple notes about the kids' names, notes about what their hobbies are. Notes about when they say they're going on vacation, when they're gonna be back, so you can hit them at a proper time instead of just hoping for the best that when you call, somebody's gonna be there.

Derek Bryant: Right.

Kevin Weitzel: Those types of small nuances that you can utilize in leveraging your CRM to work to your advantage. So yeah, you don't use it, bye. There's the door.

Derek Bryant: Yeah. I have done a lot of work with builders to create the kind of dashboards and reporting that makes it easy to see how well are your sales team adopting and utilizing the CRM. Not so that we can turn around and say, "Oh, you're not using it, you're fired," but maybe from more of a like, "Hey, we seem to be seeing some struggles here. What do we need to change? What needs fixed? How can we resolve this problem?"

Kevin Weitzel: Way nicer than I am.

Derek Bryant: I [00:11:00] try.

Kevin Weitzel: What can we do to make your life better? What can we do to make you possibly think about utilizing this database that we've sunk a bunch of money into?

Derek Bryant: Well, it usually tends more to the conversation of, I'll use sales notes as a big one, 'cause that keeps coming up for me a lot. Hey, we need sales notes put in the CRM after your appointment. We need to know, how did it go? Are you asking for the sale on the first appointment? How are you handling the objections? What are their pain points that we're really dealing with? What's the current dissatisfaction? If it's not logged in there, we don't know what you're dealing with, and we don't know how to help you.

So, it's actually been a project for the past couple of months on creating a way to automate the note-taking process. I know there's Sales Ask and Rilla and some of those where it'll take the recording and auto-transcribe it and put that into the notes. I love that. It's an unbiased way to get data, [00:12:00] and also takes admin tasks off of a salesperson's list, which is a big win for me. But I've been trying to find a way, can I make one of those where I don't have to spend the couple thousand dollars a month using Sales Ask or Rilla to do it?

Greg Bray: Derek, you talked about dashboards to help measure the usage and things. What are the kinds of metrics that belong on a dashboard like that, that somebody should be looking at on a regular basis?

Derek Bryant: Well, if we're talking specifically on the sales side of stuff.

Greg Bray: Sales and then marketing. We'll do both. All right? 'Cause they're a little different, right? They're a little different, so.

Derek Bryant: Sure. There's so many different reporting and dashboard views that I'm trying to keep track of with builders, so I'll try to not spend too long on the various. But, like, for the sales side, I have one report that I build out where it's for each individual salesperson, and we're looking at what is their set-to-kept rate. We've got you 15 appointments set for this next week or this last week, but you [00:13:00] kept eight of them. So, that might be something we need to look into is why aren't more of your appointments keeping?

Is it a follow-up problem where we need to send more reminder texts, or is it a lead quality problem that we need to pass back up towards the marketing side and see are we hitting the wrong audience? And then we'll look at the kept-to-closed side. How many of those turned into a sale? Then we can look into again, is it a lead quality problem? Usually we find out that with the reason lost section.

And then we're looking at, you know, time in sale. How long does it usually take from when it's logged as a deal to when it goes into closing? What's your average? Do you have a whole bunch of outstanding tasks that are overdue from the CRM? What does your pipeline look like? How much of it is active? What of it is cold? What's been lost? And just those kind of metrics to just see what's the overall health happening and how well is it moving people through. So, that's generally what I look at on the sales side.

And playing with AI [00:14:00] models that can do some note reading. Once they get the notes in there, it'll go through and read through the notes, compare that against whatever their sales system is. If they're using Four Two from Jeff Shore or somebody else, we can teach the AI model what they're supposed to be doing, and it can go back and say, "Okay. Yep, they seem to be really struggling with handling this particular objection."

And that's where that automated note transcribing comes in handy 'cause it's not biased where they say, "Oh, yeah. No, I asked for the sale on this appointment," and then you listen to the notes and you find out their ask was something like, "So, do you maybe see yourself living here?" That's just not a really good ask, and we might need to work on this.

That's how I try to set up a dashboard for the marketing side. The idea is I want to make this as easy as possible for the sales manager because without that, you know, I've talked to managers where they spend hours combing through all this data, all these deals in HubSpot or all these opportunities in Salesforce per person to try and find out what's happening with their deals. It's a lot of [00:15:00] time lost.

Greg Bray: Yeah, and there's so much data to look at. How do we decide which tools are worth using? On the marketing side, you know, Google Analytics is kind of the default that everybody seems to go for.

Derek Bryant: Sure.

Greg Bray: And it's got enough in there to overwhelm all of us if we spend enough time digging and filtering and sorting and all that. What are some of the tools that would be helpful for someone to consider maybe is that good enough? Is there something else to throw into the mix? What are your recommendations and thoughts?

Derek Bryant: I do love analytics. It is a great way to see traffic's coming in, where is it coming from, how are they engaging on the site. Assuming you have your tag manager set up properly is to record what events are being actually clicked on and done on the website.

Back to your question of what are those things that I check out in the first week or so, that's another one that I'll look into is what's your tag manager setup look like? What are the things you're calling a key event, and what are the [00:16:00] specific triggers going? 'Cause sometimes they send false flags. So, that's something to dig into. But analytics is great for a lot of stuff. It doesn't tell you what happens after they kind of become a lead. It kind of runs out of data to tell me once someone has signed up and I've got their info.

Other tools that I like, I really like using Data Studio, from Looker Data Studio, whatever they call it now. They change its name so much. What I love about that is I can pull the data out of analytics, and I can usually pull the data out of whatever CRM they're using. Looker lets me do some formulas and manipulation of the data to break things down and do some different dissectings to give me the views that I want to see. What's a trend that's happening? What is the longer term scale that I'm looking at instead of this one small view?

Greg Bray: What do you think is the missing analytic, the thing that people should be looking at but they don't pay enough [00:17:00] attention to?

Derek Bryant: There's a couple of things I would say to that. One is your set to kept ratio. I don't see a lot of builders doing that when I first start working with them. A lot of them will look at that ratio of how many appointments did I have turn into how many sales. But that step in between of, okay, you set an appointment, how many of them still showed up, is a really big deal to me because it sets the stage of, do we even get a chance to talk to them before we've lost the sale?

And then the other thing that I like to look at, it's not that something's missing, it's the view of it I often try and get them to change. So, week over week, the executives and leadership sit down and they say, "All right, last week we had 34 leads." And then they move on from leads. Thirty-four what? Like, 34 leads means what? Is that good? Is that what you normally get? Is that on pace with your goal for the month? We need a better context on that data on where it sits. are we going up? Is that [00:18:00] significantly down? So, that would be my answer. What people are missing is better context to the number.

Kevin Weitzel: So, on that same kind of note, you know, in the motorcycle world, you know, if you had a 10-step sales process, you know, from walking in the door to greeting them to presenting a product. They had a difference between sit on and sit down. Sit on was sitting on the motorcycle. Sit down was sitting down with a finance person or a sales manager to look at actual numbers.

Derek Bryant: Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Weitzel: And it was amazing and an eye-opening experience, what that magic spot was, which was step six, which was sit on the motorcycle. It was even more telling that if somebody sits on the motorcycle that you're intending to sell them or that they're intending to buy, I mean, it was ridiculously higher number. It was so much higher than if they just look at numbers, 'cause numbers are, "Here's what it costs. I can or can't afford it," or, "I have internal objections," yada, yada, yada. But when you sit on the motorcycle, people would close it.

So, I'm [00:19:00] curious if analytics could, especially in something as simple as, like a HubSpot, could you find that secret sauce as to what is the one thing we do in our process of selling a home or presenting a home that converts the highest percentage when somebody does X?

Derek Bryant: Yeah. It's a really good point. I haven't found the like what is that one thing. But that has been a subject that I keep coming back to. You know, in HubSpot there's different types of meetings you can have logged for a deal, and so I'm always asking, like, "Hey, do we have the right types of meetings as options in here to see?" Right? What kind of meetings are these people having?

An example is the initial versus a be back. Right? Is this the first time someone's sitting down and talking with a sales rep, or is this a repeat? And often that wasn't getting logged as a difference in the system. It would just be, "Oh, I had a meeting." Okay, well, let's break that down. What kind of meeting are you having? [00:20:00] 'Cause you're right, it makes a huge difference.

Kevin Weitzel: So, if any of our listeners have one of those telltale signs that once somebody has done X, whatever that X may be, shoot me or Greg an email so we can find out what this X is. And just out of morbid curiosity, if you've noticed that when people, I don't know, come on a Tuesday to a model home as compared to any other day of the week, if it's something as simple as that, that you have just noticed, whether it be anecdotally, empirically, or whatever, just out of curiosity.

Greg Bray: The big bag of cash. Those are the ones that are most likely to buy.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, yeah. The finance guys always say, yeah, when they come in with the escrow check, that's the telltale sign they want to buy a house.

Derek Bryant: But I'd be curious, is it walking a lot for people that are looking to build? Is it going out and seeing that home site? Is it walking a spec home?

Kevin Weitzel: Well, and I also think it might vary whether you're a custom builder, an on-your-lot builder, a production builder that builds in a community, a builder that builds in a community with other builders. I think there's various factors that would determine what those [00:21:00] telltale signs would be. But I was just curious if the CRM gave way to any of those nuances as to what would be the key thing.

Derek Bryant: Oh, if only.

Kevin Weitzel: I know.

Greg Bray: Well, Derek, it wouldn't be a good use of our time if we didn't at least touch on AI. What are some ways that you've seen builders successfully utilize AI to maybe cut through some of the noise in the data? You know, there is so much out there, and I think that's one opportunity. Have you seen success with that, and have any recommendations about where we could best utilize AI in analyzing our analytics?

Derek Bryant: Yeah. I've noticed the AI has been really good at, and part of it is I have my own AI model that I've been slowly over years kind of honing and feeding and training. But even still, it's really only good for flagging things right now. So, if I take, you know, all these reports and data, be cause usually for each builder I have the market algorithm where it's taking the whole sales funnel. All right, [00:22:00] how much traffic turns into a lead? How many leads turn to an appointment set? How many appointments set to kept, and how many kept to sale?

I'll usually set that up for the company, but I also run that community per community as well, 'cause I want to see, you know, volume can hide a lot of sins. If it looks like we're having a great month for the company overall, you might miss a couple communities are really, really struggling and need some attention. So, the AI I found is really good at flagging that, where I can run the reports through it and say, "Hey, find me the anomalies. Who needs deeper dives?"

Then it can pump back and say, "Hey, I'm seeing this thing in this community. This cove is having some problems and needs more attention." It can't do that in-depth analysis yet very well to, like, find me what's the breakdown, right? Is it a problem with leads? Is it a problem with follow-up? Where do we need to spend the attention? And it just can't quite find all the nuance and understand the whole scope yet, even though I'm trying desperately to get it to.

I mean, between setting up [00:23:00] multiple Zap functions that are doing multiple AI bots to run different things to each other, saving files in certain places to try and keep it from hallucinating, and even then it's still not able to do the deep dive in analytics.

Greg Bray: Well, Derek, it's really great to learn from you today and to hear some of your thoughts. Do you have any last words that you'd like to leave with folks? Any advice for our listeners today?

Derek Bryant: Yeah, considering we're coming up on, Q4 pretty soon, the one advice I would give is really know what your whole funnel looks like. And I say that because when we get into Q4 and it starts slowing down, the tendency is for everyone to start shouting, "Marketing, we need more leads, and let's start ramping up our budget." Often that is not the case that I see. You have the leads. We need to do better working those leads that we have than trying to ramp up with more money, 'cause we're just gonna watch our cost per lead and ultimately our cost per sale start [00:24:00] ballooning ridiculously chasing after that next lead.

Greg Bray: Well, Derek, if somebody wants to connect with you, what's the best way for them to reach out and get in touch?

Derek Bryant: So, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. You can shoot me a message there, and I'll probably respond to it. And then apart from that, just shoot me an email.

Kevin Weitzel: I'm so surprised, Greg, that he didn't say, "Hit me with a smoke signal." Just send me a little smoke signal or a cannon fire across the, a cannon shot across the horizon.

Derek Bryant: Send me a carrier pigeon. Yeah, exactly.

Kevin Weitzel: And you call yourself an Appalachian. Come on.

Derek Bryant: Somewhere around here is a jug full of moonshine, I'm sure.

Greg Bray: Thank you everybody for listening to today's episode of the Builder Marketing Podcast, coming from the depths of somewhere far, far away. And I'mGreg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse. Thank you.

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