COLD CALLING RESULTS
Real Estate Agent 路 Jacksonville, FL 路 Member since 2015 路 252 posts 路 132 votes
What's the largest list you ever used to cold call and what were the results?
@David Wurzel This is right up my alley. All we do in my wholesale company is cold call, and I stopped direct mail about a year ago so I have plenty of data, best practices, and insight as it pertains to multiple markets. We are currently cold calling our largest list of leads right now. It's a list of 9054 numbers in 6 cities spread across 3 states. We're targeting high equity absentee lists, code violations, and recently-divorced property owners. To bottom line it, it takes us about 2400 unique leads to get one deal. A lot of people may think it takes forever to cold call this amount of leads in any reasonable amount of time, and that's correct if you don't have the right systems in place. We have an army of trained assistants that tackle around 50-100 leads per day using a rapid dialer so they're able to get through more leads within a shorter period. Also, we expedite the time it takes to get through 2400 leads by sending out voicemail blasts through Slybroadcast.com. It's a great resource, and I use it every day. We have the leads that call back go straight-to-voicemail and if they leave a voicemail, then we call them back. I have an assistant that sits in the pocket all day sourcing these leads and generating offers based on a formula we generated by market. The combination of Slybroadcasting while cold calling is powerful. However, cold calling is something that needs to be done daily to generate great results. Unlike direct mail, your prospect doesn't have a physical reminder of your company so you need to have them on an aggressive followup sequence and/or VM blast campaign. We'll hit the same leads every week for 8 weeks straight and then take a break. This may seem like overkill, but you're only going to be able to touch 40-50% of your list by cold calling. We're currently averaging a 4% response rate across all markets. I'll provide my metrics for one week's worth of calling in our Charleston market below.
So we placed 436 outbound calls during the week of 9-15 OCT 2017. We consider a response whenever we get connected with an individual and it's the correct number. In this case, we only consider a remove from list request and property for sell inquiry as connects; voicemails that we leave don't count. We received 6 connects and a total of 4 properties for sale, which resulted in a 1.3% response rate. Over the course of a month, this campaign will have a 5.2% response rate, which is way higher than direct mail's average 1% response rate. We'll likely receive one really warm lead that just isn't ready to sell. In this case, we'll followup with this lead every week and place them on an email and text followup sequence, and we'll get the deal under contract the next month.
One thing to note is that you have to cold call in volume and consistently. It takes us roughly 70 dials to get 1 connect! This is why I always, always, always, encourage investors that want to cold call to do large lists, just like you would in direct mail. A lot of them want to "dip their toe in" and "test the waters", but the numbers above tell the whole story. You can't expect to call a list of 100 leads and get a deal, even if it's a drive for dollars list with distressed properties. Please let me know if you'd like for me to clarify anything I stated or want more metrics. I'm a numbers nerd.haha. Monitoring my company's KPIs is my life.
@Cornelius Garland what placement company do you use the train and vet your representatives?
great Knowledg Being shared ont his Post Cornelius... Have you thought about cost for Lead sources, Batching leads and paying for more Monthly expense cost to bring on 15 VA and turn up on the output of calls to 90,000 calls a month?
Hello guys...
I'm looking to start my cold calling campaign but I'm not sure which list should I hit so ...
Which list do you guys hit when cold calling first? Abseente? or a broad list both owner occupant and absentee?
DIstressed list?
Thanks
Mohammad Bachir El Ghandour I would say anything with a deadline whether that includes tax default/pre foreclosure/probate/code enforcement/ anything with distress.
Great Info Cornelius! Helped me out a lot!
@Jon Keeney Glad to help, Jon! I mainly rely on VM broadcasts because I'm able to cover more ground quicker. Since I'm in several markets, it's easier to set specific days to broadcast to a specific list. I can easily predict how many leads I'll receive based on the amount of numbers I broadcast. With cold calling, the amount of leads I receive varies based on the day and market. Additionally, my dollar goes a lot further with VM broadcasting opposed to cold calling. When I do VM drops, I have them routed to a Callrail number, and it gets sent straight to voicemail. Our VA will then filter through the leads that leave voicemails and call them personally. He'll shoot the abandoned calls a text to try and get in touch with them. If they called in, it might have been an accident, or the individual may not like getting routed directly to voicemail.
Currently, my marketing methods in order of preference are text broadcasts, VM broadcasts, and then cold calling. Please let me know if you have any additional questions.
@Benjamin Blackburn Hey man! I send it out to all of the numbers that I have on file for the individual. I can see when the numbers were updated in my database, so I could just narrow it down to the most-recent ones. However, since I already have the data, I don鈥檛 want to waste it by not utilizing it.
When I do my text blasts, I do narrow my list down to on cells, though. So I do exclude data with this method.
Awesome! makes sense. Thanks a lot man.
@Cornelius Garland thanks for the great information here. Do you mind sharing the company i can use to hire cold callers in the Philippines? Currently i use upwork and have to train them myself. Thank you
@Cornelius Garland do sellers ever ask how you got their number? If so what's the best way to respond? Thanks!
@David Wurzel This is right up my alley. All we do in my wholesale company is cold call, and I stopped direct mail about a year ago so I have plenty of data, best practices, and insight as it pertains to multiple markets. We are currently cold calling our largest list of leads right now. It's a list of 9054 numbers in 6 cities spread across 3 states. We're targeting high equity absentee lists, code violations, and recently-divorced property owners. To bottom line it, it takes us about 2400 unique leads to get one deal. A lot of people may think it takes forever to cold call this amount of leads in any reasonable amount of time, and that's correct if you don't have the right systems in place. We have an army of trained assistants that tackle around 50-100 leads per day using a rapid dialer so they're able to get through more leads within a shorter period. Also, we expedite the time it takes to get through 2400 leads by sending out voicemail blasts through Slybroadcast.com. It's a great resource, and I use it every day. We have the leads that call back go straight-to-voicemail and if they leave a voicemail, then we call them back. I have an assistant that sits in the pocket all day sourcing these leads and generating offers based on a formula we generated by market. The combination of Slybroadcasting while cold calling is powerful. However, cold calling is something that needs to be done daily to generate great results. Unlike direct mail, your prospect doesn't have a physical reminder of your company so you need to have them on an aggressive followup sequence and/or VM blast campaign. We'll hit the same leads every week for 8 weeks straight and then take a break. This may seem like overkill, but you're only going to be able to touch 40-50% of your list by cold calling. We're currently averaging a 4% response rate across all markets. I'll provide my metrics for one week's worth of calling in our Charleston market below.
So we placed 436 outbound calls during the week of 9-15 OCT 2017. We consider a response whenever we get connected with an individual and it's the correct number. In this case, we only consider a remove from list request and property for sell inquiry as connects; voicemails that we leave don't count. We received 6 connects and a total of 4 properties for sale, which resulted in a 1.3% response rate. Over the course of a month, this campaign will have a 5.2% response rate, which is way higher than direct mail's average 1% response rate. We'll likely receive one really warm lead that just isn't ready to sell. In this case, we'll followup with this lead every week and place them on an email and text followup sequence, and we'll get the deal under contract the next month.
One thing to note is that you have to cold call in volume and consistently. It takes us roughly 70 dials to get 1 connect! This is why I always, always, always, encourage investors that want to cold call to do large lists, just like you would in direct mail. A lot of them want to "dip their toe in" and "test the waters", but the numbers above tell the whole story. You can't expect to call a list of 100 leads and get a deal, even if it's a drive for dollars list with distressed properties. Please let me know if you'd like for me to clarify anything I stated or want more metrics. I'm a numbers nerd.haha. Monitoring my company's KPIs is my life.
Really eye opening! Thank you for sharing this great information! I've been listening to Wholesaling Inc. podcasts recently and they heavily promote their TTP (talk to people) program and cold-calling. They say the # of hours you should spend doing this every day. I've only gotten through about 40 of the podcasts (most are short and to the point, which is nice) but I haven't heard them discuss the actual numbers yet, aside from spending 3 hours a day calling.
@Melanie Hartmann I definitely agree with getting direct and talking with sellers. The days of just shooting out mail and hoping for the best, with no real plan, are gone. Even with cold calling, we need to be strategic. You can waste a lot of time and effort if you aren't calling sellers during peak hours (like lunch), your phone numbers are bad, or your team isn't properly training. Cold calling is very rewarding and I think has the highest ROI, but it takes work. The upside is that a lot of investors won't set aside several hours of their day to cold call, so it allows investors with smaller budgets or are just starting out to have a competitive advantage.
Additionally, tracking your metrics is huge. I'm unsure why the guys on the podcasts you listen to don't mention their numbers. It's not like their KPIs are proprietary information or anything. I truly think other investors use cold calling as a supplement to their direct mail and other marketing methods. If they get a deal out of cold calling, that's a win for them, but I don't think they focus on scaling it efficiently. Very few are actually depending on skip tracing and cold calling as their primary market method, like myself. Thanks for your input!
@Cornelius Garland
Thanks for the awesome info. Please send me you website info. I would like to know about your system and resources.
I literally sat here and read all 3 pages of comments on this thread. This was awesome @Cornelius Garland! People like you make this such a priceless community man!
@Michael Batts Thanks for the kind comments! I try to give back whenever I can. I hope my posts help you out.
@Melanie Hartmann I definitely agree with getting direct and talking with sellers. The days of just shooting out mail and hoping for the best, with no real plan, are gone. Even with cold calling, we need to be strategic. You can waste a lot of time and effort if you aren't calling sellers during peak hours (like lunch), your phone numbers are bad, or your team isn't properly training. Cold calling is very rewarding and I think has the highest ROI, but it takes work. The upside is that a lot of investors won't set aside several hours of their day to cold call, so it allows investors with smaller budgets or are just starting out to have a competitive advantage.
Additionally, tracking your metrics is huge. I'm unsure why the guys on the podcasts you listen to don't mention their numbers. It's not like their KPIs are proprietary information or anything. I truly think other investors use cold calling as a supplement to their direct mail and other marketing methods. If they get a deal out of cold calling, that's a win for them, but I don't think they focus on scaling it efficiently. Very few are actually depending on skip tracing and cold calling as their primary market method, like myself. Thanks for your input!
@Cornelius Garland
Thank you for this information! I鈥檓 a new wholesaler in Indianapolis. I have everything down except for a cold calling and rvm system. Can you explain more on your system, such as days and times you are dropping vms. How many times you are rvming the same list? Are you cold calling that same list, if so when? How many cold calls are you placing to the same list before labeling it a dead prospect? Thank you in advance!!!
@Dave Lee I haven鈥檛 gotten anything legal from anyone, but with the huge bandwagon of everyone sending doing robo calls or ringless voicemails I am hearing a lot of agitation in the Seattle market from the community.
@Cornelius Garland thanks for writing back. Can you PM me your service you have created?
@Brandon Beatty I found that it's time-consuming to skip trace the wrong numbers rather than just following up with the leads that came in. However, I rarely get wrong numbers whenever I skip trace my lists, so this is a non-issue.
@Tyana CarpenterI actually have a huge flowchart that addresses what happens based on how the leads respond to my marketing. Here is an overview, though. I work with large lists. In January 2019, I messaged 130,890 sellers and we closed 10 deals, during down months. December and January are very slow months for us. We're gaining a lot more traction now. Our sellers were waiting until late-January to late-February to move their properties. If our sellers want an offer, we have our VAs vet those. I rely on my team of VAs to do a lot. I would say a lead is dead if they opt out of our marketing or respond negatively to our messaging (i.e., cursing). If they say no, we'll put them on a month followup. I will aggressively target my lists for 2 months then "retire" it for a few months. The great thing about having the skip traced lists is that the sellers rarely change their phone numbers. I'm closing deals off of lists I skip traced 2 years ago. It's way quicker and less expensive to shoot the sellers an RVM or text message than to do direct mail. Also, it's easier to track. I do cluster marketing, so I'll cold call the lists at the same time as I'm sending RVM to it. I don't overthink it. One way to look at it is that you can never market to your sellers too much. Sure, some sellers may get upset but I don't care. I need to find motivated sellers. The more times you touch the sellers, the better.
@Autumn Allen I'll send you a message.
@Cameron Robinson I sent you a message as well.
@Cornelius Garland Who do you use for your text messaging? Is that done with Slybroadcast also? If you ever need boots on the ground in central Ohio, I'm happy to help.
@Cornelius Garland - This is such an awesome discussion 馃敟馃敟馃敟 Kudos to you for sharing your experiences. I have either baselined my KPIs or established new ones based on this post. Pure Gold.
@Cornelius Garland - Awesome thread and thanks so much for the info. I'd be interested in seeing your flow chart and obtaining more info on your skip tracing service. PM me if you don't mind.
@Cornelius Garland Thank you for the valuable information in this thread. I do really hope your 2019 has been prosperous. You deserve it for being such a big help and being so open with your strategy. You provided me with a lot of information and guidance I am going to use in the New Mexico market (just starting out).
Question: are you only wholesaling or do you implement other exit strategies with your leads?
This is an awesome thread. Any updates? New ways of doing things?
@Cornelius Garland - What awesome information. I would know more, could I get you website and any other info? Thank you for sharing so much.