Ask Me Anything About Marketing - Cold Calling, Direct Mail, etc.

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Ask Me Anything About Marketing - Cold Calling, Direct Mail, etc.

Cornelius Garland
Wholesaler · Charlotte, NC · Member since 2015 · 398 posts · 679 votes

Hey everybody! I hope you're doing well. I consider myself an expert at off-market, direct-to-seller, real estate marketing. I've spent well over $500k since 2019 testing various marketing channels to generate leads. These channels include cold calling, direct mail, RVM and SMS/Texting. I've worked as a fractional chief marketing officer for multiple companies that have generated over $1M in wholesaling assignments since 2016. This year, I've generated around 3000 seller leads by primarily cold calling. My systems are tight and I'm all about getting contracts for the lowest cost per deal possible. I'm always looking for ways to generate high-quality leads for the least amount of money spent.

I want to post this thread in the Marketplace instead of the general forums because if I want to be completely transparent, there are vendors I can mention here that I can't mention in the main forums. Also, I'd like to share links, PDFs, and other branded resources that will likely be removed from the main forums. I just want to be as transparent as possible without having to worry about this thread being removed. 

Ask me anything. Nothing is off-topic, and you have my word that I won't try to sell you on a $90,000 coaching program. lol. But seriously though, let's talk about it. If I don't see any posts on here shortly, I'll start going over my cold calling process, which is what I'm doing right now to generate leads.

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  • Arsen Atanasovski
    Investor · Rochester, MI · Member since 2017 · 1k+ posts · 584 votes
    4y

    You do cold calling in Michigan?

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  • Drew SygitBusiness Member
    Property Manager · Royal Oak, MI · Member since 2012 · 12k+ posts · 9k+ votes
    4y

    why cold calling?

    [email protected]248-209-6824
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  • Cornelius Garland
    OP
    Wholesaler · Charlotte, NC · Member since 2015 · 398 posts · 679 votes
    4y

    @Arsen Atanasovski Hey Arsen, thanks for the question. Yes, I've cold-called in Detroit this year. Lots of sellers are willing to practically give away their properties due to them being in distressed areas, but the city is picking up compared to where it was a few years ago. Did you have any specific questions about cold calling to Michigan specifically? Let me know! 

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  • Cornelius Garland
    OP
    Wholesaler · Charlotte, NC · Member since 2015 · 398 posts · 679 votes
    4y

    @Drew Sygit Great question, Drew. I've been doing off-market lead gen for 6 years. I started with direct mail (2016 - 2017), then switched to RVM (2017 only), and then I did texting almost exclusively for a year (2018). From 2019 to the present, I've been cold calling to get the majority of my leads and deals.

    The reason I'm a big fan of cold calling is for a few reasons. I'm able to generate a large number of qualified leads for way cheaper than other marketing channels. Additionally, it's predictable as long as you dial it in properly. I can expect 1-3 leads per day per cold caller over an 8-hour shift. Whether I have 1 or 50 cold callers, I can expect these numbers to hold steady as long as they have enough records on their lists to target (around 5k - 10k records per cold caller). The downside is the leads take longer to convert, but regardless of the marketing channel, most of your deals will come from follow-up anyways. Essentially, cold calling allows us to get a ton of leads in the pipeline and stack up the leads for the next 3, 4, 5 months.

    A lot of investors depend on "low hanging fruit" to generate deals. This means that they're only focused on the leads that come in today where they want to sell for a discount. Any other leads, they completely ignore and never follow up with. A lot of marketing dollars are being wasted by not following up with sellers. A "no" today doesn't mean a "no" tomorrow and I've witnessed this countless times.

    One of the other main reasons why I like cold calling is because I can control what type of leads come in. Compared to pull marketing streams, like PPC, SEO, and Facebook ads, you can generate a targeted list and exclude properties in certain areas. With the aforementioned marketing streams, you can get a lead anywhere and it can have no equity. This, in my opinion, is too big of a risk to take when scaling. I can't predict the type or quality of leads I'll receive. I don't want mobile homes or homes in rural areas. When I conduct my market research, I'm able to eliminate these zips and only call in areas where sellers will be receptive to my message of buying their house with cash.


    Currently, cold calling is my number one marketing channel with SMS as my number 2 marketing channel. Let me know if you have any other questions or would like to clarify anything I mentioned.

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  • Duane Alexander
    Investor · Atlanta, GA · Member since 2020 · 253 posts · 240 votes
    4y

    You always give good insight. What dialer do you have your callers using? How many callers do you have?

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  • Duane Alexander
    Investor · Atlanta, GA · Member since 2020 · 253 posts · 240 votes
    4y

    What your contact rate? What things do you do to make sure your contact rate is good? I'm at 4.6% for the month of November. I'm not sure if that's good or not and what I can do to bring it up.

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  • Duane Alexander
    Investor · Atlanta, GA · Member since 2020 · 253 posts · 240 votes
    4y

    @Cornelius Garland Also what other cold calling kpis are you keeping track of and what are your goal metrics?

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  • Cornelius Garland
    OP
    Wholesaler · Charlotte, NC · Member since 2015 · 398 posts · 679 votes
    4y

    @Duane Alexander I apologize for not seeing your message from a couple of weeks ago. I will answer all of your questions this weekend!

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  • Cornelius Garland
    OP
    Wholesaler · Charlotte, NC · Member since 2015 · 398 posts · 679 votes
    4y

    @Duane Alexander Hey Duane, what dialer are you using right now? The ones, like Mojo, that have you manually input your dispositions will have a lower contact rate. In ReadyMode (formerly Xencalll), they update your contact rate automatically. I've been averaging 20% on ReadyMode; however, on Mojo, 2% is the average. I hope that makes sense as the dialers all have their own definitions of what counts as a connection.

    Regarding KPIs, I only track a few for my cold callers. I monitor their connections per day and how many leads they generate per day. On average, a cold caller can generate 1 - 3 leads per day. Anything additional is a bonus, but it's practically impossible to improve this number regardless of what tweaks you make. After doing millions of cold calls, this number has held steady for 3 years. They should be calling 8 hours per day to hit their lead goal. Regarding the connections, they should be getting around 250 - 400 per day. Too few cold calls indicate that they have a lot of downtime on their shift. If they have like 600+ connections then your dialer isn't optimized and it's going to blow through your data.

    Let me know if you'd like for me to clarify.

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  • Duane Alexander
    Investor · Atlanta, GA · Member since 2020 · 253 posts · 240 votes
    4y

    Thanks @Cornelius Garland. I use batchdialer so I'm not sure how that changes things. My daily connects are a little lesser than that. We're actually hovering around 150 or so per VA. How do you have your max dial attempts per number/record and retry time for each number set up? How many times and at what frequency are you dialing through your list?

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