All Forum Posts by: Cornelius Garland

@David Wurzel I have a bad habit of using both prospect and lead interchangeably when I consider them to be two separate things. I use them interchangeably because most investors say "lead" so I use this term to not confuse other investors that I'm speaking with. I define a prospect as all of the names on my lists. The 9045 individuals I'm targeting are prospects. I meant to say individuals/prospects, not numbers, in my earlier post. Out of the 9054 prospects, there are about 16,000 phone numbers between all of them. 

After a prospect is prequalified and has some motivation, then I consider them a lead. The main difference is that I'd consider a lead someone who I'm actively following up with, whether it's through automation or a manual touch. I'm a "don't want-er" and will quickly remove a lead from my CRM if they disqualify themselves. You can shoot me a PM if you'd like to discuss anything on my website. I'm always looking for suggestions to improve it.

Too many investors have the spray and pray mentality and throw ridiculous amounts of money on direct mail, SEO, cold calling, etc without focusing on the issues that are causing their budgets to be so high. If only they analyzed their KPIs and reallocated their expenses, then they could probably slash their budget in half. But hey, I'm just a wholesaler...what do I know? haha

Correct, I identified 4 properties for sale and two individuals that wanted to be removed from our marketing. The 4 properties that came in were all warm leads with one being a warm/hot lead, if that makes sense. The lead was at the right price and motivated but was super attached to the property because they grew up in it. They just need to be touched a few more times by my acquisitions manager to get it under contract. 

Most of our leads are on followup, and that's where our deals primarily come from. I'm sure you can attest to this. The leads still need some vetting when they come in, but the goal of our cold callers is just to filter through the junk. We consider them our first line of defense. I equate it to sending out a yellow letter and then when a prospect calls the number on the letter, they get sent to a two-minute voicemail. If the prospect leaves their information after listening to the long voicemail, then there's some level of motivation there. It's the same concept here: we want our callers to filter out the bad stuff. 

Oftentimes, investors think cold calling is the magic bullet they've been looking for and will magically make all of these motivated seller leads come in their pipeline. It's a grind, just like doing a direct mail marketing campaign. But if it's done effectively and efficiently, then your cost per lead will decrease tremendously. This is what I'm striving towards.

@David Wurzel Ok, I'll definitely do further research on the text broadcasting. You're correct, they're selling a service so it's not necessarily in their best interest to dissuade me from using their product. Also, thank you for answering the other questions that I asked. It's great seeing another investor track their metrics. I'm always unsure what the standard should be so seeing your numbers is reassuring.

I'll answer your questions below:

We do use international assistants in the Philippines. Sometimes, international workers get a bad rap; however, I discovered the issue is more to do with a lack of training opposed to their accents or location. We use a placement company to vet our account representatives and they go through a month-long crash course on real estate investing before they can even think about speaking to my sellers. During their training, we require them to cold call real estate agents first then the ones that make it past this stage successfully will practice on seller leads underneath the supervision of our development coach. By the time they start calling for us, they can hold their own on the phone.

We compensate hour agents hourly and provide bonuses for deals we've successfully closed for leads that they vet.

In addition to cold calling, they're also looking at the comps near a property to determine if our seller is in the right ball park. Moreover, I require them to scrub our lists throughout their call day and manage our CRM. So they do a little bit of lead management as well. This is what's reducing the call volume and I'm alright with this, for now, because the leads that come to me are pre-vetted, fit our buying criteria (i.e., 3/1, 1100 sqft, SFRs), and my acquisitions team already has an idea of what they can offer. It's more work on the front end, but it makes things smoother on the back end. I give my team a limit to spend on each call based on the lead's motivation. If the lead is not interested, the call shouldn't last more than 30 seconds; they're trained to identify an unmotivated seller within the first couple of seconds. For warm to hot leads, five minutes is the limit, regardless of how motivated the lead is. They're required to gather the essential information so my acquisitions team can develop an offer. Rapport-building comes later through manual and automated email and text followup sequences.

Also, our agents are calling several lists for 6 other markets, and they spend about 2-4 hours calling each market. I have separate reports for the other campaigns. It will probably be easier to analyze my reports and the efficiency of my callers by separating the reports by agent instead of market so I'll probably do that this week. Please let me know if you'd like for me to clarify anything I stated. Great conversation so far.

@David Wurzel Thank you for posting the study from Baylor above. It makes me want to restructure my assistants' call day in order to get closer to the study's numbers. Are you primarily cold calling in your business? If so, about how many calls are you needing to make to set an appointment? I'd imagine an investor will have a lower ROI purely based on the price we need to purchase a property for, opposed to an agent that can list a property at multiple price points. I'm going to share this with my partner.

As cold calling became our main marketing strategy, I realized that I needed to be mindful of the laws so I read a lot just to make sure I wasn't violating any laws. I always run the numbers through the do not call registry, and my outbound callers' dialers aren't able to dial a number that is on the do not call list. Those fines are steep and taking this extra step is well-worth it. When we send out our texts, we present it as an opt-in opportunity for a prospect to learn about selling their property. What are your thoughts regarding this strategy? We've spoken to our text broadcasting service and they gave us the green light, but I know that this is a gray area. Also, robocalls when leaving a voicemail to anybody or just the do not call list is prohibited? Thank you for your input. I'm always learning on BP!

@Rhonda Dietz I'm not an affiliate and don't have a referral code, Rhonda, but thanks for thinking of me. I'd sign up and shoot out a blast. My voicemail that I send out sounds really personal and doesn't sound like I'm marketing at all. I say "Hey, my name is Ethan (I use my partner's name), and I guess I just missed you. I just bought a property down the road and some neighbors said you might be in the market to sell yours. Please give me a call back if you ever thought about selling." Approximately 35-40% of your list will receive voicemails, and you can expect about a 2-10% response rate depending on the list you market to. Please let me know if you have any questions.

@Shariyf Grevious Howdy Shariyf! Thanks for the kind compliment. I learned a ton off of BP when I first started investing so I like chiming in on the forums to help other people out.

@Rob Drum I'm glad I could help out. I love the fact that you can tweak your business based on the numbers. It's one thing to speculate if something is working properly, but to have the stats to back it up is so reassuring. If we're having a down month, we know what we need to do more of based on our previous results. Please let me know if you have any other questions. Hopefully some more experienced investors can chime in!

@Rob Drum This is a great question, Rob. I think the closing percentage depends on what an investor considers a lead. I have a lot of filters that I use before I consider a prospect a lead. Once it enters my CRM, then I would consider it a deal. It takes me about 160 leads to get one deal. This is not to be confused with the amount of prospects I'm actively marketing to, which is around 10,000 per month. We followup with our leads aggressively in my wholesale company so our closing percentage increases over time. Because of this, it's hard to say "Month 1 resulted in X number of deals". In month 4, we could close 10 deals, but it's difficult to determine if these deals came from followup or the 1st, 2nd, third, etc contact. Because of this, I go by how many leads it takes for us to get a contract. After we receive a contract back from a seller, the "clock" starts again. We count up to how many qualified leads it takes to get a contract, then we start again, and so forth. Probably not the best way to track this, but it works and makes sense to the team.

Currently, I cold call and and it takes me about 2400 prospects to get a deal. So if you were to relate this to direct mail, then it will take 2400 postcards or letters to get a deal.

We make offers on just about everything that touches our CRM. After our account representative takes the initial call and forwards it to our acquisitions manager, it's their responsible to present the offer regardless of how far apart it is from the seller's initial asking price. Sometimes, we have sellers asking for 100k+ more than our offer and my acquisitions manager is like "there is no way that he/she will even entertain that offer", but you'd be surprised. A few of them will entertain the offer and knock a lot off of their asking price. You never know unless you ask. I just typed up a response on another forum post regarding the metrics from my cold calling campaigns. It can provide a bit more insight as to what I referenced above.

@Accario Trotter Hello Accario! Do you have an office? And what volume are you doing per month? A lot of the ones that have the solid numbers require a site inspection. Not all of them are created equally and a lot of vendors resell watered down data. Nothing is worse than getting a ton of disconnects when you think you're paying for good data. Please let me know if you have an office and I can provide more guidance.

@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.

@Vasant R. Yes, I would stay on top of your agent to ensure your offer is at the forefront of the seller's mind. You could always contact the seller's agent to get a gauge on where your offer stacks up with the others. That might be the better route to go.