All Forum Posts by: Cornelius Garland

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.

@Tremaine Jeffries I use this company called https://hiloskiptracing.com/. Really solid data and they have insane accuracy rates. There are lots of skip tracing companies out there, but if they don't have 90%+ hit rates. For instance, if you submit 1,000 records to them, they'll give you back 900 records with phone numbers. This is a solid company. Anything below that is really not high-quality as you will be missing out on a large part of your marketing list that doesn't have records.

@Jon Fletcher Hey Jon, mailing works but it's definitely about volume. I got my first deal from a direct mail campaign back in 2015. I did direct mail primarily as my lead gen strategy for about 2 years before switching to RVM then texting and finally cold calling (2019 - Present).

A 1.5% response rate is actually higher than national benchmarks. Usually, direct mail yields a .5 - 1% response rate. I did some mail drops last year in Charlotte and had about a .3% response rate. Each mail drop cost about $6k and I sent off 17k mailers. I would get roughly 45 calls back from these campaigns. 45!! That's a ton of mail just to get 45 calls back, but that's just what the numbers are right now.

One major point to mention is how many leads are needed to convert your leads into a contract. It's currently taking around 50 - 75 leads from direct mail to generate a deal. This can vary based on the type of list you're targeting. If you're hitting an owner-occupied list with no motivating factors, you'll need more leads to convert one into a contract versus if you were targeting a water shutoff list. In general, you're looking at sending roughly 20k postcards to get this amount of leads in. Additionally, the leads are warmer, but they'll still take about a month and a half-to-two months to convert.

Knowing these numbers now, I suggest upping your volume or changing your marketing channels. If you're on a budget, test out texting as this currently has the lowest barrier to entry, and not a ton of volume is needed to convert your leads to contracts. I apologize if this comes off as blunt, but you're really wasting your time and precious marketing dollars if you're not doing high volume. Also, I haven't really seen any difference as far as leads to contracts based on the type of marketing piece. I'm unsure if you used yellow letters, white letters, or postcards, but I would go the cheapest route and hit as many people as possible. A unique mailpiece might increase your response rate slightly, but it won't increase the quality of leads. Most of those individuals will just call out of curiosity and not truly be interested in selling their houses.

Please let me know if you have any follow-up questions.

@Alex Saleeby Always glad to help out! Simpler is always better in my opinion. :)

@William Merone Nice work on getting your first employee hired, William! I remember back in 2017, we hired our first acquisitions manager and it was exciting but also a bit nerve-wracking having to be responsible for someone else's livelihood. To answer your questions, as the others point out, I would definitely get a CRM. I'd definitely look at one built for investors. The reason being is because it'll already have workflows and other features that are designed specifically for investors. For instance, there will be a cash buyers area where it will have all of the fields you need to store information for your cash buyers. For generic CRMs, you'll need to build this from scratch. No need to reinvent the wheel and build it from scratch. The CRM I recommend that I've been using since 2017 is Investorfuse. They have one built on Podio and a standalone system. Both work great, and it all comes down to your preference. I like using the one built atop of Podio just because I've been using it for so long and my systems are built atop of it.

When it comes to organization, ensure that you're only putting leads in there. These are anybody that says "yes" to wanting to sell whether they're a cold, warm or hot lead. Please don't do like I did and upload your whole marketing list to your CRM. It'll be a mess. Like the others say, ensure you place your leads on SMS or email drip campaigns. These are included in Investorfuse. They actually have prebuilt campaigns that convert. They're built for investors, which is another big-time positive of using a CRM designed for us. There are a ton of CRMs out there so don't feel like you have to use Investorfuse. I'm just speaking from my experience. I hope this helps out.

@Maria Mejia Propstream is legit but you were speaking to someone from Pakistan or India, most likely. It's actually getting really annoying on Facebook because I get one of those messages like 5 times a day. They're either trying to sell Propstream records, cash buyer lists, or skip tracing. I don't think these guys realize that you can get a Propstream account yourself and get a much better deal.

A Propstream account costs $99 and you can pull 10k records. This guy is trying to charge you $50 for 1k records (not leads). Leads are actually qualified individuals that indicate they want to sell. This guy is just pulling a list, that he likely gave to someone else, and sending it to you. I'd stay away and just get a Propstream account yourself. You could pay $50 more and get 10k records versus 1k records. Hope this helps, Maria.

@Grant Sylvester Absolutely! Always glad to help. Cold calling has been the one marketing channel I’ve done the longest with the best and most consistent results.

@Mike W. Hey Mike, it pains me to hear that you didn't receive a call back. The barrier to entry with cold calling is way too low these days, so non-serious investors are marketing and they don't have their business processes set up properly. What happened is that a wholesaler likely paid a BPO company from the Philippines to call a marketing list for them. However, they likely looked at the information you provided and decided not to call back if you didn't want 50 cents on the dollar for your house. If you didn't give them an asking price either, they likely wouldn't call back. I used to do this but I learned I need to nurture every lead. Regardless of what a seller says to my cold callers, I still make an effort to call back just to establish the relationship and see if there's a way I can help them out.

1) Typically, they are wholesalers marketing to a list of sellers that they believe will have motivation to sell. For instance, a list of tired landlords or a vacant owners list. Once they have a hot lead, they'll contract it and send the deal to their buyers list to see if they're interested in the deal.

2) Yes, it works well. However, to be effective, you will need to focus on volume. You'll need to generate a lot of leads to get one deal. My cost per deal is around $3k right now.

3) Most companies charge per hour. A reasonable price to pay is $5 to $7 per hour. If you're hiring a cold caller directly then you can get them for cheaper, but you have to deal with training them, managing them, and troubleshooting issues with your dialer when those issues come up. Dialer issues can be a pain, and I've had to deal with this a lot recently.

4) I've got a few companies I can recommend. There's one in the Philippines that crushes it and I've been using them since 2019. I'm not sure about the rules with recommending companies on the forums, so if you want that contact, just shoot me a message. I'll send you their email.

I hope this helps out, and please let me know if you have any other questions.

@Mike Schorah I cold call exclusively to get my deals. It works, but there are some best practices to follow to ensure you're doing it properly and maximizing your call time. I don't do the calling myself. I outsource it and I encourage you to as well. Cold calling yourself is the equivalent to handwriting postcards yourself. There are so many companies out here that do this for a reasonable price. I've had up to 40 cold callers dialing for me at one point this year. From 2019 - 2020, I worked with a company in Charlotte and they cold called primarily to get their deals. We netted $1.7M in assignments during that year while I focused exclusively on monitoring our cold calling campaigns.

It works still and it's not going away anytime soon. So how do you optimize it? Regarding your point about your number being marked as spam. You can check if your number is flagged by going to https://nomorobo.com/lookup/. After the "lookup", type your outbound number. If you see a message saying "XYZ Number is a robocaller" then your number is flagged as spam. You'll need to change it immediately. This small issue can actually really hurt your ability with getting in touch with sellers. I would encourage you to check your number for spam every morning and a few times in the day.

I like cold calling because I can pull a list of sellers I want to specifically dial and reach out to them. No randomness or junk leads will come through because I determine the parameters for who I consider a lead. Anybody that comes through will have equity and as long as they have motivation, I'll be able to wholesale the deal or take it down myself. 

Do you have any other questions regarding cold calling? I'd love to answer them for you. I nerd out on this stuff!

@Bryant Brislin I used to cold call on Sundays when I first started. I needed to do whatever it took to get deals to leave my 9-5 job. However, since I have a team that works for me now, they only work on the weekdays and I wouldn't ask them to work on the weekends.

The response rates are way higher than on the weekends because people are home. Whenever I did cold calls on Sundays, I was respectful and started calling around 1 PM to give time for people to get home from church. There is an aspect of marketing that will inevitably annoy people. However, there are people out there that simply don't know where to turn when they have a problem property. I've talked to sellers that literally thought they had to just pay property taxes on a house for years because they didn't think they could sell it due to its condition. In these situations, they won't actively seek help because they simply think no one wants their house. These are the situations where cold calling and direct marketing work amazingly.