Why You Might be Throwing Away Half of the Deals You Could be Getting

Mike: Welcome back to the flipnerd.com REI Classroom where experts from across the real estate investing industry teach you quick lessons to take your business to the next level. And now, let’s meet today’s expert host.
Danny: This is Danny Johnson from flippingjunkie.com. I’ll be your host of the REI Classroom today where we’re going to talk about why you might be throwing away half of the deals you could be getting and, of course, what to do to fix it.
Mike: This REI Classroom real estate lesson is sponsored by FlipNerd Investor Coaching, your blueprint to investing success.
Danny: So you’ve probably heard this and maybe read into it a little bit, but it’s going to be follow up. So many people, investors, drop the ball with these leads because they’re always just focused on getting more calls and not worrying about or taking advantage of the ones that they’ve already received. So here are a couple of typical scenarios.
So one scenario is that an investor will get a lead, they’ll then talk to the seller and find out that they’re not motivated or they don’t seem motivated. What happens is they never talk to them again. The second scenario is they get a lead, talk to the seller, they might be motivated, see the house and make an offer that gets rejected and then they never talk to them again.
In all of these scenarios, you’ve just got to follow up with anybody that calls you unless there’s some situation where it’s just a no-brainer that these people will never ever want to sell to you. Like for instance, if you send some direct mail and they call you and tell you they want to kill you because you sent them a postcard, you probably don’t want to follow up with them. But maybe you do. I don’t know.
So you’ve got to follow up. So how can you follow up? Because a lot of systems that I’ve seen investors have are pretty inefficient, and by systems, I mean a notebook that’s full of scribbles and stuff for the leads that they get and it’s not very good. So anyway, you can do a spreadsheet even, Google Sheets, Excel spreadsheet or something, just to put these leads in because you need to keep track of them and follow up with them. So one way of doing that is a Google Calendar and those Google Calendars are online and free and you can use them on most mobile devices. They can integrate with that.
So you can set up notifications onto your phone which is like a text message and then also have email alerts for when to follow up with these leads and it’s a free rudimentary system to do that but it’s one way of doing it.
Another way is using a mail service like an email auto-responder type service like MailChimp or AWeber, GetResponse. MailChimp has a free account that you can use. So if you want to keep it on the cheap free side, you can use one of their accounts and add people’s email addresses to them and set up auto-responder messages to people, that allows you to do follow-up very consistently because the system is always doing that.
The only downside is there is not a good way to easily remove them from the list and you can really piss some people off. So make sure that you consider that when you use a system like that. But we use our RAI mobile system to schedule follow-up reminders from my acquisitions guy to follow up consistently. So when he adds it to the lead in the system, then he sets a date for it and he’ll get notified of that follow-up with the information from the lead. So that way, whenever he contacts them, he has all the information about the lead in one place.
So he can make that call with confidence that he knows what’s going on and where we’re at with the lead. It really helps with conversion rate and continuing the conversation from their point of view because if they talk with you, when you call them and they don’t know who you are, you kind of need to have a reference and a way to communicate and connect with them again because it’s all about rapport and how you deal with sellers. So having that system is a great thing.
One thing that we just released as a beta feature is the ability to have automated text and email sequences built out. So this is something where you can set up a sequence, multiple sequences really because you have different levels of motivation or different situations where you might have made an offer to one seller and you didn’t make an offer to another seller or you never went to their house.
So there are different situations so you want to have different sequences that have different messages based on what’s happened with the lead. What you can do is set up through drag-and-drop basically text messages or email messages and any sequence you want with the days that they should go out and the times that they should go out, one after the other.
So it’s automated and the thing is like you can set up the information within those texts and emails that are specific to that lead. So the seller’s name or the address of the property they’re selling, stuff like that. So it’s very cool. It’s a great way to automate the messages and have them sent over time and use text and email. Like I said, you can do some of that with the auto responders through some of the mail sources like MailChimp and we allow the setting up of text and all that stuff through there.
So it’s a great way to consistently follow up and as you get more and more leads, if you’re not doing a whole lot of leads, really just having the Google Calendar with alerts to remind you to call them is typically the best because you’re actually talking to them. As you get more and more leads, then you’re going to follow up because you really should follow up with almost every single lead that you get over time because time motivates people. It has a way of having people become ready to sell to you at the lower price.
So after you’ve started to get a certain number of leads, you’re going to get overwhelmed with making those calls and you’re not going to make them anymore and you’re going to drop the ball. So setting up some automated systems or having another person in your office, hiring somebody, bringing somebody on to set up these follow-ups and then making that contact is going to be a great way to land more deals out of leads that you’re already getting. So many people, like I said, are focused on just increasing the number of leads to get more deals instead of focusing even more on each one that they get.
So as you get more leads, you’re going to get more deals and then once you start working on getting even more leads, those automated follow-up systems are going to help you convert even more of the ones that you already got. You’re just going to have a much better year than you would without the follow-ups.
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