The Fortune Is In The Follow Up, But What Does That Mean?

Speaker 1: [0:01] Welcome to the Collecting Keys Friday Focus.

Dan Austin: [0:13] Hey there. Welcome back to another installment of the Friday Focus where Mike or I focus on a specific topic or thought that we think is relevant for the week. I'm your host today, Dan Austin, aka, Investor Man Dan. Last week, Mike talked about the one thing that he wished he had known going into the business. And for him, that was focusing too much on the asset, the home, the house, the property, and not enough on the seller and their needs. So for this week, I thought it would be fun for me to go over the number one thing I wish I had known going into the business that I think would help me be more successful right out the gate. And for me, that was just how important lead follow-up is. It's going to be absolutely critical to your business. And Mike and I have taken years to build our follow-up systems. We're constantly adapting them and growing them to make sure that we are doing a a proper and sustainable level of follow-up with all of our leads that come in. Because you got to remember, these leads cost money. And there's no quicker way to just burn money than not conducting follow-up properly with your leads. Mike and I found that out the hard way. And so that's why I think it's a very relevant topic. And the reason why follow-up is necessary and why I'm talking about is because you do have to do pretty extensive follow-up with a lot of these leads.

Dan Austin: [1:28] Think about it from their perspective, a person is calling you or you've talked to them about selling the largest asset they'll probably ever own in their life, which is their house, their home, a property that they have acquired. And the average person does not transact with a home sale, you know, once, twice, maybe three times in their life. So they really do need to trust you. You need to build rapport with them, and then you need to help them understand the value that you're going to bring and why they should sell to you as opposed to another wholesaler or go enlisted on the market. You need to align what you can provide the services you can provide with what they need, and then build that trust and rapport for them to be able to sell that most valuable asset or that largest asset that they'll ever sell. When it comes to follow-up, we have a few different processes. So you have follow-up from sellers that are actively being worked in your CRM. But then we have what we would call more of a cold follow-up or or an automated follow-up. And we'll talk about both those. So to start, let's talk about more active follow-up, where it's our people, it's our humans that are working for us actually following up with our sellers.

Dan Austin: [2:39] So say a seller comes in, they raise their hand, they call us off a postcard and they want to inquire about our services. So that first call, that intake call is where we qualify the lead. And what we do there is we're asking them just general questions like what's their motivation to sell, make sure that they're in our price range for that property, the size, condition, all the details about the actual asset that they're trying to sell. And then from there, our next goal is to drive to get them to an appointment. Our acquisition manager is going to pick up the phone and try to follow-up with this person that just called in. And so if they can't get them on the phone right away, basically, they're going to do a couple phone calls a day combined with some text messaging to try to get them on the phone for two weeks. Now, if they can't get them on the phone, after that first call for two weeks, they get put in the cold lead bucket. Then they're going to be placed in this automated follow-up system that we have, which again, we'll talk about in a minute. If we do get them on the phone, then we're going to drive to get them to an appointment and continue to follow-up with them until we can get them to that appointment. That's going to be once they're on the phone again, it's twenty four hour follow-up, keep calling them, texting them, telling them them on the phone.

Dan Austin: [3:51] Again, if we can't do that within a couple of weeks, they're going to that cold follow-up. But once we get to that appointment scheduled and walk it, generally speaking, that next interaction with them is easy, because they've gone through our whole process, they've let us walk their house, they want to at least hear our offer. So when we present that offer within twenty four hours of walking their property, we come up with our offer, we present it to them. A lot of times they don't bite on that hook right away. They have some pushback, they're hemming and hawing, they're not sure what to do. So they say, hey, thank you, I need to think about it, give me a night. Okay, well hey Mr. Seller, I am going to call you back at 2PM tomorrow. Can you be available for a phone call at 2PM tomorrow? Sure. Now you have got them committed to answering the phone or at least some responsibility to you. And so when you do follow-up with them, sometimes they don't answer the phone. And this is also another critical part of the follow-up system where we see a lot of sellers do drop off. But you need to follow-up with them and see if you can continue the negotiation. So we're going to do that every twenty four hours until we can get them on the phone.

Dan Austin: [4:50] And then if we can't get them back on the phone in a reasonable amount of time, another week or two, then we're going to push them back out to our cold follow-up system. Again, depending on the situation, if you're getting intermittent conversations with them, we're not going to just throw them out to the cold follow-up. We're actually going to continue to have those conversations whether they're intermittent or not with our active, with our acquisitions manager and active person doing that. We'll do that, we'll keep following up until we close the deal or have to pop them out into our cold follow-up system, which is a good time now to talk about that. Okay, so the cold follow-up or the automated follow-up is really where you can you can make your money and separate yourself from from your competitors by doing this because it just goes on in the background, it doesn't take any effort from you. And we have proven to pull people out of our cold follow-up system and bring them back into being actively worked time and time again. And the reason why is because, you know, like I just said, they're maybe not ready to sell to you right now, but they might not be ready to sell to anybody right now. And so in the future, you want to be the first person in front of them. And you know, there's always the the old saying with marketing is that you got to be in front of somebody seven times before they choose to go with you. And so this is one of those times.

Dan Austin: [6:02] And when they do decide it's time for them to sell or they come to their senses on the value of their home or their situation, you want to be the first person there as opposed to one of your competitors. So just to recap here, what we have is two separate systems for follow-up that you can think of it that way. We have our active, we have the different phases. Once we first take our call, we're going to follow-up, follow-up, follow-up till we get to an appointment. Then we're going to make our offer, then we're going to follow-up, follow-up, follow-up until we can get them to accept our offer or tell us to go away or they've chosen a different offer, they've chosen not to sell their home. If they haven't told us to go away on any of those points and times, we throw them into our cold follow-up, which is automated. Now, if you don't have an automated system, you can still set this up. You just do like, hey, schedule yourself to text or call these people x amount of weeks away or months away, just to stay in front of them. And with that, I can assure you, you will make more money in this business. Mike and I, once we figured out we weren't doing follow-up properly, we actually hired somebody.

Dan Austin: [7:09] We hired our first acquisition manager and that person did follow-up and then we hired a lead manager when she wasn't able to conduct all the follow-up necessary. And so in lieu of us doing the follow-up, we just created the system and hired the people and paid them to do the follow-up. And we went from you know, doing just a couple deals a month to I think our first month when we had our acquisition manager was like seven deals or something like that. So it really does work. You just have to be consistent with it. And the good thing is, if you want to learn more about follow-up systems, go to instantinvestorprogram.com, where Mike and I teach and coach people on things like follow-up systems and other topics on how to run a successful off market real estate business. If you like this episode, please give us a five star review. If you didn't like it, just give us a five star review anyways. If you're a new listener and you haven't listened to previous podcasts, go out there, download them all. It really helps on the analytics. We're starting to get some great traction here with the collecting use podcast. Mike and I have hit some milestones recently, getting in the top percentile of all podcasts worldwide. Yes. That's worldwide. And we do have international listeners, so we can't say we are worldwide.

Dan Austin: [8:17] Otherwise, go and hit me up on Instagram. I'm investor man Dan. Let me know if you like this. If you didn't or if you wanna hear something else on a Friday Focus, definitely let me know in the DMs. Otherwise, see you all next week.

Speaker 1: [8:32] Thanks for listening to this collecting keys Friday focus. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts.