00;00;00;00 - 00;00;20;12
Unknown
Some people will say like, I'm just not a numbers person. I'm not a spreadsheet person. And I would say, then you're not serious. Like you're not taking your business serious and you really don't care about reaching your goals or making money or taking care of your team, because that's what's required to be a business owner. Like you have to track and know numbers are there.
00;00;20;13 - 00;00;29;00
Unknown
It's non-negotiable.
00;00;29;03 - 00;00;53;22
Unknown
Welcome back to the seven Figure Flipping Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Whitney, and I have my co-host today, Lindsey Arco. Today we're going to dive deep into marketing metrics and measuring what matters. So for a lot of people, they are doing a lot of marketing, but they actually don't know what's happening. They don't actually know if it's working well or if it's working poorly.
00;00;53;24 - 00;01;19;20
Unknown
They believe it's working poorly most of the time because they are not getting a result. And the truth is, is they just don't understand what to measure, how to measure it, and what the industry norms are to know if they're like centerline on these things. What do you think? I think that's part of the problem. But do you also think that it could be that they're doing too many types of marketing at once?
00;01;19;22 - 00;01;44;04
Unknown
Yes. You know, that that they're doing marketing without a plan is the problem. I would say not so much that they're doing too many. They're like grasping for what? I'll try a little bit of people and some cold calling and I'll try. Oh gosh, everything else. And then it's like nothing is working. This is all. These are all bad leads and the marketing sucks.
00;01;44;07 - 00;02;13;20
Unknown
And what they should be doing though, is they should be building a plan every quarter and saying, I expect this to happen over these 90 days and make sure it's realistic, and then just measuring whether or not they're on course or they're off course, and making pivots when they have enough data to actually know what's happening, because a lot of times they're going, it's not working, and they're making pivots, which is making it not work.
00;02;13;23 - 00;02;41;07
Unknown
It's like self-fulfilling. And, I'm on a I'm on a call last week with, my performance pod. And Steph, if she listens, she'll know I'm talking about her. Hopefully not Steph's like, I don't know if this, like, direct mail is working and you know, she's getting like a 2% response rate and she's been doing it for like less than a couple of months.
00;02;41;10 - 00;02;57;13
Unknown
I'm like Steph this is first off this is a long game. You're not sending out so much volume that you should just be raking in all these deals. The problem she had lens was she sent out a batch email and signed two deals up like a thousand pieces. Two deals like, oh, this is easy. I love direct mail.
00;02;57;13 - 00;03;11;24
Unknown
It's always going to be this easy. Yeah, it's all it's going to be. This it's never going to be this easy again. And that that was the case for her. And I think that's really what, soured it for her because now she's like 2 or 3 drops later and she's like, I'm getting calls, but I can't make any deals work.
00;03;11;29 - 00;03;38;01
Unknown
Honestly, if I ask most investors what is actually working in their marketing, they can't tell me or what's not working. They just think it's not working. Not really, because nothing's working. They're just staring at the wrong numbers. And honestly, most people are underperforming. They're just kind of flying blind on their marketing. By the end of this episode, you will know what marketing metrics matter and what you should be measuring.
00;03;38;04 - 00;04;07;26
Unknown
And I'll even give you an industry standard to measure against. And more importantly, you'll know how to use the numbers to make better decisions without feeling completely overwhelmed. So in n seven figure flipping, I mean, obviously we've done thousands of deals in our own business and blackjack real estate, but also in seven figure flipping. As an organization, we are doing thousands of deals annually, literally $1 billion billion plus dollars in transactions.
00;04;07;26 - 00;04;28;08
Unknown
So we have the luxury of seeing multiple high level businesses. And the beauty of that is we're talking about marketing on a pretty routine basis in our community, and we know what's working. And one thing that's different about our community is our community is not like, hey, go follow Bill, Lindsay and Adam and do exactly what they do.
00;04;28;14 - 00;04;54;16
Unknown
We create people who can actually think for themselves. And, build their own marketing plan, understand the nuances of their market. So it's not just a bunch of me, two people in the community who are all doing the same thing. What the benefit of that is, is I get to see what other investors are trying and testing in their markets and what is or is not working for them, and then we can take some of that to R&D, which we do a lot of in blackjack.
00;04;54;18 - 00;05;14;21
Unknown
And we fail a lot. We fail a lot. My November direct mail was terrible this year, as you well know. So let's dive into some of that stuff. When you were talking about how, you know, we talk about marketing a lot within the community, I think one of the most awesome things about these conversations is that each one of them are different.
00;05;14;24 - 00;05;41;06
Unknown
Because real estate is hyperlocal. And you mentioned that not everybody wants to necessarily follow me, you and Bill. Right? So if you whether you're an experienced operator or you're just starting out, what are the things that you absolutely need to know before you start spending money on marketing? And I think you need to understand your specific market. And there are some kind of rules of thumb that are useful.
00;05;41;06 - 00;06;14;22
Unknown
So I'll give you some examples. Direct mail is not the best marketing for for every single market. Some California metros don't perform super well with direct mail, but they perform well with cold calling or PPC and if you're really starting a launching a marketing channel, I think it's okay to spend 90 days testing, direct mail, or testing cold calling or testing Google Ads PPC in your market to see how it responds to the different marketing channels.
00;06;14;22 - 00;06;39;14
Unknown
But every every market is 100% different. And what happens is I see this all the time. You spend money and you send direct mail and you send month one and you don't get very good results and maybe months to, oh, you're still not happy with your results. Do you go for the full 90 days? Do you wait? At what point do you stop and make adjustments?
00;06;39;17 - 00;07;00;02
Unknown
Yeah, I would say, well, first off, if you have like let's let's use an example for direct mail of what an industry standard would be. And if you think about this, there's, there's two front end pieces to marketing when you're talking about outbound and direct mail would be considered outbound because you're sending it out is you have to have a list that's relatively accurate.
00;07;00;02 - 00;07;21;11
Unknown
It's going to go to the person it's intended to go to. So you have to have a list. You have to have data that it's going to go to, and then you have to have a mail piece that's designed to get a response. And the only thing those are the only two variables on direct mail. And the way that you tell if the data and or the piece is effective is by measuring the response rate.
00;07;21;14 - 00;07;45;16
Unknown
So the response rate is however many calls you got divided by the number of pieces you put out. So industry standard like you are meeting the mark in today's market is a half of 1%. So literally a half of a percent. So if you're hitting a half percent or give or take a little bit around that, then that's really good.
00;07;45;18 - 00;08;08;08
Unknown
The better you can do with data, the more dialed in you can get on your data, the more you can improve your mail piece that, speaks to the avatar you're marketing toward. So I'll give you an example. The better the response rate you'll get. So that's kind of the ending on that. But the the example here is we like to buy mobile homes in Central Florida.
00;08;08;10 - 00;08;32;17
Unknown
So we run a direct mobile home campaign with direct mail that has a series of different cards, like it's in the middle Florida, very red state, you know, people with land and guns and no HOA. So we're a veteran owned company. We make sure that they know that no HOA fees. These are people who value freedom. So like we're sending stuff with military and veteran owned on it.
00;08;32;17 - 00;08;56;04
Unknown
We're targeting and our language is specific to mobile homes. And we're talking about the the potential problems that mobile homes would have and that has yielded us a response rate of almost a percent, one whole percent. So that's working really well for us now. We took we went. And so I'm going to run that play as much as I can for as long as I can.
00;08;56;06 - 00;09;22;19
Unknown
We sent 25,000 pieces over two weeks in November and received eight phone calls. It was so bad that the direct mail provider said, you guys are full of it. And they said, let us send some mail and we'll spend our own money to do it on your list. I said, great, because I was like, this is insane. This is not working.
00;09;22;19 - 00;09;44;20
Unknown
It's like so bad. It's like a point 000000 something percent of 1%. So they spent money and then it didn't work. And they go, crap, you're right. Let's go ahead and let's go ahead and take a knee. Now this is Q4. This was November and it always slows down in November. You're always going to get less a less response rate.
00;09;44;20 - 00;10;06;19
Unknown
But for us, eight calls on 25,000 pieces of mail is an absolute unacceptable number. Why do we know that though? Because we understand the industry standard is a half of a percent. Like even the dumbest people are getting a half of a percent, right or right around. That doesn't have to be perfectly on it. And we paused that campaign and we paused it and we'll we'll relook at it again after the first of the year.
00;10;06;19 - 00;10;32;05
Unknown
Right? Yeah. Exactly. As we go into our 2026 plan, our target, we will put together a marketing plan that is intentional for all of 2026. And then we will assess it and revise it quarter by quarter, just like everybody else should be doing. So we talked about response rate for direct mail. And I think that is the top of the funnel for mail.
00;10;32;08 - 00;10;51;02
Unknown
The back end of the funnel, the bottom of the funnel is where the money comes out. The contracts are signed, the deals are done. I think that's where most people are focusing instead of where in my funnel is something not working on my marketing. So I'm about to to send out a mail campaign, and I think I need to track every single detail.
00;10;51;02 - 00;11;16;00
Unknown
I have the most advanced spreadsheet possible to track numbers. How much is too much? See, here's the thing is, numbers are only valuable if they change what you do next, or they lead to a decision that you're actually going to make in the decision may be to change nothing, which is okay, or it may be to kill it or to double down on it.
00;11;16;03 - 00;11;43;18
Unknown
And you can't track everything efficiently and be effective. So if we had to talk about what numbers. So we're talking about the funnel. When I say the funnel people you have to imagine that, you know, you have a funnel. Think like I'm putting oil in my and my vehicle and, you know, the funnel is wide at the top so that I can pour it in and then it goes down into a really small thing so I can fit into that oil, container in your car.
00;11;43;21 - 00;12;08;23
Unknown
So at the top, it's really wide. That's where the big broad activity is happening. That might be number of outbound calls for cold calling. That might be number of pieces of mail sent that might be money spent on PPC, Google ads. And that's what we call the top of the funnel. So you need the outbound or top of the funnel metric because most people honestly aren't doing enough top of funnel.
00;12;08;25 - 00;12;30;07
Unknown
They think they're they're have enough leads and they don't they don't really understand how it works. The second piece is really just going down to raw leads and net leads. So a raw lead would just be, a name, email address, phone number and address came into our ecosystem. Could have came from a website, could have came from cocoa.
00;12;30;07 - 00;12;51;15
Unknown
Doesn't really matter. It's just a raw lead. A net lead is somebody we've talked to and they said they have a house and they want to sell. So we another way to say that is qualified. So you go top of funnel outbound metric to raw leads to net leads to appointments set. So for a closer to get on there to appointments attended.
00;12;51;20 - 00;13;20;07
Unknown
Because we want to know if people should be attending to offers made to contract, sign to contracts closed, and all of those have industry standard percentages that generally would lead you to a good result. And here's the thing. There are a thousand other metrics you could track, but clarity beats complexity every single time. We've been to the point where we've tracked everything, overly track things, we might still overly track some stuff today.
00;13;20;10 - 00;13;42;07
Unknown
What are what do you feel? Because you, you know, I'm a I'm big time on the marketing side. You're on the conversion and sales side. What do you feel is the most important metric coming out of my department and marketing for you guys on sales? I need to know how many gross leads are coming in, because I know that there are a minimum amount of gross leads that I need to hit our conversion goals.
00;13;42;07 - 00;14;00;20
Unknown
If I don't get those coming in from the top, then we don't have enough leads and we have a problem. So that number is really important to me. I'm looking at that every single Monday and making a decision if if the data is coming in properly. And then second to that is how many appointments we're able to set from those gross leads.
00;14;00;20 - 00;14;22;11
Unknown
I know for us to hit our goals, we have to set 25 appointments a week. If we don't do that, we're not hitting our goal right. So those are the two things that I look at. I also challenge our team, our leaders, at least once a month and ask them, is everything that we're tracking usable? Is there anything on this KPI sheet?
00;14;22;11 - 00;14;45;03
Unknown
Because our KPI is pretty big that we are putting down on paper, and we're not talking about looking out or making decisions with. If so, let's start. Stop tracking it with a caveat that if we discover that there is a problem, then we might need to relook at it again. But let's not spend time on things that don't drive decisions.
00;14;45;05 - 00;15;10;05
Unknown
Yeah, and I think this is the beauty of the funnel we talked about, which is and the essence of the funnel is, gross leads, net leads, appointments set, appointments attended, offers made, contracts signed, contracts closed. That's all. If you only track those things, that would tell. And you wanted me to come consult in your business. Those are the things I want to come look at.
00;15;10;07 - 00;15;33;25
Unknown
If you're like I'm doing direct to seller marketing, it's broken. It's not working. I need to, I need help. I would say, okay, show me your data on these specific things. And then I can diagnose from there where I need to look next. And I'll very quickly know and understand if it's a sales problem or if it's a, marketing problem where somewhere in that funnel is broken.
00;15;33;27 - 00;15;56;25
Unknown
So for me, for me, like, you can just keep it simple, at least track those things in your business and then we can diagnose from there. When went to that, I see, some people in our membership not do is track where their closed deals are coming from. Somebody I was coaching was telling me that they thought their marketing was performing extremely well.
00;15;56;27 - 00;16;18;11
Unknown
But when we broke down where their deals were coming from, it was coming from driving for dollars. It wasn't coming from the place that they assumed it was because they had spent money, and the other was just time. And so if you're going to spend time and money, then make sure you understand exactly where your deals are coming from.
00;16;18;14 - 00;16;41;20
Unknown
Yeah. And I think I think what's what's interesting is fundamentally in marketing, there's like two versions in the real estate space. There's there's what I would call the the niche focus, sequential type marketing. It's the most efficient marketing. It's aiming to get after the most motivated, most ready to sell leads. And it's a very nuanced process and system around that.
00;16;41;20 - 00;17;02;24
Unknown
And then on the other side of that, when you look at a business that's doing 3 or 400, 500 deals a year, they can't be that nuanced. It's hard to do that. So they're doing what I call broad brand marketing, which is they have a local brand. They they're on TV, they're doing Google ads, PPC, and they're sending direct mail.
00;17;03;01 - 00;17;34;17
Unknown
That's broad brand marketing. And there's probably spending on average between 40 and $200,000 a month on marketing, if not more. But generally, the bigger businesses are spending that and both work really well. And we have people in our community doing both. Some people just aren't going to be able to stomach spending 200 grand a month on marketing. And I know people come in and they want to scale, they come in, they're all, you know, fired up there.
00;17;34;17 - 00;17;54;01
Unknown
Maybe they're at 100 deals. I want to go to two, 300. Mike. Like, do you really want that or are you sure? And what we'll see people do and it never works is they believe if they spend more money on marketing, it will. If I double my marketing spend, my business will double.
00;17;54;03 - 00;18;16;20
Unknown
We've proven that to not be true. I personally proven that to not be true at least six times I it takes me a lot. It takes me a lot to learn. And what I learned was you need the appropriate sales infrastructure to scale marketing. Do you have to spend more money to scale though? You would? Ideally you don't.
00;18;16;20 - 00;18;44;29
Unknown
If you want to legitimately scale, not just grow. You should be able to get more efficient and effective in your operation. And yeah, this is like this is a whole nother conversation. But in terms of scale, do you use that scale you're after? That might be the ego and you talking. It's making more money. So is there a better path to profitability or the amount of profit that you can leverage where it's not it's actually not more work.
00;18;44;29 - 00;19;05;15
Unknown
I don't need to hire more people, and I don't need to spend more on marketing. I just need to find an inefficiency that I can make an efficiency out of or find a competitive advantage in my marketplace. So, for example, we flint mobile homes, it's it's extremely lucrative for us. We do create a finance deals lease options, extremely lucrative, lucrative for us.
00;19;05;18 - 00;19;27;26
Unknown
We'll we will we do flip houses. We will buy and put new mobile home like we are doing things that we found in inefficiency in the marketplace. And we have a competitive advantage. We're not just doing wholesaling. We're not just doing house flipping. We are expanding our margins. So last year, our our average margin on a deal was probably like 21 K or something.
00;19;27;26 - 00;19;52;08
Unknown
This year it's almost $50,000. So we didn't have to do more deals. We just increased our margin. How do I talk about how we made the decision to to change our focus? I mean, we changed markets. We changed, our marketing channel. We changed, part of our sales process. So what? Let us come on to explain a little bit about what led us there.
00;19;52;13 - 00;20;16;21
Unknown
Yeah, I think, well, it actually started in 2022. We had somebody in our mastermind who was, really, really effective on foreclosure deals and Tennessee friend, my friend Collin. And he did like a whole presentation on this. And I'm like, that's crazy. And then fast forward to August of 2023. Well, before you go there, okay, let's talk about Collin a little bit, okay?
00;20;16;22 - 00;20;40;25
Unknown
Because he's a young guy. Yeah, 21 years old. No one years old. And he, he struck out spending a lot of money on marketing. He, he spent you know, he did $1 million and spent $950,000 to make, to get a million. Right. And and then he he leveled everything he was doing, burn his business down, went cold calling, went to just cold calling and just foreclosures and just foreclosure.
00;20;40;25 - 00;21;09;20
Unknown
So just got he went instead of broad based because, look, there's this part between super efficient, niche focused marketing and broad brand marketing. There's the messy middle. And that's where most people are stuck. They're doing a little bit of direct mail, a little bit of coke on a little bit of TV, a little bit. But they're not. They haven't been they're not scaled in PPC, TV and direct mail over a long period of time to gain the market dominance.
00;21;09;20 - 00;21;27;15
Unknown
That is necessary. And that's hard to stomach to do that. Like you've got to be willing to spend and have the right team and infrastructure to do that. So Colin said, I don't want to be in the messy middle. I'm just going to go super niche and focus on a problem that I know how to solve, which is foreclosures, and go all in.
00;21;27;15 - 00;21;46;29
Unknown
He he did that, and I think he did. He spent 200 grand total in his company, and he did about $1 million in gross profit. So he prison that was somewhere around 800 K that year is amazing. And we looked at that at that time. We're like, gosh, that's interesting. And you know, we throw a few foreclosure leads in our system and say, okay, now we're doing foreclosures.
00;21;46;29 - 00;22;06;25
Unknown
But really that's not that's not that wasn't it. We we weren't ready to commit 100%. Yeah. Because we would have we knew we would have to start cold calling. That was something we weren't actively doing. So that was that was going to be a new team that we had to build. We were going to have to change the way we handled the sales process.
00;22;06;28 - 00;22;24;17
Unknown
We were going to have to, to then pump the brakes on some of the marketing spend that we were doing. And I think at that point, I don't know about you, I wasn't comfortable like it sounded good, but I wasn't comfortable yet, like I needed more information. And so we we just dabbled, but we didn't really do much.
00;22;24;19 - 00;22;58;04
Unknown
Yeah. So we well, first off, I got a second witness. I saw a second person who had a KPI tracker up, and I'm sitting next to them at a seven figure flipping altitude event in Baltimore, Maryland. And I'm looking over in the back of the room at this Google sheet, and I'm seeing all these marketing channels like, oh, this people channels, you know, 5 to 1 return direct this specific type of specific type of direct emails, getting a 5 to 1, 3 to 1, 2 to 1, 1 to 1.
00;22;58;04 - 00;23;19;14
Unknown
Like I'm looking at this and this company that I'm sitting next to had closed $5 million in August by August. So they they did a lot of deals. But there was this one thing on there that said the money list, and they'd spent 30 grand and closed about a million. And I was like, what is that? And it was foreclosures.
00;23;19;20 - 00;23;42;08
Unknown
But of course, they had a unique methodology in which they were closing these. It was create a finance type stuff, and my mind was just kind of blown. Lindsay was actually at the event, but she was sick in her room and I flew and I text Lindsay and I said, dude, this is crazy. Like, we have to do this because the market at this time we are margin had got squeezed in 2024.
00;23;42;11 - 00;24;01;07
Unknown
And we're like not making enough money. We're you know, we'll do a million bucks, but we're not making much. Right. So we're like, oh crap. We were kind of got ourselves into the messy middle. We need to increase our net margin, like making actual money. So we looked at this and we decided in Q4 that, let's shut all this other marketing down.
00;24;01;07 - 00;24;28;05
Unknown
Let's become an expert at finding this data direct from the source, which we did. Let's become an expert at making sense of the data and organizing the data in the right way, finding the best phone numbers possible and having 2 or 3 methods for doing that. And then entering it into our marketing ecosystem. So before we even got to doing any kind of marketing to it, we like had to master the data.
00;24;28;07 - 00;24;54;10
Unknown
Then we also had to master the foreclosure process and a non-judicial state that does notice the defaults. And we did two states. We did three initially we did three states North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee. And we talked to attorneys. While we're doing this, we're also talking to attorneys to make sure everything we're doing is aboveboard, make sure our paperwork is tight.
00;24;54;16 - 00;25;11;05
Unknown
And our North Carolina attorney said, I wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole. And North Carolina, the attorney general, North Carolina will take you to the bank. And we said, cool. We won't do this in North Carolina. And our attorneys in the other states said it's no big deal here. So, we didn't do North Carolina.
00;25;11;05 - 00;25;33;18
Unknown
We went to the other two states, but we figured out the data, we mastered the data. We mastered the process like we did. We went and researched this process and what options somebody has in this situation. And so we were absolute experts and and knew everything about it. Not only that, we understood. We understood more than they did about where they were at.
00;25;33;26 - 00;25;54;16
Unknown
So we would bring them along the journey. And we mastered kind of the legal and transaction process behind it, which is a whole nother piece. So like to go all in on a niche is more than just like grabbing a list and shooting some marketing out to it, I guess, is really what it truly means to go deep on a niche.
00;25;54;16 - 00;26;13;18
Unknown
Yeah, we had to shut down, shut out the noise, and we had to make a commitment to just solely focus on that. That's what that's what we committed to, to see if it was going to work. Month one, week two. We closed our first deal and it fell easy to too easy, right? Too easy or like, we're going, we made 60 grand.
00;26;13;24 - 00;26;30;19
Unknown
We're going to be rich. We're going to do a million of these. This is great. And then we didn't close any more for over a month. Yeah like a month and a half. We will. We signed up with this was also good because we did sign up 3 or 5 more of these in that time, and then every single one of them canceled because of something we didn't know yet.
00;26;30;20 - 00;26;47;17
Unknown
We said, I think it was the time you said, lens, I don't know about this. This is that 50% close rate. I don't know if this is sustainable. And I said, just just give me 90 days. Give me 90 full days to just execute this. And at that time, like the cold callers were me and our acquisitions guy.
00;26;47;21 - 00;27;07;01
Unknown
Yeah. We didn't have anybody else to cold call. And, it was great. It was it was a learning experience. I learned how to build a team around that. And ultimately, obviously it worked out for us. But it it took some nerve to just stay locked in and do that. And I think that's where a lot of people cut the cord and give up is when it doesn't feel good.
00;27;07;03 - 00;27;25;13
Unknown
But you don't have enough data to support making a decision in either direction. Yeah. So let's talk. Let's go back to data marketing data. We talked about the funnel earlier. So what that led us to was I think we end up closing a couple hundred thousand dollars in January in just these particular deals. Like it was like awesome.
00;27;25;13 - 00;27;45;22
Unknown
We figured it out and then we modified it and, improved on it the entire year of 2025. But just doing it in Q4 and focusing on only that. One of the things it allowed us to do was predict what we would do in 2025. So this is just one. And we did bring in our other marketing and flips and all that other stuff.
00;27;45;22 - 00;28;07;16
Unknown
We brought it back, after Q4, but we really went deep in Q4 to figure out what will it take to do this in a predictable way. And we wanted to know the numbers. So, for example, we said that it would take 325 outbound either calls or text to get a contract, or was it to get a contract or an appointment?
00;28;07;20 - 00;28;39;07
Unknown
Appointment to get an appointment? That's right. And as we end 2025, it's 300 and it's like 335 or something. We were we were almost to a tee. So we backwards planned the entire we said let's do 1,000,001 and gross and let's keep our net margin to about 40%. On this particular campaign. There's just a foreclosure campaign, and we ended up spending maybe like 100 grand and closed about $1 million this year.
00;28;39;10 - 00;29;01;01
Unknown
In that campaign, it was like a ten x. And but that was a campaign. We had different three different marketing channels in it. We were cold calling it, we were texting it and we were sending it unique direct mail. And we closed, most of the deals from calling and texting, actually. And we closed, I think four deals from mail.
00;29;01;04 - 00;29;19;13
Unknown
Our goal was to only do I think 20, 22, 22 deals. How many have we done this year? I think we don't 1919 okay. So we're very close to that. But we still had our number. We've got we've got one closing this week okay. So we had 20, but we planned for it to be a $40,000 margin. And we're like 45 or $47,000.
00;29;19;13 - 00;29;38;11
Unknown
So the money still worked out and the whole goal was less deals, less headache and more profit. Nothing but net that that was what we wrote on our board. Our theme was nothing but nothing but net. But we use this data basically from Q4 in our experiment to map out. All right, it'll take us 22 deals, 40 grand each.
00;29;38;13 - 00;30;03;08
Unknown
This much outbound is required. This much data is going to be required to do that much outbound. And it produces results like for four of those, 19 were from direct mail. The rest of them were from either calling or text messaging. But the direct mail was like a 55 x because we spent. So we only sent 12,000 pieces of mail last year to these.
00;30;03;10 - 00;30;22;26
Unknown
And that's basically two pieces of mail each. So each record got two pieces of mail back to back days from us 12,000 pieces of mail produced US four deals that produced us over $300,000. Right? I mean, like, do that math. It's like a 50 x right from piece of mails, $0.50. We spent 6000 bucks to produce 300 grand.
00;30;22;26 - 00;30;46;27
Unknown
It's like it's like almost ridiculous. So it didn't produce a ton of volume. But the return was the highest in direct mail and texting a little harder to track because we're kind of got all the Vas mixed together but taxing and also had a massive, massive return on that. But we planned everything from how many calls to how many appointments we think it will take based on the results we had to, how many offers we had to make, how many of these things had to be qualified.
00;30;46;27 - 00;31;05;16
Unknown
A certain way, like everything. And but that's just one channel two. That's just one channel that we went all in on. Right? There is so much power and proximity. Yeah, just being in the right rooms at the right time, talking to the right members opened up so many new doors for us, literally made us a million boxes here.
00;31;05;17 - 00;31;32;03
Unknown
Yeah, it was like insane. Insane people are like, oh, our masterminds worth it. I'm like, dude, I could tell you quantifiably yes, I think, I think Adam Ray said, you can't afford not to do this and afford not to do is what I was told. And he was correct when he said that 100%. Okay, so what I just do to tie a bow on that, what would you say our superpower was in this entire process?
00;31;32;05 - 00;31;55;01
Unknown
A couple of things. One, speed of implementation and and learning. Like we went hard implementing learning, failing and, you know, improving. Like we went from mid-August to the event to launching on September 1st to signing our first deal on September 17th to closing and making our first six figure on September 30th of Q4 of 24. So we were like, oh crap, this works.
00;31;55;01 - 00;32;18;01
Unknown
Like we iterated it very quickly. So I would say that's probably like our biggest strength. And then the second thing were people I think people underestimate this part of the real estate game is the the transactions, like getting the deals to close always seven consecutive miracles. I say, you can't just sign the contract. It's a lot of work to get these deals to the finish line or any deal to the finish line for that matter.
00;32;18;01 - 00;32;47;13
Unknown
So the whole transaction process, we're really good at that. Right. And we we stayed faithful to tracking those numbers. Totally. That was very, very important. And when we, we did we did have a major blip. We had one week that our numbers were really down and it it didn't make a lot of sense. And what we found out was because we kept such a great KPI tracker, because we looked at our numbers, that we had a data problem, we did not get the data.
00;32;47;13 - 00;33;07;15
Unknown
We needed to get the deals that that we wanted. And so that because we tracked it, because we knew our numbers, we were able to make an adjustment quickly and get back on track. Yeah. And I think, if you if you think and we're looking at industry standards here, there's like just some stuff that we know. So like let's talk about direct mail.
00;33;07;20 - 00;33;23;24
Unknown
Right. We said response rate since we already talked about the response rate. That's the first part of the funnel. How many people are calling us from the mail. We send at least a half of a percent. If you read around there, you're okay. If you're better, awesome. We're at about 0.8 of a percent right now on the mobile home campaign, so that's good.
00;33;23;27 - 00;33;39;21
Unknown
The next thing is, of the people who called, you should expect at least 50% of them to be leads. And when I say be leads, I mean they have a house they want to sell. The other 50% are probably going to say to eff off and take me off your list, and they're going to be upset and all that.
00;33;39;21 - 00;34;02;13
Unknown
So but you want 50% of those to be net leads. Somebody who has a house they want to sell. Of those 50% you want to you're, you know, if you're in person, you're going to qualify deeper. So you're going to have less appointments because not just because some people anywhere. But if you're if you're over the phone, all those people who have a house and want to sell need to be sat in an appointment with The Closer.
00;34;02;16 - 00;34;17;28
Unknown
So let's get them on the phones. Then we got to work on our show up. Right? Did everybody show up to their appointment? What can we do to help them show up better? How can we? How can we set better expectations? How can we pull the appointment forward? How can we, message them and let them know with reminders and all that different stuff?
00;34;17;28 - 00;34;36;26
Unknown
And then, once you've done that, like, are we making offers on enough, enough deals? So like, if you're honestly if you're going on an appointment, most appointments, most appointments should have an offer like you really should be offering. If you're going on an appointment, it's because somebody has a house they want to sell. Like, who are you to not give them an opportunity to buy that?
00;34;36;26 - 00;34;59;07
Unknown
I was I was thinking about this sales call you had, Lindsay. And the training we did last time was that ladies named Martha with Martha and you. Price anchored her at like 155 K right around there. And she went on this 20 minute tirade and she's like, I can never take that amount of money. I'll be living under a bridge.
00;34;59;07 - 00;35;26;26
Unknown
I'll be homeless. I would never do that. It needs to be hundreds of thousands, several, hundreds of several, hundreds of thousands. She was so convicted, like literally, this recording took 20 minutes of her saying, how could you ever even give me that 155 price, which was a price anchor, by the way, and, fast forward to a few more questions and savvy from Lindsay on the call, and Lindsay comes back and says, hey, I I've got the offer.
00;35;26;28 - 00;35;50;02
Unknown
It came in at 171,342, and Martha goes, I'll take it. Like, dang it. We offered to high, but that's like, that's like these leads. You just don't know. That's why you got to get the offer out in front of them. Obviously. Follow the sales process, get the anchor and get to the point where you can make an offer, but you got to get the offer out.
00;35;50;05 - 00;36;18;09
Unknown
So, so many people. When she said that to me, that she would that what that offer was going to get her was homeless home. Right. That's what I need. Hundreds, several, hundreds of thousands. She's right. And most people and I know this because I see it and I coach it all the time, would have either not called her back, would have not tried to give an offer, or would have said, I'm not gonna be able to get to that, get to that price.
00;36;18;11 - 00;36;40;10
Unknown
And then what they probably would have done is explain rehab costs and try and justify how they got to their price, instead of just go for the offer, just get it out there. No offer, no deal. Yeah. And as a, as, the person who's running the marketing in the company and I'm like, obsessed with marketing and the marketing numbers, I don't control the result of the contract.
00;36;40;11 - 00;37;01;07
Unknown
You know, that's on the conversion and sales side. What I control is, is injecting quality leads into the ecosystem for our salespeople to have, part of the conversation. So to measure my effectiveness, if I'm looking at direct mail, I'm looking at the response rate. Is the data in the the piece of mail that I'm sending effective yes or no.
00;37;01;07 - 00;37;18;27
Unknown
And that's what the response rate will tell me. Then I'm looking at the appointment rate. How many of these are going on appointments like is it good quality data? Am I are the right people calling me? Is my messaging correct on my CTA and all that? And then if it goes to conversions, great. But I don't control that.
00;37;18;27 - 00;37;46;13
Unknown
So I got to control the top of the funnel from marketing. And then I've got to work collaboratively with sales to make sure, make sure we're converting and making money off that marketing. And some people will say, like, I'm just not a numbers person. I'm not a spreadsheet person. And I would say, then you're not serious. Like you're not taking your business serious and you really don't care about reaching your goals or making money or taking care of your team, because that's what's required to be a business owner.
00;37;46;14 - 00;38;10;22
Unknown
Like you have to track and no numbers. There's there. It's non-negotiable. Yeah. Are you making money, person. Yeah. Because this only works if you inspect what you expect and you can't do it if you have no idea what's happening because you're not tracking the numbers. Do you think that avoiding your numbers, if somebody is avoiding their numbers, tracking their numbers, looking at their numbers is creating anxiety.
00;38;10;25 - 00;38;34;17
Unknown
Avoiding numbers creates a ton of anxiety because you aren't really sure if what you're spending money on is actually working. Should you be spending it? Should you continue? Should you stop? You'll have no idea. I mean, I, I could not wake up and do that every day could, you know, but that's what people do. They're they're like they feel like, well, if I don't know, if I don't know, then I won't know that it's bad.
00;38;34;20 - 00;38;56;01
Unknown
We also don't know that it's good either. You don't you don't know. And this reminds me of before somebody implements like Profit First or a bookkeeper or a system. Right. And in this business, you're rich and you're poor. And sometimes that happens in the same day and you're not really sure where the money is that that makes you wake up and feel like you have an elephant on your chest.
00;38;56;05 - 00;39;21;21
Unknown
It's the same thing with marketing. As we finish this episode. What's the number one piece of advice you give to somebody about picking a marketing channel? I think you plan it in advance and you commit to it. You go all in on that one thing and you do it for 90 to 180 days, period. You set the budget and you just execute it for 90 to 180 days, and then you track it.
00;39;21;28 - 00;39;40;28
Unknown
How can you simplify tracking your numbers if you can't answer what that metric is in one sentence, and why it should be tracked like you probably don't need it? Don't confuse, bad marketing with a bad sales process, because ultimately you is the owner. You own it all. It's all on you. There's nobody else for you to point your finger at.
00;39;41;00 - 00;40;01;29
Unknown
So you may not have bad marketing, you may have a bad sales process, you may have noncompliant salespeople, but it's your job to figure out which one you have, right? You can't blame it on marketing. And if you're not tracking metrics, it's impossible for you to understand what is and is not working as a sales, as a marketing.
00;40;02;02 - 00;40;25;10
Unknown
And I think over the last however many minutes this show was, there are some gold nuggets in there. There are some things that you can go back to relisten to the episode, write them down. The metrics that you should be tracking in your business. I gave you six core metrics six core metric that you can track to know if your business is working or not working.
00;40;25;12 - 00;40;32;00
Unknown
All right, thanks for listening. If you guys like this show, leave us a five star review and we hope to see you in the next one.
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