COLD CALLING RESULTS

[David Wurzel]

What's the largest list you ever used to cold call and what were the results?

[Cornelius Garland]

@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.