Attention Professional Cold Callers--Need KPI Help

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Direct mail has been working fairly well for me for the last few years, but I deceided to go on the offense and dive into the world of cold calling. Ironically I ran a telemarketing firm in the early 2000's and can say I'm probably better on the phones than I am in person. Anyway I digress.

I picked a random skip trace service and ran all of my 6000 leads through them to obtain landline and mobile numbers. I'm then breaking those numbers into various lists ( Absentee Owners, Owner Occupied, Tax Delinquent, etc.)

I've just finished up dialing through a list of around 150 (not very many I know). Naturally I received a lot of disconnects, wrong numbers, etc hence my question.

1. On average what % of the phone numbers are typically wrong (disconnected or wrong number) with a good skip tracing company versus a bad one?

2. What should my average connect % be meaning the phone number is correct whether the person wants to sell or not at least its the right phone number for the right person

3. What % should my lead be meaning the right phone number to the right person and they are interested in selling.

4. What are all the other metrics you use, what they mean, and the industry standard KPI's for those metrics.

Any and all help is much appreciated. DIrect mail is a lot easier but of course more expensive plus Im having to wait on the Seller to call me versus me calling them.

Thanks

[Cornelius Garland]

@Robert Anthony Lewis Hey Robert, I'll share what your target KPIs should be when cold calling. Firstly, where you get your phone numbers from is very important. Unfortunately, a lot of investors believe all skip tracing companies are the same. Unlike direct mail where a majority of them deliver the same product, skip tracing companies can vary drastically depending on how they're sourcing their phone numbers. You can easily gauge how accurate your phone numbers are based on how your cold call campaign performs.

1. Your percentage of disconnect numbers should be around 2%-5%. Anything over 5% is an indication that your phone numbers may not be good or the company you used provided a lot of extra numbers to bolster the hit rate. Just because you get a 90% hit rate doesn't mean 90% of the numbers are good. I've seen some shady marketing from skip tracing companies that advertise high hit rates and the numbers are bad, so please keep this in mind when you're getting your list skip traced. I would always start with a small number of records to test out their phone numbers then skip trace the remainder of your list.

2. Your average connection rate should be 2%. This is why I highly recommend outsourcing cold calling. You can waste a lot of your time cold calling for hours and only reach a handful of sellers that may not be interested in selling. It's much better to outsource this to virtual assistants and have them pre-qualify your leads. Cold calling has its place and I get deals from it, but it is very time-consuming. You can be allocating your time to do other things in your business.

3. I call this KPI the "motivated seller response rate". This will be around .2-.4%. So if you make 1,000 calls, you can realistically expect around 2-4 qualified leads. You'll have a lot of people that just want an offer or are curious as to how you got their information. I don't consider these sellers as leads. I consider anybody a lead that has serious intent to sell their property at a discounted price.

4. The only other KPI I track is my cost per lead. You'll need to divide your total cold calling monthly budget by how many leads came in. For instance, if you spent $1,000 on cold calling and 20 leads came in, your cost per lead will be $50 per lead. There isn't a definitive answer regarding what your cost per lead should be, though. As a general rule of thumb, if you're spending more than $100 per lead, these need to be very high-quality leads (e.g., PPC), or you need to be in a more competitive market where the profit margins are higher (e.g., California or New York).

Hope this clears things up, and let me know if you have any questions.