All Forum Posts by: Cornelius Garland

@Joe S. Yes, I do. I'll keep the same mailing list for a quarter and then change it. Also, I spread out my mailings. I don't deliver all 6,000 mail pieces at once. I use my mailhouse to evenly spread them out through the month so I'm getting leads consistently rather than all of them within a few days after my maildrop. Usually, 1500 will get sent out each week. 

@Doug Smith You're welcome, Doug. I am sort of obsessed with this because hiring has been a thorn in my side for years. I feel like I finally hacked it at least in my company. I do like the Meyers-Briggs framework because it's both accessible to employees and employers. I have turned down employees for job positions in my company but many of them thank me because I showed them about 16 Personalities. I think incorporating this, DISC, Kolbe, and a few other tests can allow us to make perfect hires each time. More awareness on this subject is needed, though. I appreciate your feedback. 

Thank you for breaking this down. I will definitely look into both, and it sounds like Kolbe will work best for me as I like having natural problem-solvers in my company. If they cannot be somewhat autonomous then I am essentially babysitting employees. Great input.

@Celestino Moreno This does not sound like a deal, especially if you're looking for your first one. The reason is that it's a mobile home in a rural area. How recently are the two homes sold?

If you're having a hard time generating comps then your cash buyers will, too, and most of them will pass. There might be something here but at a cursory glance, it does not appear to be.

@Thomas Garnett Good day, Thomas. @Allan Smith's numbers are spot on. I'm in Charlotte, NC and here, it takes 6,000 direct mail pieces to land one contract/deal. Here is why: Direct mail response rates are much, much lower than cold calling and cold texting. However, the leads are warmer than other marketing channels. You can expect a .5% to 1% response rate. You'll likely get a 1% response rate on your first mailing and it takes my team 45 leads to close one deal with direct mail. On your first time mailing your list, you can expect a 1% response rate, but it will never be this high on subsequent mailings. It will decrease each time you mail the same list - 

Month 1 - 1% - 60 leads generated (On a 6k record list)

Month 2 - .8% - 48 leads generated (On a 6k record list)

Month 3 - .5% - 30 leads generated (On a 6k record list)

Month 4 - .2% - 12 leads generated (On a 6k record list)

By month 3, I'm already thinking of pulling a new list. I've observed these trends since I started. For a new wholesaler, direct mail is not the best option right now because of the costs. Also, these leads are valuable. If you're new to wholesaling, you're essentially practicing on valuable leads. My vote for you is to practice getting familiar with talking to sellers by cold calling or texting sellers then once you and a deal by doing this you can execute a direct mail campaign.

One caveat I'd like to mention is that your list matters even more in direct mail than other, more saturated, marketing channels. If I remember correctly, @Jerry Puckett targets probates and does not have to send thousands of mailers to get a deal. Jerry, feel free to chime in and correct me if I'm wrong. I learned the fundamentals of direct mail from you on the forums over 8 years ago.

Direct mail got me my first deal in 2015 and it isn't going away. Actually, I think now is a better time for it since we have other affordable marketing channels. When I started, cold calling was only for the top wholesales with large budgets. Typical rates were $12 - $20 per hour. Also, skip tracing was a very manual process. We would have to go on Upwork to find assistants to skip-trace each one manually through TLO or Microbilt. It was a pain and not cost-effective. So up until a few years ago, many wholesalers were stuck with a few marketing channels like direct mail and door-knocking to generate motivated seller leads.

Now, since skip tracing is very affordable, it has opened up other marketing channels like cold calling, bulk texting, voice broadcasts, and ringless voicemails. This may make it appear like it is not effective since others aren't talking about it as much.

You can get a deal by sending out 3,000 mail pieces to absentee sellers if your targeting is right by going to distressed zip codes and focusing on cheaper properties. However, I found that 5,000 mailers are a sweet spot. This will generate anywhere from 25 - 50 leads. It's taking me 45 leads, on average to close a deal with direct mail. This figure has held true for my company for years.

 Excellent question! I found that knowing your personality type helps, and that certain types are PERFECT fits for each other. For instance, I'm an INTP. I absolutely suck at execution and carrying out certain plans. I am very theoretical, so it helps to have someone who is practical to help me out and keep me on task. ISTJs are inherently great at this. I tell my ISTJ assistants about my blindspots so they know when to bring up something I may be missing. For instance, I may have too many goals for the week, and in my team meetings, they remind me of what is the priority. They have my back and I have theirs. It's a beautiful employer-employee dynamic to witness, and it is very harmonious.

One mistake I'd avoid is hiring people like us. I cannot overstate this as like being around people like us. But if that's the case you may have a whole bunch of employees with the same strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots. Essentially, you could have 5 employees on your team but it appears like you have 1 because everybody speaks the same language. Differing opinions and points of view are important to my company's success.

Great question, and I hope I can provide clarity here as I've tried many of the cold outreach methods. High-volume marketing is what's working in this industry right now, so whichever marketing channel you choose, you'll want to keep this in mind. There's no substitute for it even if you are targeting a very niche list - most of the time people want to get their first deal without spending any money. While you don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get your first deal, it will be difficult to do this in less than 3 months without any marketing spend. Now, the question is, what is worth spending your precious marketing dollars on?

In 2015, I started with Driving for Dollars. I was marketing to Charleston, SC at the time. It's a smaller market and mostly affluent, with some bad pockets. Ultimately, I did not find many houses that were distressed. Even if I found a distressed house, I would quickly find that it would be "un-wholesaleable" - meaning that it would be tied up in probate or have a mortgage balance that is way higher than what I could offer. For instance, I found 20 in one day, only 10 would be good to mail. Direct mail response rates are .5% to 1%. With these numbers, I'd have to send off 100 - 200 direct mail pieces just to get 1 response back. I wish the numbers weren't like this, but this is just what they are. We can either get frustrated at it or try something else.

Perfect transition to discussing direct mail. I did direct mail in mid-2015 - 2016 heavily. It was my main marketing channel. Response rates, as I discussed above, are .5% - 1%, so if you send off 10,000 direct mail pieces, expect 50 - 100 leads or responses, in this case. This is enough to generate one deal. Direct mail generates warm seller leads and their quality is much higher than texting and cold calling. However, the leads come in spurts. For instance, if you were to send off all 10k mailers at one time, you'd get most of your calls within a week of the mail drop. Then you'd be left without any leads coming in for the rest of the month. If you want leads consistently every day, this is not the route you should go. Also, this is costly to get your first deal. Atop of that, mail drops aren't instant. It takes a few days for the calls to start coming in.

Texting is the quickest way to get your first deal. Expect 5% response rates, on average. You'll need to focus on high volume here. The days of generating one deal with 500 texts sent out are over. I was able to do this in Tampa back in December 2018, but I was one of the first to do bulk text message marketing.

My vote is for cold calling. I switched to cold calling solely in 2019 and have been using it ever since. Cold calling laws are established, unlike text messaging, so I do not have to worry if one day my campaigns stop due to some legal change. Optimizing cold calling is a pain and it takes time and work. For context, I have managed call teams of 30 virtual assistants and I've tried a lot of dialers like Five9, Xencall/Readymode, Batchdialer, Call Tools, and Mojo. The main issue is making sure your cold callers and your dialer aren't eating up your numbers. For instance, if you upload a 10,000 seller list to your dialer and your cold callers callers ask you for more phone numbers after a week of dialing then you'll need to troubleshoot this issue yourself. Nobody is coming to save you here, and the dialer companies can only offer superficial advice. I've had to develop my own SOPs and troubleshooting manuals for my internal operations. It's worth it, though, because cold calling has proven empirical evidence to work in many industries and I don't see it going anywhere anytime soon. The leads are, well, cold for the most part but given enough volume, you will be able to snag at least one deal in one month. I found 10,000 records uploaded with 1 cold caller working 8 hours a day is enough to generate enough leads in a month to close a deal.

Closing Thoughts:

One thought to keep in mind is that these sellers don't owe us anything. I spent so much time on marketing channels that simply didn't pan out that also took significant energy and ultimately resulted in no leads or deals. On the contrary, when I ran a call center, it was so easy to get leads by paying my team to generate them for me. My job was just to vet the leads and forward them to my acquisitions team. The wholesaling process has so many components and cold marketing is step 1 of the process. If you expend so much effort on this, you will lose motivation and lack the focus to zone in on what matters - giving offers to sellers and getting contracts back.

@Alex Ficco It is truly this simple. I had to "see it to believe it." I had the benefit (and blessing) of working for a 7-Figure-a-year wholesaling company in my city (Charlotte) a few years back. I served as their marketing director for a year. And while I brought my own gifts to the team, I quickly realized that I was thinking way too small and placed too much emphasis on inconsequential parts of the business. For instance, I often overthink ideas like this: Should I cold text this seller list the same time I call them, or should I only call them first and text them the following week?

I quickly realized lead generation is the most important part of marketing and to take the feeling out of it. I cared far too much about how my messages were received rather than just pumping out the volume. I had to take the feeling out of it and just look at the facts. It's a volume game. Our best weeks were weeks where volume was high across the board: Generating an insane number of leads, lots of offers out, several contracts back, and our Transaction Coordinator was constantly on the phone talking to paralegals attempting to get our deals to close.

I agree with your take 100 percent (and then some).

Great post.

@Chris Seveney Thanks, Chris.

How much do you all use Kolbe and Culture Index to factor in a hiring decision? Admittedly, I haven't looked into those because I started getting into hiring psychology after I left corporate America, where these assessments are used frequently.

Have you found them to be accurate in determining if a person will succeed in your company? I looked into DISC, but I found it to be too ambiguous to make hiring decisions. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this.